@micro

the old ss was fantastic. they saw producers as their partners, just like their customers.

that is why many people uploaded only there, some had ports with 50k files and only with ss.

not anymore.

their new attitude started a migration to adobe, who changed...nothing and suddenly got more interesting content.

if the merged company goes the ss way and production actually becomes unpayable if you live in us or europe, then even more content will be ging to only ss.

i hope they work in a sensible manner, but both companies now have a track record of change things drastically first, deal with the problems later...

we will see.

i hope the merger brings some peace and stability to the industry. 

but...they now have many more producers and we are just useless ants...easy to replace...

i am trying to be optimistic, because if it is done right, the merger could be a good thing.

The problem is that the returns on SS no longer pays for model released production. Many high quality producers with large people ports saying they now earn 400 where they used to earn 4000.

If istock copies that, income will drop drastically.

Then we really only have Adobe as a reliable platform.

But only Adobe is not enough for quality people production.

And on Adobe you have competition from ai people.

So working with real people, mia, a team, might become something for macrostock only.

If producer income is lowered the content will be split into hobby mobile phone images, ai production and real genuine daily life people and locations only for getty house, stocksy or smaller production houses.

But perhaps the prices for this type of content can become premium again.

Good enough and cheap - ai.

Real people production, high end prices.

I will just stick to video for this year.

Simple and easy.

Will Bigstock dissappear too   

If it did, people would only notice it three moths from now in the best case scenario.

Quote from: MicroVet on January 10, 2025, 05:30

There won't be any raise for artists even if they triple the licenses price.

Well, that would be assuming they'd cut our already low commissions by another 66%, because if our share stayed the same, we'd get the same 3x increase.

Haven't they done exactly that for the past 13 years or so several times? Increasing prices for clients but keeping the same payment to artists or even lower it?

They cut my $0.38 per subscription download to $0.10 with the promise of higher payment on top tiers. Not only the top tiers payed less than the 0.38, I barely ever got more than 0.10 no matter the tier I'm in.

If you consider the price increases for clients what drop have we suffered? 90% or more? Since barely anything happened to them from the artists front, what is stopping them to do even worse?

And many are Adobe software customers already.

And that is the real reason for this merger.  They sat down and tried to figure how to fight Adobe drain.  This is why it won't be simple corporate merger, with 2 separate sites staying as is;  significant change is coming to content in order to make new (merged) offering more attractive to customers.   Will it work - I don't know; but I wouldn't underestimate it;  both Getty and SS have been around for long time and know business well.

the question is - what will they do to our royaltiies?

because I am sure those will be streamlined across all platforms.

At least looking at my own numbers, Shutterstock currently isn't far off from the 15% royalties that iStock non-exclusives pay.

Therefore, we may not see much difference in the average prices at micros once they streamlined. Average prices have really crashed at SS since they introduced those ridiculous levels scam and reduced our minimum subs to 10cents from 38 cents (also whatever happened to those $2.88+ on-demand-downloads).

Footage average prices have also come crashing down at the 3 major agencies. Seems as if no difference in selling HD or 4K.

More info here: https://brutallyhonestmicrostock.com/2025/01/11/getty-and-shutterstock-merger-what-it-means-for-contributors/

Another discussion for those with images on Getty exclusive and Shutterstock Offset at the higher-end of prices. Lots of behind-the-scenes discussions going on I'm sure.

If/when the two portals merge, what will happen to the same assets at the difference agencies? This seems like a clear loss for us. I have some 11,000 assets at both iStock and SS which are duplicated.

Good point, they could easily bring out curated collections for a genre or style where editors bring content together from all platforms.

These would save customers a lot of time.

If there is no unified front end for the companies they already own, not even after more than 10 years of owning them�why would they do it now?

What advantage would it offer?

For producers it is also best if there are many marketplaces, because not everything sells everywhere and files can find different bestseller positions if there are more platforms.

What happened to Shutterstock Inc share price? The euphoria didn't last long.

I see this as Shutterstock admitting defeat.

I thought after the 2021 stock coalition attempt that it didn't work out. Well turns out it did. Quite surprising to see that the number of irate contributors following the cash grab were themselves customers, or know customers personally or worked for customers who were large organization subscribers.

The message got out there and collectively a sizeable part of Shutterstock's customer base left, probably redirecting their business to Adobe, and thus never to return, and along with that, their share price and profits with it. 

Not that I think iStock is much better so I suppose this 'merger' is like birds of the same feather.

more likely was just a blip based on the announcement, then quick profit taking to bring it back to the pre-annoucement price. no indication it was a 'defeat'