Agency Based Discussion > Shutterstock.com

Shutterstock steals sales. Control purchase

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PokemonMaster:
It's a third-party information, so probably I will not be able to provide further details. But it comes from a trusted contributor, experienced, with a pretty old portfolio.

At the end of October, we decided to make a control purchase on the Shutterstock, collaborated with colleagues and bought a package of “25 Standard one-time” demands. Purchases were made of works that had never been sold, with the help of a real customer within a spread of 10 days.
Divided it like this: 5 purchases from my accounts, 11 purchases from colleagues’ accounts, 9 purchases randomly.
Of my five - 1 appeared on the first day, 1 - after a couple of days, and another one after 4 days
The result as of February 1 is the total number of sales for all interested parties - 7

So, 70% of the sales via one-time demands package are lost! What do you think about this?

SuperPhoto:
Believable. Need 3rd party auditing to ensure they do things fairly. They've already demonstrated a number of times they are dishonest (i.e., "selling ai" data first, "then" saying here's some peanuts and 'now' you can choose not to participate). Jon originer cashed out & bailed a couple years ago too. The "exciting news" that they restructured payments to make it poorer for contributors, etc. They are dishonest. Wouldn't be surprised if that was the case of what was going on.

This type of auditing by contributors would actually be a very good thing. Share results/youtube videos/etc if indeed that is what is happening. First raise awareness of the dishonest tactic, and then get pressure to get accountability and things 'fixed'.

blvdone:
That's a huge scandal if it's true!!!

Stockmaan:

--- Quote from: blvdone on February 11, 2024, 12:34 ---That's a huge scandal if it's true!!!

--- End quote ---

I have almost 10k videos at Pond5 and sell 1 YES just one in 14th days. Last month I have two sales! If Shutterstock does that than Pond5 do taht to. At Adobe I sell around 20 videos a day. On Shutterstock maybe 1 or 2/day. Pond5 2/month.

At Shutterstock and Adobe I have 10k videos too..

Roscoe:
It's an interesting experiment, and I understand that the contributors want to stay anonymous, because buying your own images is against the TOS. But on the other hand, this leaves very little room for verification. Anyone can claim anything. Always be careful with 3rd party information like "heard it from a friend who has been told by a friend that another friend..." Information can get thickened or altered per hop :-).

Not saying it isn't true, but always be careful with jumping into conclusions. We don't know what happened afterwards, there might be a delay in reporting, and maybe the rest of the sales were reported later, after the story started to get around. Or the system flagged some sales as fraudulent, because, well, they were buying their own images, and however not directly, it still might have triggered some red flags in the system.

That said. I wouldn't be too surprised either if it's true. There's also no way to know what has been sold to whom and how it is used. We just have to... trust the agencies. And in all fairness, that's a bit of a stretch for me. They might not hold back on reporting deliberately, but technical issues do occur, and what happens in case of database corruptions, interfacing issues, or anything else technical. I can imagine that in such case some sales went into the nirvana and never got reported.

I don't have a personal experience with this. I use google alerts to see if one of my images pops up on the internet (if I'm credited) and in such cases there was always a matching sale reported at the agency. I know this covers only the tip of the iceberg, and impossible to track for images that sell daily or very regularly, but at least, it's that. Until now I could not catch one of the agencies on not reporting a sale.

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