Agency Based Discussion > Shutterstock.com

SS continues to deteriorate

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Shelma1:
My apologies if this article has been posted previously.

“The company reported anemic revenue growth figures, and revenue growth deceleration is becoming a major problem.
Enterprise revenue growth has fallen off a cliff and actually shrunk this quarter after being a prior source of optimism.
The $1.2B company has $260M in cash, but the business is struggling.”

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4288413-shutterstock-continues-deteriorate

Stockmaan:
 it's to late for Similar Content Policy dear Shutterstock. You have been years behind

Jo Ann Snover:
I hadn't seen that and was curious about who the writer was (as in whether they had any particular ax to grind). I think that SeekingAlpha offers bloggers on financial topics a platform for their articles, so this doesn't represent a consensus of analyst views on SS but just this guy's take. His description of himself (no name)

"Long-term focus, with some exceptions. Professional experience in health care, enterprise technology, media. I'm a self-taught investor. I started investing my own money in 2010 and have outperformed the S&P 500 by an average of 5% per year since then. Other individual investors have done far better. My biggest mistakes aren't any major dogs, but passing on big-name winners like Apple, Google, Priceline, others. "

I don't disagree with what he's saying, but he doesn't appear to have many followers. Here's a link to Seeking Alpha's guide to using blogs to increase your subscribers (I didn't bother to figure out what their "Marketplace" is or how much subscribers pay)

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4156779-marketplace-success-tips-best-practices-using-blog-posts

SSTK closed at $35.79 today, so apparently the blogger's negative views didn't tank the stock price :)

BalkanskiMacak:
So, here are my two cents about what is SS doing. It's my own interpretation from what I have seen, the evidence is, of course, hard to find, but it may be close to the reality, way more than all the radical statements I have seen here.

Basically, they started something like two years ago now a war on portfolio size, that was quickly followed by most of the main stock agencies.

Why so? Competing: with other microstock websites of course, but also with free websites. By doing so, their goal was to get as much content as possible to become kind of universal. You have any request? We have the solution, unlike IS, DT, etc. or unlike Pixabay.

The second part of the plan, I guess, was to setup an algorithm that could exclude, almost immediately, all the rubbish. That could explain why they have made that many changes to the algorithm, at least till the end of 2018. I got the feeling it became less radical after.

The results? Well, they are a bit complicated to see for the moment. As far as I remember, the last results were showing a 30% increase of the portfolio for a 3% increase of the revenue.

That being said, on the long term run, the strategy is not that stupid, the only issue will be for SS, eventually, to get rid of all the "rubbish" content that is pretty costly in terms of server space while not generating anything. It's as well a good opportunity to get rid of a part of the reviewing process that has been handled by completely incompetent people. An example: I tried recently to resubmit files that were rejected in 2015 for their quality, big surprise: not only they got accepted, but even more, they are among my best performers this year. Conclusion: the heavy process that was existing in 2015 was not only a pain in the ass for me, but as well for SS, given they had to pay the guys, and they lost some sales opportunities.

Then, why didn't it work, at least not for the moment? At the contrary of most of the people here, I don't think it's because of similar content. All the agencies now are accepting similar content! I recently uploaded by mistake the same batch twice, it got accepted everywhere... except Bigstock that flagged a few pictures as similar. Yes, even Adobe didn't see anything. So, judging by the differences of financial results from all the agencies, there is something else.

To me, that something else is pretty clear: if Shutterstock is failing, it's because there is a heavy competition in the agencies' world. If we look at the market, in fact, there hasn't been a lot of agencies that closed down/got bought over the past years, meaning there are still heavy fights on the market.

The future? Well, it's hard to say. It seems SS is trying to revert their acceptance strategy. It may be a good thing about similar content, but I got as well the feeling they became again completely stupid on other issues, especially for the commercial licenses (like the infamous "Focus: The main subject of this image is not in focus." for panoramas that were completely sharp).

About the big picture, the global financial situation will have an impact, if the recession gets confirmed. In the microstock market, there will be casualties. Either some major platforms will simply shut down (my forecast: 123RF will be among the first) or will be bought and merged by other platforms (my forecast: DT will be bought, even though I wouldn't be surprised if Getty were to sell IS).

So, SS, in this game, is definitely not on the verge of collapsing. That being said, fewer agencies may not be such good news for the contributors, as there will be less bargain power facing platforms that will be in an almost monopolistic situation.

Tenebroso:
Since I have read things like this in this forum, ........ If you do not know English well, do not use irony..... or in my comments, recommend that you do not use the google translator, because my intention to participate in this forum is not valued,...... I decided to leave the comments for the usual four others and simply read, as 99% of the users of this forum do.


That said, I entered here probably the last time, because I liked your approach. I simply want to add, that today, it is more expensive for the websites to delete the files. The price of keeping them in the server is null for the storage capacity of these days. Deleting files is laborious and costs money.

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