You are right to some point but the options of the agencies are many more than cutting the royalty commission to contributors. When Istock/Getty had Vettas/Agency for 199$ each image, no subscription, and every sold image was giving a net commission of 12-15$(at 40%) and I was making over 10.000 downloads (blue flames) on some of them people where still supplying on Shutter,Bigstocks and the likes with ultra low subscriptions. What happened- a price war that still goes on today.

How did Istock react lowering drastically prices, establishing royalty targets (increasing every year to make everyone at last in the 15-30% range), jumping on the subs wagon......and creating sales for cents sometimes (still images and video). Many people left. I could not at that time as I was too deep entrenched in the exclusuivity and even with all the cuts the alternative to get 0.38 c per image sold when my net image sale was 10x times higher was not very enticing.

 Even so I tried for 3 months. In 2 months I was already at the 0.36$/level and making 1000$/month only on Shutter and 500$/month on Adobe. Still very very far of what I was making as an exclusive so I returned to the crown. But when I started with video I didn't want to fall into a trap again (content exclsuivity is not a problem if you can delete, contributor exclsuivity I would NOT recommend to anyone), so I uploaded to any agency that paid at least 30%.

How did others tackle the problem to people contributing their content to other sites that sell much cheaper. I think P5 has taken the best approach. Content exclusivity that pays 60% (very fair reward IMHO) and 40% for the rest but they leave us the freedom to establish our prices but they have to be in line with the competition.

At any moment P5 and Adobe will have to go subs on video too. They don't have another choice specially with Getty and Shutter on the field giving content away. I am ok with that, I understand that they will have to make this move so that anyone still shops there. As far as they mantain their commission structure I respect that decision.

What I will NEVER agree is a money grab under the excuse of market conditions that ends up in the owner pockets. If they need to lower the price to compete wr all share that cost , not on our backs only.

If you ask me and I think many top producers share my opinion, the only way to protect prices in some way is content (again not contributor ) exclusivity. With this you take out some of the power away from the clients to shift it back to agencies and contributors.

In resume "lowering commissions to Istock standards" is not the right approach. At least for me.

For years SS has been subsidizing Istock, most of the contributors I know used to upload their same portfolio to SS and IS, they used to get the big$$$ from SS and residual earnings from IS. IS pays a 15% flat rate to  their independent contributors. SS could not compete with a company who paid a fraction to the contributors that SS used to pay,
What happened today is the fault of the contributors who uploaded their work to every possible image bank regardless of how much they pay.
For SS to remain competitive they must lowered their commissions to Istock standards.
This is the raw reality.

Updated header post with new stuff.

+added official ss reply with conclusion, see header posting.

Looks like official reply was provided by third-party support, as a pre-written universal answer. How dare they?

Have you tried  boycottshutterstock.com ?
Interesting, they were waiting...

...Either way, I'm not coming back unless everything goes back exactly the way it was before OR better. I'll also take better. But for sure won't be accepting even a 1% paycut. No bargaining.

SOOO now you'll have to buy Luigi, the world famous pizza chef, elsewhere 

Do you mind if I tweet about this - with a link to your Adobe Stock portfolio & a screenshot of Luigi from your port there? We have a #NoLongerAtShutterstock and #BoycottShutterstock "promo" campaign going

Thanks

https://twitter.com/joannsnover/status/1270393293776367616

After 1 min of extra thinking... So how many stock contributors will be banned? 100? 500? Shutterstock will be fine without them. This action is... Boring. I won't change my avatar or whatever. Nor publicly cry. Take it, or leave it. But you can fight I will be thankful for your activity.

Just stop it. Do not continue. Also, don't yell.

Anyway, let me remind for all of us that there's a huge difference between claimed SS contributors and active SS contributors. Because, I guess, every third "portfolio" have no images at all. In 2016 active portfolios amount was counted, or leaked. It was about 30k. And now almost 10k signed the petition. This is a good number to deal with, as for me.

Freepik and ss now have much in common 
And yes we must turn off imagery faster, coz they profit 3 times faster.

Yep. The group is going nowhere. I disabled my port.

Quote from: Chichikov on June 10, 2020, 04:25

Quote from: NeonRobot on June 10, 2020, 02:49

Freepik and ss now have much in common 
And yes we must turn off imagery faster, coz they profit 3 times faster.

I have seen now that the group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/261369748434285
has a new administrator: a brand ambassador of Freepik!!
Unacceptable for me.

The new administrator, Antonio Gravante, is now the new ex-administrator having flounced off in a huff. Seems this group's admins have a shorter life expectancy than football managers.

Give it a try and see how long you last.

People aren�t leaving SS because they think SS cares. We are leaving because we refuse to accept $.10 per image, and have levels reset every Jan. 1. No, a few people leaving won�t be noticeable. Having a few million of good quality images leave holes in the collection might get noticed. Especially when they are replaced with batches of similars or stolen images. SS doesn�t seem to mind that either, though.

New ss vid on utube:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=53NGlov6RHo

& esp this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nFJO--PuDo

Kill them.