© Ruben Cress
Wow, I've been a contributor on Shutterstock since 2015. I never added a lot of photographs to my portfolio over there, I do have a few photographs that were bought at least once a day. The following changes in their policy regarding pay-outs are plain out evil. Countless photographers who contributed decades-long on their stock platform showed how furious they are about this change. Top contributors are getting 35-50% less paid out every month from this day on. That's just insane. Whereas 0,25 cents used to be the minimum, a drop of 250% means the minimum payout is now 10 cents.
Simply outrageous. Many top contributors have deleted their portfolio on Shutterstock, and for a good reason in my opinion. I used to get a minimum of 0,33 per download, now I received 0,11 cents for the same photograph. That's a drop factor of 3x, while I'm already in tier two.
You would've thought with all the new technologies and how easier it becomes to interact with each other on the internet, prices for contributors should rise. Instead, they managed to further decrease already low payments to their contributors. Sounds like greedy management to me.
There is even a petition to change this check it out here. At the time of writing 6800 people have already signed for this petition.
© Ruben Cress
Luckily for photographers that like to explore and contribute to the world of stock, the blockchain movement is fully aware of the possibilities and opportunities this new technology brings. The arrival of blockchain-built stock sites open up new ways to tokenize valuable content.
WeMark tried to bring stock photography to the blockchain, but they are shutting it down, unfortunately. However, there is another project called Photochain, they launched in 2018, but I haven't heard about it until recently. It looks promising, but the search-filter system is a little bit off, which makes it less convenient to use compared to Shutterstock. I will upload a few images on there and see how it will go. I was thinking of maybe sprint to 100 images.
The cool thing about Photochain is that you can set your own prices. Which makes competition amongst other contributors pretty cool and dynamic.
I'm not aware of how many buyers that purchase licensed images from Shutterstock know about the earnings that photographers receive. I do think it's important to know about the changes and how they affect photographers that live off just micro-stock images. Their entire lifestyle will change just because of one drastic change in management. To be clear, Shutterstock already earns 85% off the bat, decreasing it to 60% if you ever manage to get more than 25,000 per year.
Cheers,
Ruben