
Tell HN: Shutterstock is changing its commission structure - throwstock
<i>&#x2F;&#x2F; sorry if I&#x27;m wrong but I believe that a significant number of tech companies buy Shutterstock&#x27;s packages or subscriptions</i><p><i>&#x2F;&#x2F; throwaway because I&#x27;m involved with stock image production</i><p>Today Shutterstock announced[1] their new payout levels where they now start to reset authors&#x27; commission rates every year. Level 1 starts at 15% per sale, then it goes to 20%, 25%, 30%, 35%, and finally 40% per sale after 25,000 sales which most photographers and illustrators will never achieve in a single year.<p>They are also switching from the $0.25 flat-rate commissions per image bought via subscription packages to a percentage fee that will result in payouts as low as <i>$0.10 per image</i>. And with the aforementioned yearly commission reset, even popular authors are going to receive these miserable royalties during the first months of each year.<p>In other words, total payouts are going to drop for <i>50% or more</i> for the absolute majority of authors (who are usually from low-income countries like Ukraine and Thailand). There is no good reason for this except for Shutterstock being a stagnating rent-seeking company in need of higher quarter earnings. Of course there&#x27;s no way to influence them because the contributors can&#x27;t simply delete their portfolios from the largest stock platform out there, even if it pays peanuts per sale.<p>Most authors upload their content to multiple stocks at once, so please switch to any alternative out there to help them earn more (except for Bigstock because they&#x27;re owned by Shutterstock).<p>[1]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shutterstock.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;contributor-earnings-update
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clarkevans
There is a producer platform cooperative, Stocksy United
([https://stocksy.com](https://stocksy.com)), that is competitive in this
space. I think the photographer payout is at least 50%; critically, profits
are distributed to the producers based upon the revenue they are responsible
for. They don't have equity owners.

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jawns
A producer cooperative is a company that is entirely owned by its members, the
producers. There are no outside shareholders. One of the important
implications of this is that unlike with a for-profit company, where
shareholders might be tempted to squeeze out extra profits at the expense of
employees, a co-op has no motivation to put the screws to their workers,
because those workers are also the owners of the company.

But I'm a little curious about the profit distribution structure you describe.
Generally profits are calculated after paying salaries for
founders/administrative staff who keep the service running. So you subtract
those costs from revenue and then whatever's left is profit/surplus, which
gets distributed to the worker-owners according to their contributions.

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tannhaeuser
For photos there's also istockphoto (the classic who started micropayments,
now owned by Getty Images), and for vectors there's Adobe Stock (where I used
to buy when they were still NL-based Fotolia/before they went all-subscription
and raised prices). There are also indie type foundries left who haven't
bought out to Monotype and who don't insist on draconian analytics to gauge
prices but on trust.

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STHayden
the problem with trying to find platforms that give more money to contributors
is that the big platforms which take more money have more money for marketing.
Historically big sites with low payouts have out preformed smaller sites with
higher payouts. you need to find a way to both give out more money to
contributors but also out advertise the big names to win in this space.

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godzillabrennus
Elements.envato.com has moved to unlimited subscriptions. I expect
shutterstock is responding.

Sucks for creators but the downward pressure on pricing will give customers
more amazing content to use in marketing material.

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XCSme
Just a random note, Elements did destroy the Envato marketplaces for authors.
I was an author on CodeCanyon (until yesterday), sold an analytics script[0]
and earned $65k+ over 7 years now, but since they released Elements they drive
all their traffic away from the marketplaces, they no longer care about
authors. Yesterday I actually deleted my product from CodeCanyon, it was
pretty sad to delete an 8 year old item with 1500+ happy customers and 5 stars
rating, but the way they treat authors should not be encouraged.

Just one of many examples of how the authors are no longer respected on the
marketplace: Imagine that you launch a paid marketing campaign for your
product, you drive traffic to Envato's website on your product page and the
first thing the customer sees is a prominent banner promotiong Elements where
they get unlimited everything for $15/mo, when your product alone costs $99
(even though your product is not even on Elements).

[0]: [https://www.usertrack.net/](https://www.usertrack.net/)

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troughway
Is there a business opportunity here? Would it make sense to open up a
competitor to Shutterstock? How well is Getty doing?

Or has that ship sailed and the service (as it is, anyway) can't grow any more
due to having satisfied the market demand?

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throwstock
I think it's quite saturated and the success depends on how well you can
attract companies who already use some other stock.

Currently, the best-paying stock is Adobe. Getty isn't as bad as "new"
Shutterstock but they also lowered their rates years ago. The same portfolio
earns 52% at Shutterstock, 25% at Getty/iStock, 12% at Adobe, 6% at 123RF, 5%
at four more small stocks.

On Shutterstock more than 50% of sales come from outside the US, so it doesn't
seem like there's much room to grow globally. The problem with Shutterstock is
being a public company with growth expectations while not diversifying
whatsoever.

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Antecedent
Isn’t this inevitable? The number of new things to take photos of is not going
to increase that much year over year and digital photos last forever.

The squeeze is going to come simply because at some point there is far more
content than buyers.

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rathel
Stock photography has to catch up with lifestyle, technology, fashion,
society, culture and architecture, among others. On top of that, stock sites
sell news images as well.

So no, there always will be something to be photographed.

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MattGaiser
Sure, there will always be a market for hyperlocal and hyper-relevant stuff,
but most of it is fairly timeless. Many of those landscape photos will be good
30 years from now.

Add in that an image competes globally and is infinitely scalable and that is
essentially perfect competition with the prices to match.

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viraptor
There are trends for what looks good. If you look through some stock photos
you can easily spot things uploaded years ago just from the style and quality
alone. Just like all UIs are essentially the same thing, but you can tell
which era the XP windows decorations came from.

