Starsphinx

He did not say Covid19 was the common cold he said it was a form of the corona virus and that corona viruses have been around a long long time. The majority of corona viruses in the majority of people are indistinguishable from the common cold and people will refer to their infection as the common cold. The way herd immunity works with them is although the antibodies do not last very long the basic template is retained and future infections fought off easily and with minimal symptoms - ie "common cold" symptoms. SARS and MERS were also corona viruses - they have not disappeared but hardly anyone notices if they catch them these day. Corona viruses generally mutate into milder forms - and the likelihood is that Covid19 will do the same and in a couple of years although people will still catch it - and a small number of elderly or otherwise ill people die it will not be noticed (and such deaths likely be put down to either age, a pre existing condition or flu because most deaths marked as flu are not tested for the influenza virus) In the meantime regards "increasing numbers" it is important to try and filter out the effect of increased testing in causing those increasing numbers - Leicester in the UK has been locked down again because of increasing number when 7 out of the local 8 testing centres have only just opened since the start of this increase. If death rates (all causes not those marked as Covid19) are at or below the average for the past 5 or 10 or however many years then this epidemic/pandemic is passing. Again in the UK all causes mortality is now below average. Not sure of other areas but my advice is instead of looking for headline figures about Covid19 see how many people are dying each day of everything and how many people died of everything each day in the past.

It is important to remember that although SS have reduced what they pay to contributors their front end prices to buyers have not changed - so there should not be any impact on Adobe sales.

I have not had enough time here to draw sigificant comparisons - and May saw me get a $50 sale which has skewed my figures hugely (my graph is low low skyrise for May back to low only lower) but as a rough estimate my income per download has dropped by over 50% (and that was not counting Mays figures)

I think a lot of customers are going to be oblivious to the cuts to contributors - and some are more likely to ask SS for a cut to what they pay as a result rather than a demand for contributors to be paid more.

Not as far as I am aware. Just because we get paid less does not equate to customers paying less

Unfortunately it just does not work like that - a significant amount of buyers are large organisations that negotiate their own terms with suppliers, limiting there designers to the use of one agency, at which they pay something completely different from front end advertised prices. While you may be able to persuade the designer that SS have pulled a nasty and they should change to AS, the designer has no influence over the financial team who are only interested in their bespoke deal and will stay with SS. Further more as I have said the evidence is different buyers with different needs tend to congregate at different agencies - the fact that totally different pictures from the same port sell at different agencies suggests the reason buyer A is a SS not AS is because AS does not have enough of the precise images they want. Sure some of the images they want are available at both places, but plenty of them are not, so they stick to the place they are available. You may not be suggesing having the same images at both but general advice from experienced photographers are that is the way to go - although counter intuitive you do not undercut yourself and stand a much higher chances of the images that do not sell in one place selling in another so overall you get a much higher number of unique images actually selling than if you stick with one agency.

Firstly have you checked the prices customers pay v what contributors are paid? 5 image on demand packs are virtually the same price on both - other packs and licences vary but not necessarily cheaper on SS. However what is paid to the contributor IS different. Secondly several experienced knowledgable stock shooters have deliberately looked at having the same images at different agencies and run as many variables against them as possible and come to the conclusion that the vast majority of stock purchasers do not shop around, and even though some do it does not make any significant difference to sales volume or income at different agencies. Research does in fact suggest that each agencie has its own customer base and its own needs and it is often found that images that sell heavily at one agency sell rarely or not at all at the other agencies - you can have identical images all over the place but different ones will sell in different places. There is absolutely no evidence that having the same shot at different agencies undercuts yourself. This is a disproved argument.

I have seen the same pattern of sales disappearing on Adobe - although I have only uploaded 2 things only to Adobe since SS announced its change to 10c - I was having a rough time personally and that just was cherry on top and I just have not really been shooting or uploading since as I work out what my next step should be.

And in my little world when I get stuck with limited upload I look around for services like wirestock or stocksubmitter so my one upload goes to multiple agencies. You presumably looked around and of the possible options decided that uploading to just SS was your preferred path. That path has suddenly become not as nice as it first appeared - but that still does not make it a virtual sweatshop.

Of course you do not lose thousands of hours of work. To claim that is ridiculous. You can decide to use other outlets to sell that work. It is nothing like encouraging people to move town under contract. We are not the employees of shutterstock we are the employers - and we can choose not to employ them anymore. Just send your work to another agency or sell it yourself. We are not and never have been exclusively contracted to SS - we have not at any point given them any rights to our work, they have simply said they will sell it for us and we can keep x amount of what they sell it for and now they have changed that to y amount of what they sell it for.

To be a sweatshop SS would have to be the only way a person could make money to eat - and I do not believe that to be the case. I think very very few people are totally 100% dependent on SS for their entire income with no possible alternatives.

For the general question people need to look at the opposite side of the scales - there is still high demand for images - in fact as far as I can tell demand for images is still on the up as more and more sites swap images more and more often. However the qualifier to that that is the what quality of images are demanded - where for large chunks of the market shots taken on a mobile phone suffice the requirement for the expensive equipment is not there, and the need to earn higher amounts is not there, and the result is free stock companies. As for the specific point above - dont we all consider ourselves to be the quality contributors - and is part of the whole that there is a much smaller group who are even better quality contributors who already have special terms or the bespoke agencies and are making the money?

It can be normal - if the image had sold through Alamy direct you would only have had a 60% reduction so you would have made $30. As it sold through one of their "partner distributors" you get a total of 70% reduction

SS is NOT the first agency to do this - and if there is a domino effect it is already in progress and is down to market conditions. It is pointless isolating one agency out and making them to be some sort of unusual ultra villain. There are sites that provide images for free. There is at least one agency that pays contributors as little as 1c. There are other agencies that have reduced what they pay. If agencies that have not recently lowered payments now do so that is not going to be the fault of SS it is going to be down to the fact that the market allows it - that the supply of required images is higher than demand.

I was not technically exclusive - just not uploading anywhere else, and focusing only on the one place. If they had not cut commission with the resulting whoha and fuss I probably would not have tried uploading elsewhere. That occasion resulted in changing my behaviour in a way ultimately beneficial for me, although that was probably not the intention of Alamy lol. With this one I have kind of hit pause while I consider what to do next - I am considering doing more "creative" type work and increasing focus on adobestock, or looking at wirestock. There does not seem to be any developments around new stock companies coming in - I am not hearing of any I am not already aware of.