Pond 5 lowering artist share to 30% (and exclusive to 40%)

I suggest that in addition to voicing here, send a message directly to exclusive@pond5.com and let your voice be heard. I consider this a major "bait and switch" -- I would never have pulled my footage from the other stock sites and gone exclusive if I knew it was going to be a 40% commission.

Between my 2 accounts I have over 50,000 clips (120+ TB of video footage), and it would be a nightmare to go back to non-exclusive and get my footage back up on the other sites.

@GrayJones - "suggest that in addition to voicing here, send a message directly to exclusive@pond5.com"

Yeah - 60% down to 40% is a 33% cut in royalties. I also would never have gone Excl for 40%.

exclusive@pond5.com must be swamped with irate Exclusive account owners. I emailed them last night requesting termination of Exclusive for my account. Got response early this morning and replied with more questions - crickets so far.

Just got the word- Six months notice to close an exclusive account. They are being less than gracious.

Really a Bah Humbug moment!

30% for sound effects....
20% for dataset earnings...

That is absolutely disgraceful.

no more exclusive after 15 january because 40% is very less

Please help!
How can the exclusive status be terminated?

"How can the exclusive status be terminated?"

email to: exclusive@pond5.com

The issue is not even this (it is but there are much larger things, and this is consequence). First, we get only a few days of notice whereas we gotta give them 6 months... Secondly and most importantly, this is the result how the whole web has become crap in the past 20 years or so. Everything is concentrated, merged, just big entities owning every single damn thing and capturing users on both sides: sellers and buyers, creators and audience. It is clearly convenient but it surely leads to oligopoly and consequent price policies. Add to that the subscription model appearing everywhere. Subscriptions are not bad per se, but they surely are for those who provide products and services if the fees are ridiculously low - and guess what? They've been low since forever! There are also tonnes of completely free assets in any category, let's also add AI now and the picture gets more and more bleak.

Cherry on top: search engines have become crap, and if you have your own website and shop, you don't exist because at best you'll appear on the 6th page of search results, and people hardly ever search anymore and they rely on the big platforms (and often even the internal search engines of those platforms suck big time).

They have succeeded in losing both sellers and buyers..
I have changed my plans and will direct my effort and time to creating content on YouTube