Shutterstock

The first time was the pandemic, then Putin started the war and now another bad news, P5 joins SS, I look forward to the end of the world :))

Its a pathetic and disgusting news. I thought Pond5 was only a professional stock site that provides proper royalty but what is this? There are no options left for the sellers. How could we sustain it? Feeling absolutely the end of our career.

An unbelievable betrayal.

The plot thickens...

Wait.... it gets worse. From Photo Archive News.

"..this morning from Shutterstock New York HQ they have announced Paul Hennessy as their new CEO and confirmed the acquisition of video stock library Pond5."

PAN note: Prior to joining Shutterstock as Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Hennessy, 57, served as Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors of Vroom, Inc., an online pre-owned car retailer."

An online used car dealer??? OMG.

Very disappointing news. I always thought that Pond5 was more honourable than this.

Vroom! Vroom!

It hit me like the news when Rupert Murdoch bought National Geographic. I was a 35-year subscriber. Sold to satan for a bag of silver. It was that or die, they claimed.
Whenever I read "To better serve you..." I know that never happens. Maybe P5 will be the exception. I am open, but very skeptical.

I sincerely hoped that Pond 5 were the only ones who judged the artists fairly. Shutterstock have slave contracts that give less rights to artists than slaves had in Roman empire times in antiquity! This is annoying because I don't want to sell my video for cents!

I think that rather than contribute to the panic (I am panicked) the real question is will these two platforms merge content and / or will Pond5 content exist independently of SS? If your footage winds up on SS game over. I think this is unlikely to completely happen, as the content moderation is very different and aimed at different markets between these two companies. (The big issue at Pond5 in the last several years was the shear increase in volume of uploaded footage, which accounted for declining revenues for individual contributors.) The curation and vetting is different with P5 being a wild and relatively unrestricted free for all and SS attempting to appease corporate buyers about liability issues, etc. So there is some reason to hope. Different markets. The pricing structure of Pond5 is different and I hope it stays that way - so we have two big questions. Uploading anything to SS is a fools game as the ROI is pointless. A business model which discourages new images and footage. Why anyone would do it considering the vast accumulation of competing images and the pricing structure I don't know. Who are these people who upload toSS or is it just a milking machine for existing material? So maybe Pond5 is just being bought to wipe out the competition. Sold rather cheap as things go these days. A couple hundred houses in NYC or Seattle. We'll see. I knew it couldn't last forever. Fingers crossed.