$50 price cap?

It hurts me to say it but Pond5 went from being the most profitable, artist friendly and best of all the agencies to dead last. I don't know why they keep insisting on screwing over the contributors. All this talk of wanting to help the artist and keep prices high was a smoke screen to lower our commissions. Once they got away with that they went full force with the discounts and bottom feeding pricing.

How can any contributor who fell even partially for the exclusivity scheme trust them? Don't play their games. I don't know that we will ever get our 50% commissions back after so many people took a leap of faith on board the exclusivity train but there is still time to drop out. Sorry for the rant. If you can't tell Pond5's betrayals over the past year have hit a sore spot. Its one thing for a person that always been bad to deal with continues to be bad but it stings a lot more when your best friend does it. I have lost all hope for Pond5. Without major changes I will be putting most my energy into supporting the other stock sites which have sadly become more profitable and artist friendly than Pond5. The worst thing of all is that they didn't even have to change anything to increase their artist friendly ranking. They just sat by and watched pond 5 keep lowering their standards until eventually they became the better option.

Greg, 10 days of not having my clips show up in the search results is a huge hit for someone that does this full time. Don isn't joking when he talks about thousands lost. My month was half of what the previous month was which was already half of what I was earning the year before. Its ridiculous. No hard feelings on my end between us. I like you and you are the only good thing pond5 has going for it at the moment. Its got to be rough to be the man in charge of making horrible decisions from the higher ups sound like a good idea to contributors. I don't envy your job.

Pond5 was secretly capping the prices without letting us know. It basically shot from behind the exclusives (and others too!). Why Pond5 has capped the prices and has not let us know about it, why it encouraged the exclusives to raise their prices while capping them in the search engine??? I do not know enough English to qualify the Pond5 gesture, but for sure I know how to call it in Romanian and that is not at all nice.

If I do a search while I am logged in the price cap does not appear but the moment I use a buyer account or I am not logged in, the price cap appears as magic!!!

This is not fair at all in regard to the contributors, mostly to the exclusive ones - basically it is shooting them all from the back!!! Very ugly what Pond5 has done - this is totally unacceptable. You ask us for fidelity, but you shoot us from behind?

Pond5 - you lost all the credibility, you lost your status as the most artist friendly agency - it is totally unacceptable what you did. You lost all your credit!

The test is not over yet. I am still getting the $80 limit.

And I do not blame Pond5 for the race to the bottom(which is in fact led by other agencies) but for the way it fights against it, by sacrificing the contributors.

perhaps it would be more "cost" effective or "profitable" for all concerned if upon entry first time, a message pops up pointing to the slider and allowing the buyer to set their range right from the get go, instead of forcing a range upon them. Experimenting this current way really does not give accurate information or feedback. Statistically any information coming back from this method it going to be totally off as it is "planting" data as opposed to asking for data.

ONE sale in last TWELVE days. Based on years, over a decade of statistical growth and norm, in that amount of time I've lost a minimum of 25-40 sales because they were hidden. It's a lot more than the last two weeks, it's been been on-going "something" since April. It just got easy to see what has happened. Like Jakerbreaker and others, doing this full time and always having P5 as the first who got everything, this has been devastating to income. This has not been a "summer slump". Going from about $700 a week to $31 is not an industry summer slump.

Andy is absolutely correct, setting a slider like that was has no statistical meaningful nor scientific reasoning. The slider should be eliminated completely or set in three or four steps that the buyer must set starting at the high end. Maybe Minimum to $80 (industry standard for HD), $81 to $150 and $150 and higher. BUT it also must not eliminate 4K that is higher with downsized HD. So if the slider is set at $80 and below it must show the 4K downsized and not eliminate the results because the 4K is set at $150.

For many or most of us who shoot 4K I believe our clips have been hidden for a long time because of the higher 4K prices and not allowing the downsized HD to show. So tell us please. If the original is 4K at $149 and HD is downsized price to $79 and slider is set at $80 will the 4K original show with the downsized HD? I think for a long time not. The technical programming to accurately show 4K versus HD and their downsized pricing is seriously flawed. It seems better to shoot HD only and not 4K. This question was asked in the forum a couple years ago and we got no answer. Why would any agency pander to the low priced and sacrifice the fair price? Of course a vocal minority of low priced buyers want it free or cheaper.

A select gallery is a bad bad mistake. Don't even think of doing that. That version of selling has been tried before, it failed, it will only lead to more discord with Artists who are the only suppliers. The negative switch was flipped starting in April, it was not due to SB. It can't happen that fast but with the latest actions it will cause a very rapid decline. The industry is listening. I'm loyal but hurt like thousands of others.

Greg says, "The initial results of this testing have been incredibly positive. Visitors landing on the different capped search results pages are converting at a higher rate and are spending more money." I just have to ask, "Who is seeing more money?" From the posts I'm reading here it doesn't sound like anybody here is. Maybe he means for the executive staff. He surely can't mean for the contributors. Maybe I'm being naive but I just can't picture buyers intentionally moving the slider to look for more expensive footage.

When P5 first rolled out the "Exclusive" program they wanted every P5 contributor to pull ALL their portfolio off every other agency and go exclusive with P5. Maybe it's time for a reverse exclusive program. What if everybody pulls their entire portfolio off P5 and goes exclusive with the other agencies that aren't trying desperately to get to the bottom quite as fast.

It is a big shame for P5, I used to believe in changes they made for so many years, but now I will have to watch them closely. No wonder that sales for me are much lower last few months comparing to previous summers. I wish I had less work so I could check this earlier. In my opinion price slider should be removed.

I have a hard time thinking when I'm pissed but I'm seriously considering pulling all my media. I know i can't pay my bills with pride! But with only 50 bucks and some change in sales so far this month whats the use. My first step is to stop uploading media and looking for other outlets for my work. It bugs me that they have affected so many loyal creators.