Missing watermarks

Watermarks have been removed from all my tracks today, any thoughts on that please

Looks like it's everyone, I just sampled a few tracks from other composers and same thing and the free download button it one click away.

Not sure if this is yet another policy decision or just a temporary technical bug, there was also a massive AWS outage this morning that might have caused some lingering problems with some websites. I'd closely monitor it for now.

Looks like it's still the case......wow.

They seen to not have the audio watermark while playing on the site but if you download the trial it does have it embedded.
Now, that said, some enterprising person could record the online playback so there is that.

@JHDT, Was the first thing I thought of and super easy to do. If it's a legit technical problem then the responsible thing to do would be to temporarily shut down the audio market until they get the watermark back up and on those files, even the watermark on the trial files isn't that frequent and strong, can easily get around it.

Hi folks,

Pond5 here, on behalf of our resident forum moderator, @Ryan!

In an ongoing effort to continually improve the Pond5 customer experience, we’ve decided to remove the watermark from the quick preview function of music and SFX tracks. Please note that this is only the case for the lowest bitrate quick preview file and the audio watermark remains on all downloadable preview files. We’ve heard numerous complaints from our customers about how the watermark is obtrusive to their browsing experience, hinders their ability to assess the audio track, and can deter them from licensing. Furthermore several prominent competitors have also removed such watermarks and so this has become increasingly the market standard practice from a customer perspective.

There was a time when audio watermarks were necessary to deter fraud; however, with advances in digital rights tracking technologies (including Content ID), there are new ways to detect unauthorized usage. We are currently evaluating integrating some of these new anti-fraud technologies into the artist experience in 2022 for additional monetization opportunities so please stay tuned for updates.

OMG

Hi Belle, that all makes perfect sense and thank you for the thorough explanation.

Perhaps it would be possible to give us a little heads up ahead of any changes in the future?