$50 price cap?

Yes, the sales drop started in the same time with exclusivity, around April. Prior to going exclusive, I made myself some charts and all were showing me that exclusivity(in the initial terms) was a good thing. I did not expected to be betrayed by Pond5 in that miserable way. They should've told us to lower the prices instead of encouraging us to raise them while they were capping them.

If it is true that Pond5 already knows that buyers jumped from 50USD clips to higher priced ones for the benefit of artists, I wonder for how long this "experiment" has been running? I am sure it is not for 10 days - that conclusion takes time to get it.

If it is true, why artists with higher priced clips do not get the sales but a huge, deep, fatal drop in sales?

And the cap was meant to be hidden from the artists and buyers: it was not visible while logged in as an artist and while searching without being logged in the button has a delayed loading which makes it difficult for the searcher to see it as he/she is scrolling down.

During those months of "exclusivity": Pond5 has not promoted the exclusives at all, but a huge editorial contributor, I was unable to pay my bills, to feed my kid, I had to borrow money to survive, I had to go to interviews to get a job, I was convinced it is the market and I am not that good at stock to make a living out of it. I had no idea at all that Pond5 was shooting from behind, betraying all of us. Pond5 has even told me that I should leave exclusivity if I am not satisfied with it!

CONCLUSION: Exclusivity has brought nothing good to the contributors, Pond5 has not promoted the exclusive artists at all and dropped the regular commission by 20%, Pond5 has capped the search engine without letting the artist know while they all artists crying for help on forums and to support.

The only argument Pond5 could bring to defend itself would be sales - but we are missing them for more than two months!

We asked for sales but we got capped!

Shame on you, Pond5! You lost all the hard earned credit of the last 14 years.

... I`m supporting April month theory... something big happened then, not just on P5...

We now have the cap set at £80 in the UK and $80 elsewhere. I know that the value of the UK pound is falling rapidly because of Brexit but there is still some difference between the two values.

They seem to have implemented a pop up when you do a search now - it highlights the amount slider and says:

"CLIPS FOR EVERY BUDGET
We've set your price filter! Adjust the slider for more results"

Price is set for me at $80.

This is still unacceptable - without the buyer changing the slider, many clips of mine will still not be included.
If P5 are not including my clips for the buyer, why am I here?
Why let the buyer remove higher priced clips? (they could find a clip $5 above the max which would have been perfect for their project).

Why not as some others have mentioned, just allow them to sort on price (which is currently available), so why the need to implement this filter default idea??

"If P5 are not including my clips for the buyer, why am I here? " Well put @cfhdesign!

The buyer should by default be seeing all priced clips. The price sensitive customers should be the ones that need to manually adjust the slider. P5's argument about buyers wanting exclusive clips and willing to pay for them was apparently a total farce. Everything they're doing is contrary to their stated aims of raising the market.

Pond5 should just follow the Amazon model, which delivers a rich mix of low, med, and higher priced items.
The consumer can always select the "sort by price" which then prioritizes lower dollar clips.

If they want to race to the bottom, then have a popup that reminds them that they can sort by price.

It looks like the new model is high volume low price

@MovingImages said: "It looks like the new model is high volume low price"

If that's the case, there is absolutely no reason to be exclusive at P5. Pond5 can you please confirm that this is your new business model going forward so that the artists here can make decisions regarding the direction of their individual businesses?

Dear Artists,

We thank everyone who has participated in this thread or sent us direct emails regarding this test.

At Pond5 we are always testing to maximize revenue. One of the levers we use to maximize sales is to optimize search results based on the pricing sensitivity and content needs of a buyer.

For example, Enterprise customers are our least price sensitive customers. That’s not surprising given that creating content is core to their business. Given their purchasing power and unique content requirements, every Enterprise client is provided with their own custom search experience. We know that Enterprise buyers value unique, premium, exclusive content. Price is not a factor for them, it's the quality of the clip that counts. Therefore our algorithm seeks to return the best possible content for this channel, regardless of price. Consequently, no Enterprise buyer has had a price filter applied to their search results.

E-commerce / retail buyers are different. We've learned conclusively that when we promote higher priced footage on search results to this segment it hurts artist sales. That is because e-commerce buyers tend to be more price sensitive and prefer content that is more value priced. To them, the price is as important, if not even more important, than the clip itself.

Our testing has demonstrated that when we filter higher priced clips (at least initially) for e-commerce buyers, Artist revenue increases. In fact it increases over 30%! Although we are excited by these results, we know there are always opportunities to improve. And based in part on some of your feedback we’ve made additional improvements to this test, including prominently recommending to all e-commerce visitors to use the price slider to see more/different results. We’ve also included additional callouts promoting the Exclusive filter.

Ultimately our variable pricing model is what makes the Pond5 marketplace so interesting to our buyers and our artists. Buyers can count on Pond5 to have footage across a range of budgets, and Artists have the freedom to choose what price point and budget they want their work to appeal to.

At the end of the day, the goal is always to increase revenue for our community and balance the needs of all our Artists and Buyers. We are still in the early stages of testing. These tests have only been in the market for a few days to a portion of our traffic. When we have results to share you can count us to do so via this forum, Artist newsletters and Town Halls. Thank you as always for your invaluable feedback.

Gregp5 please stop to tell ... to us...no one believe you anymore...you keep saying that you are bringing in more revenue but the only one that see this increase is pond5...i don't know any artist happy with sales here...you see a 30% increase in reveneu??maybe in your pocket which is so different from our pocket!!but hey,we are in business so this is fair but please stop asking people to join exclusive to stop the race to the bottom and start saying that you have not any other market strategy or skills than lower price...now we all know where to put our effort...