$50 price cap?

Unless the buyer moves the slider.

Greg, you always write about your successful tests which will create more revenue. Who get's the revenue. I never read here in the forum or elsewhere that any contributor is happy by getting more income after your tests. Since you've start your diverse curious tests around one year before or so i only read nonstop that long-time contributors are mourning more and more.
I'm my whole life a self made business man, and there's an unwritten law for all businesses: "Never change a running system!" You change nonstop anything. All your positive words and talking don't response in any positive results on the contributor side as it seems ;)

Sorry, Your test has cost me over $2,000 in last 2-3 weeks. None of my footage shows and only one sale in 11 days is not honesty and lacks business integrity. Private forums with the top P5 artist it's obvious that anger is higher than I've ever seen at any agency. How can it be successful when a single Artist loses a several thousand a month? One of thousands of Artists?

It's fine to play and experiment but give us a chance, use P5 or employee owned footage to do this, not long term loyal Artists that sell at prices at or below what P5 has always encourage. If you want or need to sell HD for $50 then make that the maximum and eliminate the friendliest Artist agency in the world. Heck if the cheap buyers are so important then make the slider huge, across the entire screen. Set it at default maximum and describe to buyers how they can reduce it if needed. Setting it at $50 and completely hiding mine and hundreds of other top performers clips is not just bad business but dishonest. P5 has been over and over and not too far back telling everyone not to race to the bottom ... so now the only clips showing are the race to the bottom clips.

Sorry but we as Artists have extreme expenses, cutting all of our clips from searches just proves the slider at any level is a bad bad business venture. SO now do an experiment and set it at $99 for HD and $199 for 4K. Guess what P5, you just gave us some hard earned sales back and increased the take on the P5 side.

ONE SALE IN ELEVEN DAYS IS NOT HONEST.

Sincerely;

One of P5's first and most loyal Artists who for more than a decade always sent my clips to P5 before anywhere else. With over 6,000 more of my clips at P5 that any other agency. Assigned thousands into the Exclusive deal and 3 fast sales a couple months ago then nothing. Frustrated, heck yes. As are dozens of other top Artists that are more strongly vocal on private chats. We trusted but this was not honest.

If this is a true scientific experiment, it needs a control group. In this group, the left hand side slider will start at $79. If this control group is not included, then the results of the experiment are not valid.

I agree with Don that at the least make it very apparent to the buyer what kind of footage they are being fed: a very explicit pop-up explaining that the slider is set at a low amount...

You also cannot truly say that a 'summer slump' is the cause for this unprecedented freefall of sales, causing a minimum of 50% reduction in sales compared to previous years for big Contributors like Don and Stef, for instance (and relatively small Contributors like myself).

Lastly: all the changes you implemented you told us was to stop the race to the bottom. And now you set the standard price level at bottom prices?

"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. The average price per item download was not effected".

The problem with this is that everyone who has priced their clips over $50 (any self-respecting contributor) is now out of business! Am I misunderstanding? Should we all now price our clips at under $50 to continue doing business with Pond 5? (Honest question).
So much for avoiding the race to the bottom - it looks to me like P5 is leading the race.
P5 seems like a ship without a rudder lately. So frustrating.

pond5,why did you ask contributors to remove their port from other agencies to become exclusive here to stop the race to the bottom and then cap the search result at 50$?? you are leading the race to the bottom! you are responsible for those artists that have trusted you and now have been cut off from the search result...(some of us feed our family with this job)
i feel very sorry for my fellow contributors that have trusted pond5 going exclusive taking off their port from other agencies (that don't communicate with artists but at least don't lie to artists....)
plus,i don't understand why other agencies keep growing with fixed price (79/179) and here the only way to grow is to low price...
sorry but i don't trust this agency anymore....

Just checked the site and the $50 price cap appears to be gone. I hope it is for good. It is a pity it has done so much damage to contributor relations.

So you've asked us to become exclusive and now you've cut us off from even having our clips being shown in the default searches?! My ONLY reason to go exclusive in the first place was to be able to set my own higher prices. This sucks!

You guys may be burning some bridges you can't ever repair.

Unreal.

Seriously Greg, these "tests" are thoroughly killing the morale around here. You can ask first if any contributors would like to voluntarily participate or not in dropping our prices for testing. You can send a simple mass email to contributors forced to participate, informing them of any upcoming tests that seemingly eliminates their clips form search results and as a result, limits sales considerably. You can provide time lines for these tests and follow through on those time lines and not let them last indefinitely, unchecked and forgotten. The only reason you cannot is if these tests were poorly planned and rushed. Honestly, are they?

"We...cannot give notification about all the tests we're running."

That is something the Pond5 from a couple years ago would NEVER say. It's disingenuous. It's not because you "cannot" give us notification, it's because you know most contributors would not want to participate and would be understandably upset if they were aware it was happening to them (which is quite evident in this thread). It looks MUCH worse to try to "sneak" these tests by us and assume we won't notice.

Sure, you have no obligation to ask our permission to do what you want with your company. But you really should know when bringing us into the conversation is the right call or not. There has been a reputation damaging lack of consideration lately.

PLEASE respect your contributors more than this and ask for participation, or at least attempt to communicate with us to some minimal degree. Stop treating the ones that create the content your business survives on, like an afterthought.

Thank you in advance.