I understand that Adobe wants to offer a free section to draw people away from Unsplash and in principle by having width but not depth and paying artists fairly for the year it looks like a lot of thinking went into it.

If the downloads were limited to 10 files a day, I could maybe somehow get myself used to it.

But at 100 files a day it is a genuine threat to our income.

Adobe is the last good site standing that everyone can join.

Like others have said, we have seen these things before and it always meant our income went down.

istock once had the dollar bin, which I thought was a much better concept. Old files could be moved into that collection where every file just costs a dollar.

But every file had a 30 day clock ticking. After 30 days with no sales, the files were deleted forever.

This gave the dollar bin a playful vibe and many old files lived a long and happy life there.

A variation of this could see the files moved  back to the regular collection at higher prices.

Also...every artists then has the option to join (total size of collection was of course limited) and it also was another entry point for the customer to discover artists beyond the usual search.

I wish Adobe all the best, but it sounds like our income will suffer because the quality in that collection is very good.

ETA: I also understand that introducing a free collection allows Adobe to keep our royalties stable, instead of lowering them like SS. It is a complicated world.

Wouldn't it be better for Adobe to offer their software for free to attract people to paying decent rates for stock art? Makes much more sense to me.

From Matt

b) Yes, that's the plan. The free only sites are attracting a lot of potential customers. Our goal is to showcase Adobe Stock content and educate them on the value of having a safe license on released content. The end goal is to attract them to the larger, paid collection to entice them to purchase licenses for content outside the free collection.

I understand the "strategy" to increase sales and traffic to AS by enticing Free-Searchers with a promise of better search results, higher quality and model/property released images. But free-searchers will NOT buy. And offering 70K+ quality images will surely satisfy their need. You have just become another browser bookmark in the free photos file.

You will NOT educate Free-Searchers on anything. NOTHING! They don't care about safe license. You are just providing a bigger, better trough for the pigs to feed in. And in doing so, helping to kill the market for contributors.

And free-searchers don't care about your license terms. LOL! They will use any image any way they want.

You are inviting the wretched, bottom-feeders to the house. "Welcome one and all! Enjoy the free photos! And while  you are here look around at the stuff you will have to pay for if you don't find what you like." Not gonna happen, Matt. As far back as I can remember, Adobe's marketing strategy meetings are ruthless - from abandoning Apple to subscription software.

STUPID, STUPID, STUPID IDEA!

I propose that you limit the maximum number of downloads to 10 photos per day, 2 videos, 5 illustrations ... and add 1 extra free per photo purchased with real money

I propose they allow 5 free downloads per day of their software per person.

Mat,

Free images doesn't make people feel "wow, I need this service, I'm going to pay for it".
No.
They just want more free images and download what they can get free of charge, then go to the next free site, and so on.
Free makes our work of less value, and Adobe as a stock agency will lose its credibility and look like Pexels, Unsplash, whatever xzyqw sites there are.
I'd expect stock agencies to be a little more inventive with the services you offer. Is "Free" really the only thing you come up with??