I can't delete my portfolio. I am the sole bread winner for my family and we have a mortgage to pay, that I wouldn't be paying if I deleted now. Sorry, I would love to but I wont put my kids out on the street.

You can bet I stopped uploading the day I found out about this though, and will do my best to get buyers to other sites and build up other revenue with a mind to deleting come January.

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Also many customers have an agreement with one marketplace, if they want to switch the contract to another company, they need to get that approved.

So the migration of customers to other agencies will take months, if not 2-3 years. It is a slow process.

You are also ignoring that while maybe the majority of ports are still open, the uploads to SS have dropped drastically by about 50%.

And if you look at the latest uploads, you see a considerable drop in quality.

Shutterstock will slowly change into a company that has a huge volume of irrelevant amateur content, I mean they now accept 25 images of the same out of focus mushroom, and some professional stock machines.

If you want to be a force for change, then what you can do is aggressively upload your best work to other agencies that pay better and also promote them online - twitter, facebook...comments on the internet etc...
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To remove your dependence from Shutterstock is something that takes a lot of time, but diversification is key to survival in stock.

....My sales at Adobe are down after I disabled my portfolio at SS (coincidence?) while they should be slightly up from buyers that cannot find my work at SS anymore. Video sales at P5 are non existent, nothing new. So that probably tells us it's indeed a different crowd or not enough of us have moved to Adobe/P5 to make even the slightest difference! That still doesn't explain why Adobe is down just this month though for me and many others but that's for another thread.

All photographers featured here: ...still have their portfolio's up at Shutterstock. I haven't checked Illustrations and vectors but I'm sure it's the same.

But if all these people who continue working with SS don't care and are so keen on destroying this market then why shouldn't I join them and get things moving a bit faster, take what is left and then completely move out? After all like someone mentioned it's each for themselves right? F.ck the rest! That's the mentality of your average stock contributors no?

but no it seems we are being surrounded by robots who may have experienced a slight glitch but are back in business! Many don't even seem to have noticed the glitch!
...  People seem to go hide under a rock when harsh language is being used to make a point so to me it feels more like a friendly social club then a protest.
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So I ask myself am I still doing the right thing by disabling my portfolio even though other contributors don't care, nor do other agencies or buyers.

...Anyway, starting from today, i'll stop uploading new content to SS...until i can afford this

This is a big act of support - thank you. I hope the new content is going to other agencies.

If you want to be public about it, I'd be happy to tweet a link to one of your new items at another agency (something I've been doing for those whose new content is going elsewhere)

I have to imagine SS foresaw a protest, but figured people would just pull their ports. Certainly it never occurred to Pavlovsky that contributors would be looking at his abhorrent Twitter likes. Nor did it occur to Oringer that he should hire a PR team to handle his social media instead of telling the hands that feed him to go take a hike.

Others have probably said it better - but we are basically where we were with Istock a few years back - are you going to put up with the BS they put you through to get 15% of whatever schemes and scams they come up with to wring as much $ out of a once pretty nice opportunity for everyone or are you going to decide that your peace of mind is worth it to remove your content?

I certainly am not a big enough fish that they care about my specific content even though it probably made them 6 figures over the years. They aren't going to give me any special deal and if they decide to improve the deal for artists it won't be because of something I do or do not do.

I can say they won't screw me any worse going forward. I don't have to worry about getting 10 cent video sales or a total January RPD of 10c. I won't be racing to follow a moving target RC scheme to prop up some egotistical man-child's bonus.

Sadly I also probably won't be doing a whole lot of microstock production anymore since SS was one of the last pillars barely keeping it worth my while. It was a good run. I wish I had put a little more work in during the early days when it really made a difference. Oh well, it was a good run.

I am very fortunate that I have no dependents and have paid off my debts and learned to live off of shockingly little in a place where many people struggle to make ends meet. (California)

Do I wish SS would pull its head out of its backside and actually motivate artists to produce quality work - hell yes, do I expect it to happen - not at all. Same with Istock/Getty, 123RF, and so on.