close to 40% of your royalty income.

Are you serious?

Wow. I would have guessed maybe 10% and thought that was way too much, but 40% is just robbery.

It is a very good way to make sure you will never make a significant income from stock footage, however.

Please learn how to write good metadata yourself if you want to make money. Because we want to make money, right?

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It's hard to avoid the 30-70% cuts to the agencies, but further cuts like these are quite easy to avoid!

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I recently edited some keywords of older clips to include some current relevant terms that fit them well, even if they weren't necessarily created with that in mind. They have since started selling very well.

And optimizing my metadata a number of years back on clips already uploaded when I learned more, quite literally raised my income to something I could live comfortably on.

Please learn to control your assets and optimize them as much as you possibly can on your own. I know many absolutely hate writing, but it's necessary in order to maximize earnings.

One thing they've mentioned is that the 15% cut they take makes no difference since they've negotiated a higher commission with the agencies (they sort of allude often to it).

That might be true, but as far as I understand you just get a lump sum each month, and you have no idea what clips sold, or do you get the stats? Is it possible to see what percentage they're getting or do you just have to take their word for it?

Anyway, you would need a 17.6% increase to negate the 15% cut, which would mean roughly 35% at Shutterstock and roughly 47% at Pond5. That's not unlikely, but as we've seen that doesn't really matter since you still have all the other major drawbacks to deal with (along with much worse average performance at Pond5 at least).

Still a fairly involved process. Though the idea and execution is definitely a good one it just seems like there are missing bits

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That would be my thought as well. You have a good collaboration platform it could support the upfront payment or coownership options needed for film production or even other creative projects.



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I've been submitting there for just over a year. The main reason I started was that I wanted to start submitting live-action content as well as animations, and it would look a bit weird to have cookery videos on a SpaceStockFootage account full of planets and spaceships and the like. Could have changed my username, but wanted to stick with the branding... and as most agencies don't let you have more than one account... using something like BlackBox was the only option.

Aside from the odd exception, my income has increased every single month since I've been submitting, but that's to be expected as I've been submitting a lot more content every month. Aside from March and April 2020... things have been pretty quiet since the middle of last month, but I guess that's to be expected. Seeing the same from my individual agency accounts.

Upsides:


Submit and tag once and they distribute to five agencies.
Payments are always on time
User interface is good when it comes to keywording and the like
Popular Facebook page with a lot of help and advice
FTP is fast, reliable and very few issues.
The ability to share revenue with partners, actors, curators etc
The ability to assign curators to handle your keywording etc.

Downsides:

15% cut. I guess that's not too bad though, especially as they seem to have slightly better royalty rates from one or more of the agencies. I think with SS you get pretty much the same as you would going direct.
Recently added a 10 clip per day upload limit
You can't alter the display image/thumbnail for a clip... it's always the first frame.
No ability to enter a 'description'. They call it a description like on SS for example, but if they're submitting to P5, the description becomes the title... and the description is just a duplicate.
Once you've submitted, there's no editing of anything. Stupid typo� it�s there forever.
They tell you if it's online at one or more agency, or if it's been rejected by all agencies. So when it says 'online', it may be online on one agency and rejected by the rest, or it might be online at all agencies.
You don't get any feedback on why a clip has been rejected.
Impossible to delete anything from your portfolio without contacting support... I'll double check but I think there might be a minimum duration you have to keep them on as well. They did say they'll take them down asap for any legal type issues though.
Can't set your own prices at P5.

Other downsides which I've not included in the list as they're more subjective opinions rather than facts... everyone's far too positive in their Facebook group! You've got people ordering all the BB merch and wearing it with pride, thanking the owner for everything he does and how amazing BB is, people brimming with excitement and being all hopeful about making their first sale. Negativity doesn't go down well in the group. Negativity as in facts though... not just unfounded negativity for no reason. It feels a tiny bit like a cult for some reason. Maybe I'm wrong! And don�t ever ask a question in the group unless you�ve double checked the user guide twice. The moderators will tell you to read the user guide. Your peers will post some kind of meme or inside joke about not reading the user guide. Call me crazy, but I just answer their question. Not exactly a recommended approach when it comes to customer service.

Does seem to be quite a mixture of abilities and experience when it comes to the people who submit there� from people who are just shooting on their phones to people all kitted-out with their Red cameras and the like. Then you�ve got another mixture� people with their Red cameras who already produce stock and know what stock is, and people with their Red cameras who have no idea about stock. So I guess their early marketing worked, it got plenty of people through the door. I do feel that a lot of their marketing is marketing the concept of selling stock itself, rather than marketing Blackbox (with a bit of collaboration features sprinkled in).

So they�re on about moving away from the gig economy, financial freedom, passive revenues etc etc. All stuff that the other agencies offer�. without the 15%. So in that sense, they�ve done a really good job of promoting the concept of stock itself.

And while the owner is obviously a talented guy who has set up a decent platform, I do get the feeling that he bends the truth slightly if it�s in the interests of the platform. Like when he said that there wasn�t any benefit to knowing why you�ve had your clips rejected. I mean, surely everyone here would agree that there�s more benefit to knowing why your clips have been rejected than there is to not knowing why your clips have been rejected? I�m sure you�d get the same answer if you asked why you can�t edit clips, why you can�t delete clips, why they don�t tell you which clips have been accepted where� I�m guessing the real answer is that it would take a lot of time, money and effort to install those features, but that�s probably not the answer you�ll get. It�ll be along the lines of� trust us to take care of all the business side of things for you, you concentrate on creating great content.

On a side note, one reason why you�ll notice a lot less videos promoting BB at the moment, is that they�ve suspended the referral program. I think it was two, maybe three months ago� give or take. They�re working on another one and will let everyone know when it�s ready. 

Bottom line... if there was the possibility to open second accounts at all the agencies, then I'd probably just do that instead. Overall, I'm pretty happy with them though, but I would rather have a bit more control over editing, know what's been accepted and where, what's been rejected and why, pricing etc etc.

Thanks spacestock that really helps. Although i guess you've been submitting fully edited, metadata filled clips to them. Have you had a chance to use check out the collaborative features? How convinient have you found them?

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There's something really fishy going on with SS and Blackbox.
Almost nothing seems to go through.
If you compare the Blackboxguild portfoilo on SS and P5, you'll see that only half of the files end up on SS and the gap is growing.
SS has 750000, Pond5 has 1,4 Million files

I notice my commercial files always show up on ss but not all my editorial files. some show up with a 3 month time lag, some never.

Maybe it is the heavy rejection change at SS.

In the beginning pond5 and ss always took the same bb files. So yes, that is frustrating.

Just a couple of answers to a few things...

You get a breakdown of your sales, and get an email for every sale you make with the price, date, clip etc. You never know which agency you sold it at, but you can usually tell based on the price.

They don't make the percentages they get from the agencies public, as I guess it's a figure they've had to negotiate, so the agencies don't want BB to go advertising it. Could cause them issues if they try negotiating deals with other people.

They definitely have a deal with SS on the percentages, but that might just be it. Based on sales prices, I don't think they have a deal with P5 or Adobe, but I could be wrong. Maybe with Vimeo... hard to tell.

Yeah, the 20% for keywording and 20% for editing is just a recommended figure. You can negotiate with the person and if you have a track record of getting decent sales with your content then that's going to put you in a better position. I mean 20% for five minutes work is great if the clip sells 5 to 10 times in a year... not so great if it sells once a year or less.

Signing up with a curator is probably a good idea if English isn't your first language. While I'm not sure if great keywording makes that much more of a difference than good keywording, I reckon 20% could be worth it to avoid bad keywording. Otherwise, probably best to do it yourself unless you're super busy.

Collaboration features are good... have used a couple of people for keywording and allocated a share for a model in some shots. The keywording ones were mainly with people I know to get the hang of it so they could do keywording for other people. Obviously they signed up using my referral code, so I get 1% from every one of their sales!

Well, how many people do stock full time?

Less than 10% of all uploaders? BB has a lot of new faces, so it seems to work for them.

I have been a member of BB for 16 months.  In late 2018, early 2019, I sent them a little over 1000 clips.  Starting in March 2019, I switched to using Microstock Plus to upload all my media.  Since that time I have uploaded about 1100 more clips to various agencies, including the ones that BB supports (and which you cannot upload to personally if those same media are sent via BB).

I have about 30% more revenue from the non-BB clips than I do from the BB ones, even though BB has had all their clips longer.

BB takes 15% off the top as their commission.  They then take another 2% when they pay you, claiming that "every agency does this." Uh... I have worked with some 20 agencies over the years, and NOT ONE of them charges me to pay me.  Thus, their commission is really 17%, which comes off the top of what SS, Adobe, etc paid in the first place.

With BB, you do not have any idea which agency accepted (or rejected) your media, and have no idea which agency sold the media.  You do get an email  for each sale, and they pay very quickly on a per-sale basis (no holding until the balance reaches some special level, as the other agencies do).

BB might be useful for far-flung transient teams that work on one project together, then reform into different teams for future projects. That is because they support assigning different percentages to different people for a specific media.  For those of us that are lone operators though, that benefit does not really help.

I tried 5 different BB members to do editing/keywording for me when I was on the road for 6 months straight. Of those, 4 were absolute complete wastes of time, where the person was clearly doing the least possible effort to grab 60% of the take.  1 was good, but then stopped doing that work after only a couple weeks. 

When I asked the owner of BB about some form of vetting of editors, and some form of voting on them, so we would have some idea which ones were competent, I was blown off, and he just said it was my responsibility to vet the people (which I did by giving them each a small one-day's worth of shots to work on first).  That was pretty much every interaction with him.  He is a Dictatorship, taking down anything in his forum with the slightest sense of questioning His Wisdom.  He is totally closed-minded to any input at all, thinking he knows exactly how everything should work.

Bottom line -- I dropped them a year ago. If I could remove my media, I would, but the initial agreement (which I read up front and knew at the time) says that I cannot. Once they have it, your media stays there.

They charge way too much for what they offer (which for lone operators, is about zero).  They are non-responsive to any suggestions or requests for changes. Their forum is a rah-rah-ain't-we-great forum, because any post even very slightly off that theme is deleted within minutes.

Instead, go with Microstock Plus. They charge $10/mo to send 250 media to each of 30+ agencies (I only use 12 of them -- pick the ones you want). you can pay more for higher volumes, but that works for me. MS+ also handles both photos and video.  I typically submit 1000 to 1500 media at a time (after traveling 4 or 5 months). I let MS+ submit 250 per month until the batch is complete. That means I can input all at once, and know my stuff will roll out over a 4-6 month period.

Oh yes, MS+ does not take one dime from your commissions. They are submitted under your name, so you know who accepted/rejected, and later sold them.  The only place MS+ gets involved is submission. You upload once, and MS+ then sends to as many as 30+ agencies that they support.

Bumping this up, i made an account there and somehow wss never able to figure out the get another person to help with metadata. So not much up there at this moment and zero sales

Have any of you had more luck there? I'm guessing it makes a ton of sense with the shutterstock tier system