Forget all about the rest and check out this one.

http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/what-premier-select-means-for-shutterstock-contributors

Lots of questions yet to be answered.

March 16, 2015

Already having been rolled out and being tested by certain individuals?

Anyone know the whos, whats, wheres, whens?

Looks like an exclusive group so far, and after that they will choose who gets in?

Where can we go look at this collection and the select few artists that have been chosen?

I cannot access the first link in Shelma1's post, but I can see the info at the second without logging in.

For the first link I get a message:

"You're trying to log in with a standard Shutterstock account, but using this site requires a Premier account. Please contact your account administrator to upgrade your account or call (866) 419-2365 for assistance."

What I don't understand is how being in this collection makes a difference to the contributor. In the blog post it says:

"Premier Select will not change the exposure of your content currently available to our Premier customers."

So would it mean that the Select content will get a boost in the search results over the content from the rest of the standard collection?

It's a carefully worded sentence. I'm not sure it means all our work is exposed to people with Premier accounts: "your content currently available to our Premier customers." To me that means some, all or none of our content is currently shown to Premier customers. Maybe Premier Select will be a separate thing, or a box you check to eliminate non-Select results when you search?

I interpret this as the Offset option for current contributors.

Thanks for the info shared so far but wish there was a way to find out more about Premiere, so, if an SS admin or someone who's already been invited to the premiere collection could answer, I'd appreciate it. I followed the links I could but am still confused.

Here's my situation:

SS has been a good outlet for some of my commercial travel images, my bread and butter, but since I have a lot of RM and high value RF travel images, I have a very small portion of this work on SS, so no chance in being invited in with my small port so far. Much of my stock photography is licensed directly to publishers via old-fashioned queries and some via my personal site, so I don't put those images on the micros for fear it would hurt my earnings on direct licensing.  The travel photos I have put on SS account for upwards of 90% of my SOD and EL earnings, however, so I'm really tempted by the Premiere concept. Getting SODs for $50-120 means they are being licensed for $150-360, which is in keeping with what I earn for direct licenses on the work I license directly to publishers and while the percentage is smaller, SS has a much larger audience, so it is really tempting.

For those of you on Premiere,  I have a couple of questions.
How did you get on there - was there an application process or were you just notified?
Are your premiere images separate from the main collection or can those premiere images, still get downloaded hundreds of times for peanuts as part of the main collection?

IMHO I don't think the stratification is what did iStock in. Even as an indie with a tiny port, my E+ images in the old days were downloaded way more often and earned me more than anything else on iStock and when they put all our indie work into Main my income there tanked.

Anyway, appreciate any info. Thanks.

According to their blog post, it's based on lifetime earnings.

It would be interesting to know how much you need to have earnt to qualify.

It would be interesting to know how much you need to have earnt to qualify.

"based on lifetime earnings" does not necessarily mean a certain bar over which you qualify.

It would be interesting to know how much you need to have earnt to qualify.

My guess is 50K lifetime, could be a 100K? a 100K sounds like a lot but a 100K in 10 years ain't that much.

Lifetime earnings is an odd stat to use to decide who gets invited. It should maybe be something like average of the past 2 years or something.

This may be the way SS will "give a raise" to contributors who have reached the top tier with no further incentive til possibly now

This may be the way SS will "give a raise" to contributors who have reached the top tier with no further incentive til possibly now

I hope you're right.  If the only criteria is lifetime earnings, my guess is that it will be pretty hard to reach even for some of us who have been with them since 2007.  Me, who has an average looking port, and not up there with the likes of Rinder and some of the other high enders. If the premier platform is really to incent contributors they could not pull it off by making the threshold too low. They would have to raise prices to pay us more or otherwise why do it as a net loss strategy.  There is more to this than just lifetime earnings. Also, how they calculate lifetime earnings could be in question as well.  What about someone who reaches $10k in a year? And the lifetime is, say, $50k? That person would be screwed even though they have powerful earnings.  I bet there is an extrapolation algorithm to ensure that these high performing, newer ports get privileges....assuming this becomes another tiered privilege.  And it may also be lifetime earnings per image and thus it's image specific, not port specific. Who knows.

It's a carefully worded sentence. I'm not sure it means all our work is exposed to people with Premier accounts: "your content currently available to our Premier customers." To me that means some, all or none of our content is currently shown to Premier customers. Maybe Premier Select will be a separate thing, or a box you check to eliminate non-Select results when you search?

I interpret this as the Offset option for current contributors.

Maybe. I've gotten some high SODs on some weird ones that I wouldn't consider to be very good.

Lifetime earnings is not rigth.
SS has enough data to assess the valuable material regardless of its age. Newcomers often have better quality than some old timers.

I would somewhat agree, There are some very good folks. But......Experience is a good thing. Old timers may Know what sells better based on that. No one knows what will sell, Old timers may know more about what doesn't do well. And, As a lot of us know My Old and very Old stuff is often at the front. Is that due to search, Or usefulness? I have quite a few Very Old Images in the 5000+Sales  Range.And maybe one of the reasons I don't go for to many...."Trends" Blurs and Filters.