I was just going to post to see if anyone is leaving SB.  I think I am going to close my account there. My 3-4 sales a month has gone to zero a month once they made the "good news" announcement.

Hi i was wondering how to leave videoblocks with my balance of $24.50


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Quote from: Mantis on April 01, 2019, 11:44

Quote from: pkphotos on April 01, 2019, 01:27

What has happened to them? They have gone from quite reliable to very pathetic. I've sent them emails about how useless they've become and they always reply with the same stock standard BS.

They now have ample clips in their wholly owned collection to fill most of their needs. That was the plan all along, to ultimately phase out the paid collection so they get more subscribers that do not have to pay more doe for clips once they lay out the cash for the subscriber model. I think many here pointed that out early on and questioned VBs long term intent.  Those hypothesis came true and sure enough VB cut commissions and could now care less about the contributors who helped make them successful.

I just looked back at what I said about them in 2015 "I've stayed away from VB.  If they become successful they force other sites to lower prices and then what happens if they decide to take 50% royalty or if they stop licensing videos and only promote their free offerings.  I'm going to say away and most likely this year go exclusively with Pond5"
I didn't go exclusive with P5 since then but I did put more work on there than anywhere else.  It should have been obvious to everyone what VB's plan was all along.

I used to get a few sales each month.
But now nothing this year.

I suppose you haven't considered that pushing them to raise marketplace prices by over 60% caused the potential buyers to look elsewhere?

The typical VB customers are not bigger budget advertisers that go to Pond5 and Shutterstock mainly. They are small subscription users that sometimes could stretch their budget to one or two $49 clips. Even that was probably out of reach for most.

And then you probably got quite a few buyers shopping around for the cheapest price, and now there is no reason for them to buy from VB instead of P5 or Shutterstock, where you get 40% or 30%.

Quote from: tickstock on April 12, 2019, 10:58

Are you sure they didn't raise their marketplace prices so that the subscriptions would be more attractive?

None of us can be sure of anything, since we don't work there. But subscriptions have always been their main product. They raised the prices because of pressure from content creators. They were set on continuing with $49, a price people thought was perfectly reasonable before.

Quote from: tickstock on April 12, 2019, 10:58

They list ABC, NBC, the History Channel, MTv, Travel Channel etc... as clients.

Everyone lists their famous clients in the spotlight. So do I, and even if I have sold licenses to McDonald's and Nike, they are not my typical customer.

Quote from: tickstock on April 12, 2019, 10:58

VB sells at $79 the same as SS.

Yes, which was the entire point of my previous post. As nearly all VB contributors are reporting near $0 sales since the price change, something happened. And if anything, VB would only be more inclined to want to sell marketplace content now that they get 50%.

Buyers have no reason to shop at VB now since the Shutterstock library is both better and bigger, at the same price.

But a buyer that needs 20 marketplace quality clips would have saved $600 with the old VB prices, which can be significant for small to medium sized businesses.

Are they also pushing the subscription sharing model because of contributors desire for that?  I remember people saying only bloggers use SS not serious buyers with money.  Getting 100% is better than getting 50% so I'm not sure they want to push marketplace content, if they did they would make it easy to see that content and put it in the similars space but they don't, they also wouldn't be trying to get contributors to sign up for the subscription sharing program either.

Also when you do a search there the marketplace clips are hidden by default, only membership files are shown.  When you click show all you get a pop up warning about them and then in the generic search I did only 1 out of the first 60 clips was a marketplace clip.