Not uploading to Videoblocks because of Dissolve forced high priced stock footage

About a year ago we planned to try Videoblocks stock agency nevertheless the HD pricing tier is way bellow industry standards. Some contributors reported good income and because there is no agency share, the contributor receives 99% of the income. It sounds good, sure. But we have an opinion that such dumping will lead to other agencies drop their tiers and consequently the incomes from each agency will drop further to the bottom.

But, there was another reason we dropped the idea of uploading files to Videoblocks. We got a “hostile” message from Dissolve, that they will drop all prices on our footage to lowest industry tier. Which would mean that they would sell our footage for $49. And from that we would get 30% income share (which is a BIG difference from Videoblocks contributor 99% income share). This was a bizzare move from them and we wanted to know why. They found out (searching for our files elsewhere) that we are also selling some (mostly low quality) footage on other stock agencies for $49. They concluded that our ten thousand files collection are worth only $49 per file. That means we couldn’t even think of selling anything on Videoblocks. And because Dissolve at that time was a decent earner, we resisted their action, up-priced our footage elsewhere and deleted files from Videoblocks.

But after that, incomes on Dissolve stagnated and didn’t improve. It has got even worse, incomes are the worst and it won’t be long when even iStockphoto/Getty will surpass  the income with only half of the footage that Dissolve has from our database. We stopped uploading to iShitty more than a year ago and number of sales are much bigger than on Dissolve where we upload constantly, with over five hundred files still waiting to be currated.

What can we conclude? We’ve been deceived, that is a fact. If you are so brave to even force contributors to drop other agencies where it could earn some more bucks, then at least be brave enough to meet their expectations and make more sales. There’s been enough of shitty agencies such as iStock/Getty, Motionelements, Revostock, Canvas… etc. that we aren’t afraid just withdrawing our footage whenever we see a hoax. We even noticed that our income dropped because of uploading some images to Shutterstock. That is why we deleted all images.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.