Pond5 Removing The Referral Program Is Disappointing

There are few reasons why we resent Pond5 for removing the referral program. It is useless to point out that the biggest markets (Amazon, bhphoto, aliexpress etc..)  in the world are working on referral programs to attract more customers, while Pond5 is heading in the opposite direction. Even we were more fond of their referral program because we could get few bucks more if we attracted more customers to their site. And we did. In one year there were more than 10 customers that applied via referral program and some of them even sold or bought something (which was not our stock media) from the Pond5 agency.

We resent Pond5 for several reasons;

  • They have unjustifiably removed the referral program which promoted new users to apply.
  • Removing an active program without any future warning for users that are using it is intolerable.
  • After the removal of referral program and not informing users is even more intolerable.

How did we notice that the referral program was shut down? It was a complete coincidence that we wrote to the help desk with some specific question about the referral program and we got the reply of the “recent” removal. So, we were promoting your website and referral URLs which did not work and we could promote it with no results for another year or so? That is very foolish and unfair.

With such neglected attitude, we even got more boost to speed up our plans to offer stock footage via our own marketplace. Because we can’t even trust any stock footage agency anymore.  Why would we promote own clips on agencies database where there are dozens of other competitive media and we won’t receive even a penny if we refer new users. It just doesn’t work out this way. While if we promote only our database we can give better prices, offers, and appropriate attitude to referred customers.

Thank you Pond5 to brighten our view and help us understand that our promotions are now worth nothing.

PS: We will stick to promoting our clips on Pond5 without referral URLs till we arrange own marketplace.

PS2: We noticed, that since the information of referral shut down we still received new signups of referred users. They probably didn’t yet shut down the program yet!

One Comment

  1. Pingback: 5 Reasons Why We Promote Stock Footage from Pond5

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