As a stock footage video production we are very dependent on the sales of our clips. And because the Shutterstock agency is one of our biggest source of income, it is important to have some insight of what is being sold. Shutterstock does have daily sales reporting, which is a lot better than some other low-income sites that don’t even report anything such as iStockphoto/Getty Images and Dissolve. But SS still lacks some things they already had in the past, or it was broken through updates. And because our income is in their hands we would like to have some better insight to improve our works and sales.
We were happy in 2017 that Shutterstock finally added Payoneer as a payment option, they’ve shortened the curation wait lines and improved the media import dashboard for stock footage. We even started receiving some kinda “The shot list” for themes that are welcomed to be uploaded. There is also an Adobe plugin that directly searches through the Shutterstock database for customers to get stock files directly. All such things are very welcome.
But still, we made a list of things that Shutterstock should do in the year to come. It is all in the faith of improving the agency.
1. real-time video sales map preview (It worked on the old dashboard, now it doesn’t)
2. more statistics data (views, add to bins, from which country, etc…)
3. faster ftp transfers (If lucky, files are transferred up to 200kB/s, which is only 10% of our upload capacity speed)
4. easier setting video thumbnail preview (Editing thumbnails is real hell)
5. adding more commissions levels for contributors (we already mentioned in the past that SS should give more commissions, especially to well-established contributors)
6. page security against stealing media (photographers noticed that images can be downloaded without any payment)
7. replacing old files with newer and better ones (old files get lot of sales, but they could get a better and higher quality version without losing its position in search – it’s for the costumer’s sake)
8. fix the keyword suggestions (keywording page is great, but all multi-word keywords are broken to single-words. That is not OK)
9. making video sets (images already have their sets, what about video?)
10. back-link watermark over video/image preview (many media files get abused, why not use backlinking as part of a promotion)
When you do all of this things, we will give you a big THUMBS UP. And we will start promoting our footage from your site.