Shutterstock enforcing their restriction on sharing earnings?
Update: It appears that all may not have been as big an issue as I initially understood and may have just been with one contributor. However, I’ll be careful with my posts going forward, but perhaps not the issue I at first thought.
I saw some posts recently that Shutterstock was issuing warnings to contributors who share their earnings, royalty amounts or other “confidential” information. This is forbidden in the terms and conditions we signed:
By submitting any Content to Shutterstock, you acknowledge that you will acquire certain confidential and proprietary information, including but not limited to royalty rates, royalty payments and earnings data (collectively, “Confidential Information”). You agree to keep Confidential Information confidential and to not disclose Confidential Information to any third party other than representatives, agents, attorneys, accountants, auditors and advisors with a bona fide need to know, who shall first agree to keep the terms confidential.
Shutterstock Terms and Conditions
I do remember this being introduced when they became a public company and the explanation at the time was that this could be market sensitive information – yeah, right! It is more likely that they don’t want discussion of the latest low priced video sale I guess.
However, I don’t want a warning and so I am going to have to put some blank spaces in some of my posts on this site. I’ll leave all the normal stuff about total earnings, earnings from the other agencies etc. but leave a blank space for the SS earnings. Sorry for that!
This is unfortunate. If it wasn’t for all of the information shared broadly about Shutterstock, I wouldn’t have been comfortable to join the Shutterstock community as a contributor.
I may have over-reacted – difficult to say. It could also be because they know that everyone will see a big drop in earnings in January with the reset of the percentages and they are trying to block that from being a big subject? Who knows!
Hi Steven. I’m sure you’ve thought of this but just in case. If you leave in your total earnings and all earnings for the other agencies in your posts then it will still be possible to work out your earnings for SS. Not sure if SS would count that as disclosing sensitive info, as people would have to go to the effort to figure it out, rather than you giving it out direct? But to properly hide it you’ll have to obfuscate more than just the SS figures.
It probably was a storm in a teacup, but I did think of that as an option (as well as Agency X…) I doubt if they are really that bothered. We will have to see!