A closer look at Adobe Stock
Posted by Yuri Arcurs on October 12, 2015
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My name is Yuri Arcurs, and for those of you who don’t know me, I’m the world’s top selling stock photographer and founder of www.peopleimages.com. I have spent the last 10 years as a stock photographer and I´ve worked with over 100 stock agencies. Today I’m exclusive with Getty, but prior to that, I distributed to as many agencies as possible. Together with my distribution manager, I would go through a series of analysis for each new stock agency that would pop up to determine whether it would be worth our while to work with them. Back then I only had 40 000 images, but considering the time spent on uploading, categorizing, attaching model releases, etc. it still took months to get the images online. Before making the call to engage with new agencies I´d make a preliminary evaluation of the site’s potential success. Most of the time the assessments we made were right, and I believe part of my success is attributed to not wasting time on the wrong distribution partners.
Just recently a new player has entered the Stock arena. Adobe launched its “Adobe Stock” which is the biggest entry from a foreign entity that the stock industry has ever seen. On the online communities there are many opinions and ongoing discussions about this newcomer and the impact it might have on the stock industry. Instead of diving straight into the middle of these discussions, I thought I would do something different. Why not put Adobe Stock through the same preliminary evaluation process that we used to perform in order to determine whether or not we would submit our images to them? In the following article I will rate Adobe Stock on a scale from 1-10 on various critical criteria.
Server Speed Comparison
(Score: 2/10)
These days, the customer’s expectation regarding server speed is very high. They pretty much expect a loading time that is equal to that of Google, which is not easy to achieve. The first thing I noticed is that the stock.adobe.com website seems slow. At first, I thought the problem might be my connection or geolocation since I live in South Africa. To be sure, I ran it through various site speed testers and the results were quite interesting. The landing page of stock.adobe.com loads very fast, but a simple search for a keyword like “cute” loads very slowly. Repeat searches load quickly, but first time searches take as long as 6 seconds to start loading. In comparison, my own site, peopleimages.com, with a much lower “server budget” than Adobe, scores an average of 65/100 on Google’s PageSpeed Insights on a search for the keyword “cute” for example. Adobe’s stock site scores 52/100 on average. Shutterstock scores 47/100 on average between mobile and desktop users. If you get other results when testing this, share your findings in the comments section below.
Shutterstock.com 47 / 100 (Seems faster than scores dictate however)
Peopleimages.com 65 / 100
Stock.Adobe.com 52 / 100
Conclusion on Adobe Stock site speed: First search so slow you notice it. Second search ok. Not impressed!
Score: 2 out of 10.
Ease of Sign-up and Purchase
(Score: 1/10)
I logged in to my existing Adobe Cloud account and purchased a subscription for stock.adobe.com as an addon to my current account. To my surprise, it turned out that I had not purchased a subscription anyway and to this day I am still unsure what I actually purchased because I am not able to download anything. To add to this, support was of no help as I was referred to Danish support pages, which had no entries. A highly frustrating experience to say the least. Checkout and customer support are very standardised nowadays so I am sure these issues will be fixed. The puzzling aspect here is why the Adobe team chose to launch their new stock site without sufficient customer support. To me, the launch seems rushed, and the ease of signup and purchase experience seems to have a general lack of attention to detail. Personally, I tested my own site for weeks prior to the official launch date and would never have launched it in the state Adobe has. I believe the reason behind their premature launch is founded in them wanting the product out before the Adobe MAX conference in L.A. on Oct. 3rd 2015.
Conclusion on ease of sign-up and purchase: Sign-up and purchasing is troublesome to put it mildly. However, these issues are easily fixed. What worries me is that they chose to launch anyway.
Score: 1 out of 10.
Search Result Quality (Score: 4/10)
Let’s compare search results. Simple search results for a set of common to not-so-common keyword combinations. Although the results I have listed below speak for themselves, I will go ahead and comment on them for the ease of reading this article and to spare you the trouble of visiting all the links. Keep in mind that these are keyword searches that I have chosen because they are cases where Adobe performs particularly poorly, it is not a fair judgement of quality per se.
About two years ago a similar comparison of search results was done by stock journalist Jim Pickerell, where my site peopleimages.com was compared to shutterstock.com. Jim Pickerell concluded that my site looked the best (hurray), which prompted Shutterstock into immediately optimising their results for the given searches rendering the comparison “fake” or staged. To put a damper on the “quick fix temptation” I´ve linked screenshots of the search results as they appear at the time of writing this article.
Common Keyword: Cute
Results:
Shutterstock.com – Accurate result, but pretty much only vectors and illustrations. Not ideal at all.
Peopleimages.com – Accurate result, but only a few images due to quality cutting.
Stock.Adobe.com – Very outdated and mediocre images. They are even serving some of the exact same images as Shutterstock on the first page. By exact, same I mean identical.
Rare Keyword: Retrenched
Results:
iStockPhoto.com – Very accurate result for a pretty rare keyword. iStock has been known to uphold a strict policy of correct and accurate keywording towards its contributors.
Peopleimages.com – Accurate result, but only a few images.
Stock.Adobe.com – Exceptionally unsatisfying result. With more than 30 million images to source from, the 29 images that come up are disappointing to put it mildly. People with army helmets and machine guns have nothing to do with being fired, and there are fair amount of them below what is shown in the screenshot.
Natural Language Keyword Search: Being Entertained
Results:
iStockPhoto.com – 200+ images. Result is not bad actually, taking into consideration that we are now looking at some very difficult searches.
Peopleimages.com – I must be honest and admit to a somewhat unsatisfying result here.
Stock.Adobe.com – Quite humorous and completely disconnected search result. There is pretty much nothing here that makes sense. From tomatoes and babies to grannies with massive laptops and hippies eating topless in a kitchen. The only thing to say about this search is that I was most certainly “being entertained” by looking at the results, but we are definitely not finding images of people that are actually being entertained.
Another issue to discuss while on the topic of search results is that Adobe Stock does not allow me to search in English. It keeps giving me zero results and forces me to search in Danish. I believe my Adobe account has it’s billing address set to my Danish company, but even if I logout the site simply won´t allow me to search in English. Does this mean I´ll need to change my billing address to an English speaking country and delete some cookies or? I can only imagine the desperation of design teams around the world who, in order to use Adobe Stock, will be forced to search for images limited to the language of the billing address :-)
Conclusion on search result quality: Highly unrefined search engine that needs a lot of TLC and desperately needs new and modern images to compete convincingly. In the spirit of how this test was done I will still give Adobe Stock a solid 4, since some searches returned decent results.
Score: 4 out of 10
Photographer Royalties (Score: 2/10)
Adobe’s 33% flat rate in photographer commission reminds me of 2005. Literally nobody in the industry works with a flat rate royalty structure anymore, not even the agency that Adobe bought (Fotolia). If you want mediocre images, flat rate commission is great, but if you want excellent photography, you need to give more to the ones that go the extra mile and produce images that are more expensive, more competitive, more interesting, higher resolution, and higher selling. If an agency decides to give these photographers the same commission as everybody else, it is the same as saying that they don’t care about dedication, or at least that they don’t want to pay for it. Bad idea.
However, I’m pretty sure it won’t stay like this. The 33% commission is probably the biggest misunderstanding in the Adobe offering and I simply think it is an overlooked aspect right now in favor of higher priority issues. A commission of 33% is exceptionally low in microstock and most agencies have top tier commissions into the 40%+ range. This leads me to believe that the reasoning behind the low commission is either that it is “coming soon” or that Adobe really wants to make money on their new project. If the royalty rate of 33% is not a “mistake” or “to be defined later” then we need to seriously upgrade our thoughts on Adobe’s ambition here. Then they are setting out to make serious money, take a huge chunk out of the stock industry and be a big player.
Conclusion on Photographer royalties: I think there is a pretty good chance that we can use this 33% flat rate decision as good indicator of initial ambition, even if it’s changed later on. Adobe wants to make money, right now… and takes on a “too simple” and “too