Ответили, много букв:
Thanks for writing in, we appreciate the feedback. The site has undergone some changes lately, so let me try and give you some more information.
We're working on ways to satisfy the needs of an underserved demographic, which is a section of our visitors who were coming to Pond5, seeing intimidating prices or prices outside their budget, and never buying anything (we have posted similar messaging to this in the artist forums).
As a way to see if we can get them to stick around, we added the price cap tests that everyone is talking about. The price cap tests are not capped for all visitors (not our big spenders/enterprise clients, to name a few), nor is it $50 for all visitors. A small portion of traffic comes in at $50, while another portion sees $80, and another portion actually doesn't experience any price caps.
Since we introduced the test, we've taken the feedback from the forums and worked to add more visibility to the price slider and exclusive, membership, and news/archival collections. The price sliders also are removed for different sets of visitors based on various site behaviors and actions.
As a Pond5 contributor myself, I completely understand your questions and sympathize with you when there are changes being done to the website. There are a lot of ways that businesses in this industry are trying to gain market share, and this is one of the ways we can open up to people who aren't buying footage, as well as catering to new users who aren't buying in the same way they've always done.
It's totally up to you to set your prices at whatever prices you want them to be. That said, since you are non-exclusive with us, keep in mind that if you sell on other stock sites that we will price match your identical footage being priced lower on those sites. Since most sites are $79 for HD footage, we may change the price for you. You can read the about this here in the contributor agreement:
https://www.pond5.com/legal/contributor. Here's the section:
"If you do not enroll in the Exclusivity Program, notwithstanding section 3.b. above, you shall not set the price for an item of video Content that is higher than the lowest price for which the same (or substantially the same) Content item is offered by or on any Other Marketplace, and if we discover that the Content item is offered at a lower price by or on any Other Marketplace, we may change the price of your content in our marketplace."
Cheers, and please don't hesitate to reach out with any more questions, we're happy to help.