I had a paid for account for several years and at first it was of some value but as time went by the level of interest in my work dwindled to such an extent that I couldn't justify the cost. I have reverted to unpaid member ship but that is hardly worth the bother. All I get now is constant bombardment to renew paid membership. The contests are pretty meaningless, and I suspect that the awards are just bot generated.
SpringfieldPhotography

- As a free (Non-Pro) Member you are getting spammed with „Get Membership" Popups, Buttons, Banners worse than on any other site
- Free Contests are full of spam and a massive amount of really bad snapshots and photos not matching the topic of the contest. / Pro contests are quite fine as they are for paying members only.
- The Rank system for Contests is completely useless. The rank does not matter! I had a photo in the first top 10 ranks of several contests and nearly never made it into the top photos. In the newest Contest, I had an award-winning photo in the Top 15 Ranks and still got not selected under the best 30 photos. Instead, they selected several boring snapshots. Is this a f%&%ing joke?
- It really feels like the top photos are randomly chosen and the winning photos are often a very bad selection! There were winners not matching the main topic!
- The prices are absolutely no more worth paying for that site. For half of the contests, the winner gets a trash reward worth a couple of dollars. The cameras and lenses of „better" contests are old. No one of the winners would use them.
- Follower system does not make sense. You get dozens of followers but it does not matter because photos of people you are following are not appearing in your home feed and on the main photo page there is no filter for photos from followers. So the follower system is absolutely useless. I have 18.000 followers but new submitted photos have around 30 views after one week…
- The new photo detail page is garbage as the main photo and the photo details/comments are divided by a big amount of other photos… UX fail!
- Same UI/UX fails for the whole page. All design changes they made in the last year made the page worse than before.
- They implemented a discussion board within the page. That was quite nice as lots of people were active there. But they removed it from the page, wtf?!
- The whole email system is buggy for years! You receive email spam even if it's deactivated in the account. I selected only email if a photo receives an award but got so much more spam. I had to contact the support twice. Now I'm not getting any email at all. Lol….
- Be aware: If you buy a year of PRO and don't delete your credit card / Paypal account, ViewBug will charge you for another year without asking! I deleted my credit card data to avoid this! After my PRO ended, they contacted me informing me that my credit card transaction failed! WTF! YES IF FAILED BECAUSE I DONT WANT TO WASTE MORE MONEY ON YOUR SCAM PAGE!

I have been a member since 2013. I have made Finalist on numerous contests and won 2 contests. I was a paid member for one year but did not renew. I have decided to delete my account as Viewbug has become pretty much a scam to attract paid members.

MARKETING:
I have a fundamental problem with their marketing to new and non-paid members. Their tactic is that they use other members for free by making them Curators. Viewbug then uses these Curators to like and comment on new users giving them a sense of community and to give them a sense that their photos are really popular even in cases where their photos are quite frankly horrible and have no chance of ever winning contests which encourages people to buy memberships. They also use Curators to send private messages and comment on peoples photos who have not posted for awhile. Again, this gives people the false sense that their photos are really popular. Even today I received a private message from a Viewbug Pro+ member "Jimboz" who follows 1,489,288 people! I haven't posted in a while and he messages me "You have creative photos. Looking forward to seeing new photos in your profile." This guy has never once liked or commented on any of my photos and has one primary purpose: solicit business for Viewbug.

CONTEST PRIZES:
Prizes on this site have been getting really bad even for contests that you have to be a paid member to submit photos. As of this posting, Many of Viewbug prizes are worth literally nothing. They love to have Social Media Exposure prizes which basically means they feature you on the Viewbug website. I won a contest once where that was the prize and I still have no idea what I actually won or where/when they promoted me. For contests with bigger prizes, they love to give away old stock product and smaller, cheap items like crappy tripods. Even as of today, they are still giving away cameras like the 5D MKIII with went on the market in 2012 and was replaced by the MK IV in 2016. Figure it this way; A paid membership is about $100 per year. The likelihood of winning a contest with a big prize is EXTREMELY slim even for the best photographers. Your chance of even recovering your membership is almost zero.

JUDGING: This is where the contests really suffer. There are some technically flawed photos making it through to the finals of contests. We are talking pictures that are not even in focus (and I'm not talking intentional/artistic depth of field). There are photos making it through with poor contrast, colour saturation and lacking sharpness. The other major issue is that many contests, the topic is vague in explanation and entries that meet the criteria could be people or wildlife. However, many of these contests are often judged by people who work in the portrait industry and their selections are heavily weighted to their own photography style.

SPAM: Once they have your email address, prepare to get spammed about paying for membership. Under my account manger, I have only one box checked under communication preferences which allows them to notify me if I win a contest. I continue to get emails with offers to get a paid membership. I contacted customer support and asked them why I keep getting emails and this was their response:

VB Customer Care (ViewBug)

Feb 6,19:44 PST

"Hello Stuart,

Thank you for your participation in the ViewBug community.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Our editors are currently set to send offers like this to all of our members. Unfortunately, no mailing lists exists where an email address can be removed. However, we've forwarded your email to our tech and management team for review and consideration when implementing future updates.

Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns.

Thank you and have a great day!
Your friends at ViewBug"

I am not the only one to complain about this issue. I also live in Canada where it is actually illegal to send unsolicited emails to people and you must have an opt out option.

I have been a member of this photography website for several years now. The apparent purpose of the site is to facilitate photography contests wherein prizes can be won by photographers who take the most appealing image relevant to the subject matter as determined by a "voting process" (Viewbug asks site members, especially those who take part in the contest, to vote at their leisure, so it's a biased process to begin with). Viewbug caps the number of times a photographer can enter a contest and bars entries to certain contests entirely unless you agree to pay them a monthly membership fee, which I have done. However, all site members (whether they're already paying for a membership or not) are constantly bombarded with email after email "advertising" their membership, and there is no way to opt out of receiving these emails except to completely opt out of all emails. This website has options for opting into or out of contest-related emails, "special offers", photo stats, likes, comments, "community updates", etc - there are a total of FIFTEEN types of updates you can choose to receive or not receive including one called "personal invitations" (I'll get to that in a minute), and I have opted out of every single list EXCEPT the one about contest updates for contests I've entered (not new ones, it specifies that). But, I still receive emails about membership (which I already pay for) over and over again. I've even reported this problem to them and warned them that I would be reporting it to officials if it didn't stop, and they answered me by telling me their system is literally set up to send membership offers to everyone regardless of what emails they're subscribed to. The worst part is, these offers are frequently disguised in very misleading ways. Regularly, an email will have a subject line similar to "Attention! Your photograph has been handpicked for this contest" and a link inside the email supposedly meant to facilitate my approval of the contest actually just leads to the contest page. No photograph of mine has been "selected" and there's nothing special about the exchange, it was a trick to get me to look at a contest I had no interest in entering. Furthermore, they frequently advertise flat-out lies about sales. There was recently a Labor Day sale advertised as a $600 value which actually came out to $198 at the absolute most - I literally did the math and checked, and when I addressed this with them it was just ignored, I got no response at all. This website is malicious, it's a platform to trap photographers and creative individuals by luring them in with "prizes" I'm positive nobody actually receives (the only documentation I've ever seen of supposed winners is on Viewbug's own site, nobody has ever posted elsewhere about winning anything), and then tricks them into paying money for a service that isn't real, and then constantly reminds them that they have to pay by advertising fake sales even to people who are already paying them with no opportunity to stop the advertising. It's a huge attempt to coerce people into paying for nothing. In fact, all the prizes they supposedly offer? They're supposedly "partnering" with the companies that provide them, but I've never seen a trace of evidence from any of those companies even mentioning Viewbug, which, if the point is cross-promotion, you'd think there would be at least a Tweet or something right? Nothing. Viewbug is a fraudulent service and a spam advertiser.

I have had a free account on Viewbug for a few years, now. I have no intention of ever "upgrading," as I know the site is all about making money, not about promoting my photos. My objectives in using Viewbug are probably very different from most of its users. I regard it as a free onliine portfolio of my best photos, and to that end, being limited to posting only 10 images per week has helped me to post only my best work by forcing me to be more selective about what I post. I use my Viewbug address on the cards I hand out to people I meet and, thus, it serves the function of an online portfolio on which anyone can see my work. I'm fairly certain that most of the views I get are coming from real people I either know personally, who know me, or from real people I have met, and most are not photographers, but that's fine because an audience of nothing but photographers will have a very different viewpoint than an audience composed of people from all walks of life. Anyway, as long as my cards are out there somewhere, I know that people are being exposed to my work and it is the exposure of my work to as broad an audience as possible that I am interested in, whether I ever hear from them or not. A "comment" like "Nice shot" or just a string of emojies is meaningless to me, but hearing genuine praise from people I have talked to face-to-face and can discuss my work with is far more edifying. As for Viewbug's focus upon contests, I couldn't care less. I know the lure of winning awards and so on is how they steer you toward buying a subscription and continuing to pay for it every year. I now have approaching 2,000 images on the site and I get spam from them daily aimed at getting me to subscribe. They have even resorted to giving me an additional 10 images for the week, as a bribe, an enticement to pay for a subscription. So, sure, I'll upload 10 more images, but I'm still not buying anything because there is nothing they are selling that is of any interest to me. I'm sure that, at some point, I'll reach some limit (I haven't heard of any, yet, though) on the maximum number of images I can have on my page, and if I do, that's fine. As long as it continues to be maintained, I'll continue sending traffic to my portfolio via my cards, email links, etc.

Hello everyone!

Time to show some VB facts here!

You know that contest you got Top 10, 20, 30 or whatever? Good sad news for you: most of these results are completely random, unchecked and most of them even mathematically impossible. I will post here two examples, but I have many others saved in case I need:

Recently we have the "Sensual & Sexy" finalists announced, and 100% of them are incredibly wonderful photos, pretty sure any of them would be great winners.

BUT:

I don´t know about you, but the contest theme suggests that many entries may have been marked with the Adult Filter content, which is perfectly natural on this case.On the other hand, any fair contest based on online voting gives a balanced exposure for most of the entries on the voting screens, even with a voting link available for us to ask for some votes for friends and contacts, right?

NOPE! Take a look:

=============================

JUN 27,2019 | 05:34PM PDT

VB Customer Care replied:

Hi Gabriel,

Thank you for your participation in the ViewBug community.

We are truly sorry for the inconvenience. While unfortunately, we are unable to provide you with the total number of votes that each photo received, we have reviewed the entries and we see that 4 of them are marked with the Adult Content filter. As you can imagine, many of our members have the option to see these photos active and therefore could not view these entries. Additionally, photos with said filter are not displayed in our apps, which now play a big role in our community.

We see that your entry with the highest ranking was in fact the photo that does not have the Adult Content filter.

Please remeber that the rankings are based on votes received by members and that these will only count towards the People's Choice Winner.

Please let us know if you have additional questions or concerns.

Thank you and have a great day,

Your friends at ViewBug

===============================

I asked VB for the exact total number of votes on my entries, as their positions were terribly bad. It was already a bad surprise that they don´t have a record of how many votes you got, but even worst: 4 of my 5 photos were not even saw by voters, due to the Adult Filter. I even marked some off-topic photos that got higher (unfocused selfies on a restaurant drinking some coffee, "extremely sensual") and well, I had to get OK with the fact that my opinion and pointing this issue were not even considered to review some policies for this specific contest. Even with this vague reply about the votes numbers and the ridiculous idea to open this kind of contest limiting the exposure of Adult Filter, now comes the real bad part, what really mattters. CONTINUING:

When I open my results on APP, I get a message like this one:

Yout photo ended ahead of 358!

Same photo, on desktop: ahead of 59!

What Viewbug says about it:

VB Customer Care replied:

Hi Gabriel,

Thank you for your patience.

Our technical team has now identified the origin of this issue and will now begin working to resolve it. The update with the correction will be implemented as soon as it's ready.

Please let us know if you have additional questions or concerns.

Thank you and have a great day,

Your friends at ViewBug

===============================

Almost a week later, finalists announced WITH VB AWARE THAT THERE WERE FAILURES ON VOTING SYSTEM/RESULTS and this bug persists! :) I can´t consider it a serious contest if the finalists were chosen with the judges/company knowing that there were errors on the votes counting.

But, but, but, BUT, worst part: since MAY/2018 i´ve been proving and they AGREED that there were some major failures on many other contests. Examples:

On February, I got two pics on the same position. It was the 8TH time I was proving them that there were errors on the voting system and counting:

========================================

FEB 08,2019 | 12:13PM PST

VB Customer Care replied:

Hello Gabriel,

Thank you for your reply.

We have forwarded your email to our technical department for review. We will contact you via email as soon as we receive a response.

Thank you for your patience and have an excellent day.

Your friends at ViewBug

FEB 08,2019 | 07:12AM PST

Gabriel replied:

Looks like your bug got even worst now:

https://www.viewbug.com/contests/technology-photo-contest-2018/*******

Your photo is in the top 30% most voted.

Your photo placed ahead of 4,563 submissions.

https://www.viewbug.com/contests/technology-photo-contest-2018/*******

Your photo is in the top 30% most voted.

Your photo placed ahead of 4,563 submissions.

What happened this time (8th time btw...)...? Two photos, same number of votes and SAME POSITION? LOL?!

Gabriel Fox

==========================

So, as I promised to VB: as they are unable to fix their own system for over a year now, and as they keep on delivering false results (more than once I got 5 pics in a row, like 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5th place! LOL!), I think it´s time to spread the word that even if you are an user with paid subscription, you can´t count and trust on their team and system.

First time I exposed their errors, btw, they decided to solve my 3months problem in 5 minutes: I won a Contest in February and they gave themselves 5 weeks to send the prize or the value in Paypal. The only excuse I got after these 5 weeks waiting was that "an error ocurred on Paypal" and they were solving it. The errors was basically that my account as many others here in S. America can receive certain amounts only as Service Payment, what can be solved with a single click or even a phone call to Paypal FROM VB (as they were the ones facing the error on the screen, not me!). A few posts on their facebook, instagram and more and BOOM suddenly it was fixed!: D

Let´s see how they will perform now on their own forum as I pasted there at least two contests with a lot of unmatching results and I have at least 5 more here waiting for another "We have forwarded your email to our technical department for review. We will contact you via email as soon as we receive a response" that never solves a thing!: D

Looks like here in Sitejabber they don´t even care to reply, so... don´t lose your time registering there or buying a Pro plan :]

After being a Premium Member for a few years, I think i can share a little bit of my experience with this site.

Things i like about ViewBug:

Plenty of good photographers and good photographs, makes it really hard to even think about winning a contest, so I've given up on that haha. I had a photo chosen as a finalist twice, that made me happy!

The design of the site is al-right, it displays the photos in a good way and disables right clicking, which is good to discourage thieves!

I've got quite a few awards from the ViewBug team, which i think is really awesome. One of my photos was featured as the cover of the site for a day. I'm not sure if they still do this, but i thought it was really nice and definitely encouraged me to keep shooting, back in 2013 :) So thanks for that ViewBug!

The whole contest thing, what ViewBug is really about, is amazing and it makes Viewbug a very unique site! It's really easy to join contests, there's no confusing stuff or anything involved, and you maintain the rights to your work. This is 100% why i joined ViewBug in the first place, to enter contests!

It's hard to know how well your photo placed, as many people have said. Yeah that's true, but it all comes down to a Jury so if they think your photo is good enough to be the winner, it will be. So i don't really care much about how well my photos did, as long as i have a chance to win.

---------

Things that i do NOT like about Viewbug:

You can report a picture a thousand times for being inappropriate, nothing happens.
You can report it for being stolen, nothing happens.
I've seen many profiles with stolen photos, photos that have almost won contests, I've reported them and nothing happened. This is definitely the thing that worries me the most. One time i even contacted the real photographer to let him know that his photo was stolen, he said he contacted ViewBug about it, but it's still online and gathering likes and peer awards.

Memberships are too expensive, especially if having a Premium, Pro or Lite membership makes no difference to you. If you are sure you have what it takes to win a contest, then pay for the PRO membership and enter as many contests as you can.

View count is depressing. If you post a photo and don't add it to any contest or photo challenge, that photo will get maybe 2 or 3 views in a month.

Right now i have 4745 followers. Posted a photo a few weeks ago, and it has 34 views. And yeah it's a really good photo. This isn't the site to get views, so i wouldn't bother joining if that's all you're interested in. Join 500px or Instagram for that.

Bot members. Yes there are plenty of bot members! These are members who award everything and like everything! It's super annoying, I've got a few of them following me and whatever it is i post, they like and award. Even if the photo is completely white or black, they will like and award. They are real accounts with real photos, but they probably use bots or whatever, to like and award everything they see automatically. So they end up with thousands of followers, even if their photos are bad.

Stuff i do not care about:

Points and being a curator ( you can be a curator in 1 day if you really apply yourself by liking and awarding everything you see). By being a Curator, you welcome other people to the site, comment on their photos, like and award, ask them to join contests and photo challenges and whatnot. I've never done that. Sorry!:)

I'd give 3.5 / 5 stars.

Conclusion on a very long post:

If you're interested in joining photo contests and growing as a photographer, JOIN!
If you're interested in views, comments, awards, whatever, but don't really want to push yourself to have a chance at winning contests, then don't bother joining.

I have been a PRO level member for 2 years and won over 6K "awards", ALL being from other members, except for only 14 chosen as either challenge winner or "finalist", nothing more. My images are without question better than most of the "winners" I've seen in the challenges and the Viewbug contests, yet it seems the images are not even seen by the public. I believe Viewbug hides certain peoples images from the public while allowing their buddies to win all the "prizes", which are nearly ALL USED ITEMS that their staff wants to get rid of. The "prizes", if you are lucky enough to ever even have a chance at winning against literally THOUSANDS of other people from around the world, are so cheap that it is criminal that Viewbug even can call them a legitimate prize at all. Like I said, they are used items, mostly, and if they are new, and actually worth anything over $100 (very rarely), they reserved for their staff who enters the contests also with fake profiles they create it appears. I have noticed strange things going on the more I began to investigate "winners" that just seem to keep "winning" quite often with images that are quite literally less than mediocre at best. They are not just winning once, they have won multiple times these contests, and some of the challenges. It is quite odd to see the same person, that is supposedly not a staff member, winning on a regular basis. I also notice my images have hardly ANY "views",. Even though I enter 98% of all the challenges. The "contests" tend to be a deliberate tenancy for their staff to be able to win by using certain selected themes that they just so happen to have images for that 80% of the members would not have taken such pictures.
I for one find this site to me much more of a bait and switch, as I have contacted them many times about things that they either do not bother to respond, or give such a vague response to that it is not even worthy of them responding at all anyhow. It isn't until sites like this one, where people can openly say the truth about Viewbug in public, that suddenly Viewbug acts so polite and interested in helping you with your problem, but only in words for the public to see, not what they actually do once you return to their site.
I have had problems on several occasions with my challenges not being visible, and I contacted them each time that happened. They say "they will look into it", and nothing happens. This last time it happened, a strange thing happened that I cannot explain. I had just posted my challenge that said it "waiting for approval", but already two photographers had immediately posted photos to it, and it wasn't even approved to be public yet! That got me very suspicious, so I began to snoop into their profiles, and sure enough, they were both top "winners" of multiple contests, and not just a few, it was a LOT of contests and challenges they "won".
My challenge is still not viewable to the public when you search for it in the Challenges, yet a tiny handful of people are able to post pictures into it, strange, huh? It certainly is, considering ALL of them are past winners and suspiciously seem to have images that I've seen under different names as well as used in their "contests" that are not supposed to be staff members.
Sorry, there needs to be an investigation into Viewbug for FRAUD, because it appears more and more that this site is created to take your money, while the photographer staff and "judges" tend to make a living off all the Prime and PRO members. I'm about ready to pull the plug on them and see what is left after a real investigation is done.

Outstanding international photo contest site. It is also a useful social network for photographers, both amateurs and pro. This is one of the best sites you can find of photography contest, and for validating and evaluating the quality of your photos among peers and learn from them. Of course there are some improvements that I would suggest to Viewbug, like the voting system within the contests, that is not very agile. But regardless the number of votes a photo receives during the contest's voting period, at the end the contest awards are always granted by a professional photographer or by a jury.

I am a member of Viewbug since 2014 and I am writing this review in March 2017. In these three years very few of my photos were selected as finalists in the hundreds of contests that I participated. The photographic level of the contenders is so high that winning a contest seems impossible for me, as I just have the level of an enthusiast photograper. But you can find inspiration and learn a lot from other Viewbug members, especially from the winners and finalist of each contest.

Beyond the contests, thanks to Viewbug's Peer Awards system, the site is a powerful tool for knowing the evaluation of your art by other passionate photographers (not by the general public). After having reviewed hundreds of winners and finalists and compare their statistics among them and with others (and also with my own statistics), my conclusion is that if around 20% or more of the visitors of a photo by members of Viewbug community give a Peer Award to it (after some contests and/or some weeks or months of exposure), probably you can say that the photo is a good one (that is, if at least 1/5 of the visitors give it a "Peer Award"). If a photo receives less that 15% Peer Awards from the Viewbug community visitors, its artistic appealing probably is more questionale. With the "Likes" the threashold for knowing if a photo is popular is around 33% (1/3 of viewers give it a Like). Although you always have to bear in mind that "popularity" is not all what matters in art (even Van Gogh was not "popular" at his time).

I am not a newcomer to the site and have a well-formed opinion about it compared to other sites. I am also a subscriber of several international photo contests sites, like Gurushots and Pixoto (and Flickr, Smugmug, Photoshelter, Alamy and Kizoa for other purposes). In my opinion they have worse functionalities than Viewbug. Here you can find my most-viewed photos at Viewbug: https://www.viewbug.com/member/GEFAELL#/GEFAELL/photos?sort=mostview

I had a profile on there for 6 months. My pictures were tasteful and professional. Someone must have had a vendetta against me and started tagging my pictures for inappropriate. Many had already won awards. Viewbug removed them and when i contacted them they were rude and instead of addressimg the attacks against me cancelled my account. One of the pictures in question was ranked top 10 by week 3 of contest and they pulled it right before the contest was up. They are a con job to just get money and not give out prizes.

I reworded my review a bit for more details and added below after viewbugs generic reponse.

They truly do have no concern for their members. I had an account for 6 months. I do boudoir and pin up photography. My photos have some tasteful nudity (which is allowed). I had a photo shoot on a beach in Aruba and one of my photos was very popular, it had 1500 view had many rankings in photo trifecas. Viewbug even gave it the summer selection award for the photo in question. Then one day it just disappeared off the site. When I contacted them about it numerous times, they ignored me or just gave back generic they were looking into it notes back. I eventually gave up and stayed off the site a couple months. (I am a paying pro member as well). Last week I went on and they had a female form contest. I submitted some black and whites. They were in no way explicit. You could see a breast in 3 of them thats all. Within two hours they disappeared. I had them marked as adult. So I contacted them, they insulted my creative works by telling me nudity for the sake of nudity was not allowed. My photos are tasteful. I took screen shots of other peoples work which showed open vagina, and masturbation and asked how my picture with just a breast was more offensive than those. They refused to answer how explicit photos were allowed but my tasteful photos were not. They appear to pull pictures based on complaints without looking at actual picture. Maybe it was because my picture was ranking high. They refused to even look at what I sent, but cancelled my account on me. My pictures have been used by artists to paint and are sold as prints. They are in no way pornographic and I am disgusted by how viewbug has different standards for different members. One of the pictures they pulled of mine was in week 3 of being top 10 trifecta, if given awards one week how is it offensive the next week? Do yourself a favor and don't support viewbug as they are unprofessional and a joke in the photography world.