MicrostockGroup

Where is your portfolio link?

Here is the link: http://www.dreamstime.com/patrickwang_info

I started uploading to DT since middle of February and receiving overall 60% acceptance ratio. Just when I gaining confidence on what I should submit to DT and improving acceptance rate then things changed suddently after a month and half. I've been digging out travel photos accumulated in the past years so nothing changed in my submitted photos.

Peep, I did receive some "too many shots" rejections as well. May be you can try to split them in different bunch of submission. 100% accepted in March? Wow... a dream of me 

Yeah they just nailed me too for "well covered subjects".   

How long before one of these agencies simply starts posting a list of subjects they currently want, and stops accepting anything else?

And how is a new submitter supposed to know whether a subject is "well covered"? 

Let me be devil's advocate for a moment and ask - why do they reject photos for "well covered" subjects anyway?  Don't they want new takes on old subjects?  Don't they advertise their vast number of images?  Do they want the old images to keep selling?  What are they afraid of?

Doesn't every subject become "well covered" eventually?  And then are they just going to stop accepting new photos and lay off the reviewers?

Yes, starting in Feb. The same rejected photos are now my best sellers on IS, FT and SS for the last two months. Some well covered subjects can still use new higher quality, better produced, similar images.

What DT has apparently done, (and it's their business, not mine) is issue blanket refusals for "well covered" subjects, that "don't sell well" without regard to the content or quality.

As pointed out in another thread, if you submit a chocolate cookie and get refused for too many like this, the problem may be that someone already uploaded 30+ of the same setup, and same cookie! That's filling the results, instead of a diverse and assorted collection.

If DT wants to market stale old redundant photos, shot on older equipment, smaller size, that's their decision. I can't complain because my sales are going up on five other sites, with the same images that DT (and Panther) just refused. 

I agree with above.    They are mass-rejecting without looking more and more these days.  They have top contributors filling the needs anyway...

I once read an interesting article about retailing and malls.  Over the years the big clothing stores have ended up selling all the same stuff, and shoppers just got bored and quit going to the malls.  Same thing will happen here to some extent. 
 
Right now these microstocks are just DIY warehouses not adding any value to the product.  They make money by preventing buyers and sellers from communicating directly.   It will take time but things will change. 

OK - but then they should not use those rejections to decrease our acceptance ratio which they then use to calculate the position of our photos in the search engine results...
It should be something like Accept-Ignore-Reject for any photo. And only the photos rejected for technical flaws should decrease your position in search results.

@OP & all, please read refusal reasons carefuly and correlate the info with your refused images (and in this case, with the ones online). On the "well covered" issue, do a generic search  (like "house" and not "red house on a hill") and see how many they are online. Compare the best of them with your submission.

Here is the full reason. From replies above I don't think many people actually read it.

This is a very well covered subject in our data base or the subject of your image is too specific. We are looking for images that exceed the technical quality and creativity of the images already online. Please take a few minutes to browse through the best selling images online (on this subject) and go deeper, play, have a more creative, more personal approach to it, also keeping in mind the technical quality of the image.

@OP as this is not allowed on our forums, it would be a good exercise to use the freedom of MSG and ask for critiques from other users by posting the images. This generic discussion is not helpful without seeing the images.
 
And remember you're always free to reply to the refusal if you have strong doubts about an image (choose your best refusals only though).

@OP: please don't call our reviewers stupid, they're people just like you and work hard to review your work. Always remember it's many times more difficult for them to refuse an image than to accept it.

Take it as a challenge patw. Its frustrating for me as well if my images get rejected, but it helps me also to improve. Without the increasing standards of microstock I would not have learned and improved so much.

I know it sounds cruel, but I would delete all images that didn't sell 2 years or more, and I would implement an algorithm like TinEye in every site to block reuploading of old deleted images and for deleting duplicates. This way images that sell would stay online until nobody buys them 2 years or more, and poor images that didn't sell would be deleted. I know this is not directly connected with the reason "well covered" but I think it would be good for all. It would be good even for contributors who's poor images would be deleted.

That's why I asked his "port" in the begin. I should have said the "rejected ones". It's useless to discuss this in abstracto. Maybe Leaf should open a separate category dedicated to rejections + advice to keep it organized. Also, the full size image should be posted. It's easy to put a big bar or cross over it in PS.