MicrostockGroup

No worries, carry on - nobody's upset. You have to admit it's a lot more funnier than b!tching about anecdotal buyers leaving IS for... DT? 

I've had a couple of payouts too.  I had expected more.  Perhaps a lesson in diplomacy would strengthen my standing?   

Just kidding, RolMat;  that was sarcasm.   

There just isn't one answer (site) for everyone's portfolio.  Why wouldn't you go exclusive with one site if they sold your portfolio better than anyone else?  I see a lot of hobbyists who submit to a lot of sites and they don't seem to do any better than me submitting to one site (DT), whether talking monthly revenue or revenue per image...  Since there are no exactly equivalent workflows or portfolios the best you can do is make a decision based on your own experience with all the sites.

As a hobbyist I enjoy the simplicity of submitting to a single agency - and the dollars they put in my bank account!  I also like that when I do a search on DT I can find my own images in the first page of results without having to check 'exclusive'.

Yes that's very obvious. There are a few very loud exclusives on DT with many sales, and if you go have a look at their portfolio, the images are very mediocre.

I can't imagine how they dare to forbid selling the images they rejected. I have for instance loads of editorial that won't fly on DT. Perhaps on RM, but also that is forbidden by DT. Claiming all my non-stock worthy (technical flaws, fine at 800px) production on Flickr is pure serfdom.
I posted that (in May I think) on the DT forum and lo and belo, my current July earnings are just 18.89$, compared to 67$ (full month) July 2009. They also fell from position #2 to #5, between the peanuts sites like 123RF.

As a small scale buyer though, DT is still great. IMHO they have the fastest search engine around, at least for me. I'm always on ranked by downloads by the way, to be fast. The subscription pack is a great deal! Max sizes for virtually nothing, if you don't wander into level 4 or 5.

Don't know about DT but the guy that started SS used to be a contributor at iS

That would be us - my company left istock over a year ago and now buy exclusively from DT despite having used IS for many years - we spend several hundred a month on images FWIW.

@WarrenPrice - Price was a pretty big factor but also we were treated badly by support a couple times at IS - first it took them days to get back to us when we had download issues (which happened from time to time) and then second they were often simply rude in heir response. The last straw sort of all happened at once - a price rise combined with a really rude and sarcastic response from their support to some problem we had - to be honest now I don't remember exactly what the issue was I just remember being flabbergasted at the response. So we looked around at options and went with DT which seemed to have the best value for money combined with the largest selection of images. The biggest downside to DT is that they do lack choice on the illustration side - IS is far far superior on the vector side of things so we do buy the occasional vector from IS when we need to. Other than that though we almost always find what we need at DT.

We never seriously looked at SS or any other agency - SS's search is terrible - full of spam - and while we did look at Thinkstock a few months back but don't like their search engine at all and their images just seem kind of old and tired TBH. And no, cutcaster never crossed our mind ... sorry about that.

I would like to add though that I am speaking here as a buyer and not a seller - outside of work I do contribute to micro to be sure and make a couple hundred or so a month doing it - IS is easily my top agency in terms of sales - I like DT in terms of the web site and how they treat their contributors (by and large) - but IS is my best seller and if I had to go exclusive with one agency it would be IS. So my buyer hat and contributor hat are different.

 

only if you're anonymous. 

During our (the 17 provinces of the Lower Countries) rebellion against Philips II of Spain, Philips proclaimed a collective death penalty against the northern part (now The Netherlands). The thing seems to have never been revoked. The Spanish were legally entitled to kill all the Dutch on the field. That's why they won the cup: the Dutch were too intimidated. Good try with your old treaties 

dreamstime used to be a user on iStock before leaving (or getting booted) to start his own place, I believe.  Can't find anything on google right now though.

I'm currently building my Free Galleries with old shots on old cams that would never pass QC on any agency nowadays. Of course my download pages will be stuffed with Google Ads and Adsense. Those images are 2-3K, often a bit soft and certainly noisy. But they look fine at 600 or 800 px web resolution.

Under any exclusivity contract, I would not be allowed to post them for download, not on my site and certainly not on Flickr. I can't live with that.

Out of the DT exclusivity agreement:

Does that mean you can offer your free images on your own site?