MicrostockGroup

If you're in the US, I'd suggest a short note to Chad asking that he please have someone look at the recent batch of rejections for a second opinion. If the files have been accepted at IS/DT you've a pretty good measure that they're technically OK.

I don't think there's any formal appeal's process and I wouldn't expect you to get anything overturned if you went to the FT forum for this purpose - it's primarily to show you your errors rather than look at theirs.

Yap mostly similar images , few for technical quality , and all grunge backgrounds ( raster images done with brushes) for "type of photo"  reason.

But the problem is if they were strict in their demands , I wouldn't submit the images they are not looking for , but I remembered it already happened once few moths ago , then I submitted same style illustrations  again , few times ,and they were accepted.

I wouldn't be surprised if 123rf passes them by the end of 2008 for a lot of contributors.  The Fotolia earnings rating is drifting toward the bottom of the Big 6, and 123 is clearly growing by most accounts. 

More convincing to me is the amount of technical problems which seem to affect Fotolia, compared to Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and even 123RF.  Also, early indications show EVO to be superior to the inconsistent quality of the Infinite Collection.

The 123rf pricing is still too low, far below industry trend.  If they could raise prices by 50% and still keep their current level of activity, that alone may put their earnings on par or even beyond Fotolia for many contributors.  I hope it happens.  Just lurking on the FT boards and seeing the way contributors get slapped aside every time they bring up a site issue (especially search problems), I'm not particularly impressed with their community relations.  As opposed to 123RF, which has a pretty open environment and frequent admin feedback.

I don't know the work flow of their rejections/approvals mails being sent , but according to them the rejections were super fast generally , and someone has actually reviewed 37 images in a single minute , than few images in the next few minutes , than more than 60 again in the same minute.

Funny

I don't have any problems with vectors, probably 100% AR. Not so good with pictures, been getting a lot of "Type of photo" and "Overabundant category" rejections(I thought they would accept most of them, since they were pretty good, also other sites accepted most, even though they also like to reject that type of images for overabundance). Lesson learned, fotolia is very strict about it, so I won't upload any more like thos.

We don't know if site sales are down or not.   My personal sales are way up as are lots of other people that have probably not bothered to comment on the forums.  The ones making a noise are the ones who's sales are affected badly which doesn't mean that sales are down overall.

Just to prove my point , here are some of the the images from that last batch , rejected for we are not looking for "that type of image".

Lets try a little game...

In every row one image is accepted (left or right) and one is rejected for the  "type of image reason" , so Im just wondering if someone can find much difference in type of image , and figure out which were  approved which were not , without checking my portfolio on Fotolia before guessing.


I just saw that the thumbnails are little blurry on tinypic (I dont know why), , butt I assure you that all rejections were just for type of image , and If someone doubts about technical quality of any image I will upload the 100% crop.


Well here they are:

I think it is safe to say that FT has become microstock's poster child for schizophrenia.

The last (2) background rejections I got form Fotolia about a week ago were accepted on the second attempt.  I did add a note to the reviewer that they were the only site to reject these images and both had sold very well on SS.  I also noted that they were technically perfect.  I closed buy saying that rejecting these images would not benefit anyone, especially them. 

It worked!

They don't have a system for resubmitting an image.  So just upload it again and explain your take on it.  It may or may not work?  Worth a try no matter what I guess.

The cool thing is one of the images sold (3) days later!  Now that was a home run and a "Told you so" Love it when we can prove that we do know what we are doing from time to time.

They may not know how good you are, but luckily he/she isn't blind and can therefore see how good your images are - hence the rejections.

Our earnings polls for the past few months suggest Fotolia sales are down with respect to their competition.  They are down to #4, 0.1 above StockXpert.

To clarify, 123RF generates 1/2 the earnings per month on average off my portfolio of Fotolia.  But while Fotolia earnings seem to stay the same or drop month to month, 123 grows.  It will only take one major screw up from Fotolia - another complete melt down of the search engine or whatever - to push 123 up to their level.  Running site traffic comparisons tells a similar story to the earnings ratings comparison on our message board.

say..you're not the new reviewer at Fotolia are you?