MicrostockGroup

Are the levels of both images the same? Oops, saw you said they were same level, ignore my post.

Yes, both the same level.  Credits bought in the same year, so both used 1 credit.

Warren Price says this was discussed before.  I must have missed it.  But it doesn't make sense to me.  OK, a buyer gets more credits for his money the more he spends, and that allows him to buy more pictures with his additional credits.  But then the price of pictures also comes down when he buys a large credit package?  Seems like that's double savings... or at least we're bearing the brunt of the discount he gets?

Yep, I think it is common practice. It never seems like marketing expenses come out of the agency's pocket...always the contributors.

The only other practice is arguably worse - at FT they assign nominal values to a credit for the purposes of calculating royalties and those are based on which country you signed up in GBP, USD, EUR, etc. Regardless of what the buyer paid, the royalty is calculated on the assigned credit value. They trumpet how it could be that the buyer paid less and you get paid the same, but conveniently omit mention of all the currency conversion benefits they can reap as well as the small package purchases where they keep the extra.

I don't have any problem with the discounts from large credit bundles being used in calculating contributor royalties. What I do object to is when marketing promotions or sorry-we-borked-the-site discounts come out the contributor's hide too. Part of the large portion the agencies keep is for marketing expenses and running the site. They shouldn't try to transfer those to contributors, although iStock routinely does (not sure about other sites and one-off discounts)