on top of this, the requirement to pass istock and others QC is just ridicolous, they even rejected some pictures i sold more than once on macros !

now, i can understand micros are not the right place for editorial images but my pictures were razor sharp and technically more than OK, yet they said "lack of focus" and yadda yadda.

So given the obviously low opinion you have of micros, can you explain why you attempted to sell your images via one or more microstock outlets?

Oh, I get it... "Hippy" must be short for "Hypocrite"

i just wanted to see if i could sell on micros the images i'm ashamed to sell on macros.


p.s.
@magnum :

fine, but for how long will they sell as long as they add 1000s of pics every day in their database and now they even allow free photo section for promotion, subscription, flat-fees, and who knows what more tomorrow  ?

the only ones making money with micros are the owner of the micro companies.

I bet you�re some old member just wanna pick a fight here for some past reason.  I�ll ask Leaf

This is too good to be true...

Old Hippy, I haven't been doing microstock long enough to have an expert opinion, but I think the sharpness expectations have been steadily creeping up and sometimes reviewers go over the top.  Remember that the people at these microstocks are a generation younger than we are (I'm an old hippy too) and have grown up in a world of CGI and vector illustrations which are basically infinitely sharp.  They are starting to see "photographic" looking images as dated and second rate. There is little to no acceptance of shots with selective DOF - they seem to expect everything in the photo to be sharp, even if that looks dumb and distracting to someone with more of a film sensibility.

There is also an expectation that these big digital images be totally sharp at 100%, even though 99.9% of the time they won't be printed at anything like that size, and should be resharpened at the published resolution anyway for best appearance.

In short I'm seeing a sort of  simplistic concept of "sharpness" in microstock.

microstocks sell the sort of "microstock images", very very different from what is selling well on macrostocks.

i wouldn't sell well on micros with my actual pictures.

OK, then you don't need to hang around here any longer. Do you 

Old Hippy, come back and deliver a rant anytime.  This place needs some serious cage-rattling.  Personally I'm not reconciled to the idea that microstock is a Good Thing, I still see it somewhat as the equivalent of an offshore sweatshop, in a place where labor is too cheap and collective bargaining is impossible.

You are right, there is no money to be made with the micros.  Don't know how many times we have to say this before people start believing it   And it is impossible to sell a photo more than once and the most you can make is $0.25, 99.9% of photos get rejected, the sites have too many photos already, they automatically reject photos uploaded on weekends.  Please let all your colleagues know.
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^^...is the right answer