MicrostockGroup

Quite right Nazdravie.  Business is business.

Fair enough....... but it is still determined by those who buy the images.   

***edited for spelling reasons 

It does have a name........ Crowdsourcing. Google it. Only the strong survive, No room for a conspirarcy theory.
........ Just my opinion though.

We all know how image reviews vary from site to site - its very subjective - why would the buyer be any different? One persons treasure is another's trash. If the image is accepted by the site in the first place should it not be equally promoted?

paranoid? definately! 

Ok, but don't they have an obligation to you the contributor, one facet upon which their business is built, to give you equal unhindered access to as many sales as possible?

LOL. I bet you won't find anything about equal treatment obligations in any agency's terms and conditions.

They're a business. They have one objective, finanical gain. And most decisions will be somehow tied to their financial objectives. Fairness and financial gain normally are opposing forces in business.

No our beloved agencies would never tinker with the search. Especially Dreamstime who doesn't base their search result placement on your image approval rating 

http://www.microstockdiaries.com/watch-your-dreamstime-approval-rate.html

How is this punishing the customer? The agency established a qualification process that maintains a minimum standard of quality of images. Images just above that minimum are probably "just okay" and not great quality.

If you have a high acceptance rating, you're probably a good photographer that consistently creates good quality images that buyers want. If you have a low acceptance rating you probably are a photographer that produces inconsistent quality which most buyers would prefer to avoid.

Wouldn't a buyer benefit from consistently finding good quality images first as opposed to a mix of good and questionable images?

Sorry, but I have to whole-heartedly disagree with that statement.  There are too many factors that go into the acceptance rating to simplify it with such a statement.

First, contributors that joined DT earlier will more likely have a higher acceptance percentage than those that joined later.  It is a known fact that new sites want to build up their portfolio and therefore reject less images.

Second, contributors that submitted the first images in a category will also have higher acceptance ratios than those that submit similar images later.  For example, if you were the first contributor to upload "two business men shaking hands" or "woman talking on cell phone", you would have an easier time getting them approved than today.  One of the most popular issues that contributors have is getting the "we have too many of these" rejections even thought the images might be better in quality.

Third, if a contributor takes images that are not conventional and experiments with different styles, they will probably have a higher rejection rate than those that submit the basic conventional image that is submitted.  Images with creative lighting, or even images that have advanced Photoshop editing are more likely to be shot down than those that have standard lighting or less creative editing.

Fourth, there is no proven correlation between acceptance rating and sales (except on DT where they have forced a correlation).  While sites pretend that they know what sells, it has been shown time and again that images that get rejected on one site sell like crazy on another.  There are plenty of contributors that have low approval ratings that sell loads of images, and there are plenty of contributors with high approval ratings that have very few sales.

Finally, the images should speak for themselves.  A contributor might submit the most perfect image of "woman on cell phone", but if they don't have a high acceptance rating, then a buyer will probably never find that perfect image.  How does that help the buyer?  It doesn't.