gostwyck: My only loyalty is to me and my partners pocket! believe you me I have no stocks at IS/getty.
you forget that uploading to many sites has a huge overhead. uploading, keywording, disabmiguations, and keeping track of submissions and rejections all takes time. a LOT of time. This is a huge downside for us since we are essentially a one man crew.
In addition, this brings down our upload quota on IS to 20 instead of 60, and I hope 90 soon. add to that a much higher rejection rate.
Our decision was based purly on our own best economic interest. If we feel this will change in the future we will not hesitate giving up our crown.
If IS decide to play around with the goals (as I do suspect they will) then again, giving away the crown is ALLWAYS a possibilty.
(I appologize for any spelling mistakes, English isn't my daily language)
It's no difference to me whether you stay exclusive or not. You may indeed be better off exclusive. Only you can determine that.
But with respect to the hassle of uploading to multiple sites, if you put your keywords, descriptions, and titles in the IPTC data using Photoshop, Irfanview, or other software, then you only have to do that once. All sites can read your IPTC. The other sites also have model release libraries, so you don't have to upload those more than once. And no disambiguation or controlled vocabulary to worry about. All you do is FTP to all sites at once, then assign releases (if necessary) pick a category, and you're done.
It takes me the same amount of time to submit images to IS as it does 8 other sites combined.
