MicrostockGroup

i'll go for agencies who are fair , and percentage 2nd. anyway my istock sales has not been doing well recently. macros has performed better by ratios for me lately.

At the same time, only a very tiny proportion of Alamy contributers post regularly on the forums: manyfold fewer than post on, say, iStock forums. I have a former pupil who's doing very well there with his niche (clue: geographically unattainable for you and I).

ok, i like that . but i'll still post to alamy. sometimes it's not all about money  

Here's the down.
Alamy give big discounts to two main groups. Newspapers and textbook publishers. Their main market at the moment is the UK and Europe.
Speaking of the UK:
Newspapers are in big trouble, and some have already folded. They are not going to spend $300 on a non-specific photo. Also, on iStock, a print run has to be 1/2 million before you have to buy an EL, which apart from some huge newspapers doesn't happen often.
The UK economy is in a total mess. I was a uK teacher until very recently and know for a fact how much per capita has been cut. In my case, by 1/3 in the session 09-10, and to 50% of that for this current session. Projections were that the cuts would be even more swingeing for the next four years at least. That means very little budget for books. So the only way publishers will be able to stay afloat is to severely cut the price of their books (again, several educational publishers have gone out of business recently). And the best way to do that is by reducing the prices of their images.

iStock, on the other hand, offers deep, unadvertised discounts to huge corporations who spend lots on credit packages. So your 250 credit EL might be worth very little to you.
Remember that the $300 cost EL is worth a lot less to you, and will, for most of us, be less still in January, that drop being even worse for exclusives, who lose their 10%.

The Alamy vs IS for editorial will not be a simple decision.

Staged editorial with perfect lighting and models? Isn't that just regular stock?

I'm really worried about the honest of captioning/integrity of labelling.
Until recently there was an iStock admin/inspector (both) who, for example, keyworded many photos of a man in a monkey suit as 'gorilla', 'animals in the wild' ('monkey suit' is in the CV) [1]. It's bad enough that he did this, and it got through inspection, over several days, hence presumably many inspectors, (most of his pics had several unquestionably wrong (i.e. objective as in my example, not debates about subjective terms like 'beautiful woman' or 'expressing positivity'), keywords, all apparently accepted) without this sort of thing (probably not literally that example) appearing in editorial.
[1]They're not there now. Don't bother to look and berate me for calling someone out. But it took months to get the keywords cleaned up.