MicrostockGroup

I saw that, but when I tried to take his advice and try for myself, I found a chart for iStock which dropped in mid-April and didn't recover, but for some reason I couldn't do my usual comparative search with fotolia, dreamstime and shutterstock.

I can't seem to get Alexa to work right now, but I ran this comparison a week or so and didn't get the same result.  Istock and SS were neck and neck, but FT and DT were further down.  I wish there was a link to where those analytics were done. 

Ahh.  Thank you nruboc.  Wow!  Striking numbers! 

Alexa (last week when I could access it), and Google trends both show what I described above. 

For some real fun try comparing Thinkstock with just about anything....lol

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/thinkstock.com+yaymicro.com+crestock.com/

Ouch! Over 57% down in relative terms during a year. No surprise that Kelly got 'promoted' then. As others have said that graph fairly accurately reflects my own stat's over the same period. Istock's greed has truly blown up in their face.

Yay! Way to go Yay 

Not that I disagree with the concept but the numbers there are horribly flawed. I checked a site that I know has followers and links and it shows as 2 refering sites. I have more sites than that myself that refer to the subject site!

But it was fun looking at Crestock and Yay ranking way higher. 

People always like to use Alexa as a reference, I know I do it too sometimes. But it is based on the traffic of people who have installed Alexa, so the stats although they give an idea are not representing entire website traffic. As to whether the other stat companies are reliable, considering their entire business is based on giving statistical information, I would hope they do their research in getting accurate information, but who knows. I posted in June about iStock's tumbling traffic in comparison to a similarly paced rise for Shutterstock. Traffic doesn't always represent earnings, but generally lots of traffic isn't a bad thing.

True. It's good to combine resources. And read between the lines. I mainly use stats like Alexa, Compete, Quantacast, Blogsearch, Twitter, AdPlannner, Yahoo to give me an idea of the trends, because in the relative world, trend and actual market position is just fine.

Just to clarify things. The url for Thinkstock is thinkstockphotos.com. Thinkstock.com is just a pointer now.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/thinkstockphotos.com+yaymicro.com+crestock.com/

I wonder how much traffic is affected by the "i sold a picture" links which infest some people's Twitter and Facebook feeds. And I wonder how much that traffic costs to manage vs what it generates in new business.

I know that 3rd party rankings can affect the resale price of a site or domain if it is being sold - but does anyone here really believe in Alexa, Compete etc ? For example, has anyone ever known anyone who had the Alexa toolbar installed ?

I am no fan of Lobo and have been vocal about his rude forum moderation.  But I think, being fair, that this was an appropriate 'lock' given the way they run their forums at IS.  He'd certainly done WAY WORSE in terms of locking threads and making snide comments.