MicrostockGroup

Since the new SS raise is based off of your tier, I was wondering how many of us are actually in the upper tiers.

2000$. it would take me 2-3 months to reach 3000$

500-3000, with current pace I'll get another raise in about 4 months.

Why does that surprise you?

500-3000$ - and I just had the first 33c sale.

Just started, I am still under 100 

500-3000.

Average salary raises here are in the order of 3%-5% over the last couple of years, so it seems reasonable to me, although the folks under $500 have reason to be unhappy given the 50% hike in fees to the buyers.

because all the other sites have tiers that are very high and can be used as a goals and also give bonuses to those people who work hard.

The tier at $10,000 is very low and is probably what the top photographers earn in a month.  If there was a tier at $50,000 and $100,000 they could give more incremental raises keeping the big producers happy and giving the little guys things to work towards.

At fotolia´s top tier there is currently 0 photographers.  at the 2nd top tier there is 2 photographers.  Istock is similar.

I'll try to analyze this, hope you can understand it

Shutterstock first decided to raise the prices of their images. This was due to:
- submitters wanting a raise, they (or should I say we) wouldn't wanna sell our images ofr 0.25/0.3 for ever
- their profit was becoming smaller due to the costs they have or they weren't on their projected plan for 2008 because of the costs(servers, reviewers, people reading forums, bandwidth all cost money). The costs are bigger and bigger as the number of photographers increases. It is true that more photographers bring more money but they will only cover the costs if the demad rises acordingly. Which in my opinion isn't true, that's why SS (and other agencies) take bigger and bigger piece of the pie and that's why (well add oversaturated market) the future may not be so bright for MS.
- because they could. Increasing prices means more money

So they increased prices. The waited a few months before doing a raise for submitters. Reasons for doing that:
- to see how the new prices will go with the buyers. After they saw how many they lost they could set the raise for us
- get a boost in their money
- so that the buyers wouldnt buy subs with the old price and buy images that need to be paid with the new price (this still happens though, because o the yearly and half yearly subscriptions, thats why they needed the money from the previous point)

So they analyzed the sales and set up a raise that is best for covering costs, paying us and also increasing their earnings. It probably is best what they could do (well of course they probably got more from it that us, they also need to cover increasing cost for the whole year ahead of us). Increasing the prices of images even further and giving us a bigger raise would make many buyers go away and we would be earning the same or even less, we would just get more for a download.

Then you get the biggest raise of all, 32% when you reach $500. Same as me. Suddenly it doesn't look so bad when the percentage of increase is that high for the second level, does it? 

500-3000

460 $ until next 0.03 raise... hopefully in 2 months

Same here, I just sailed past 3,000 five days ago - based on my current sales it will now be years rather than months until I hit 10,000 so there's very little incentive to go all out and get to the next payment increase. Next years raise will have come and gone before I get anywhere close 

There is no compelling reason to go exclusive with IS and any knee-jerk reactions to the SS raise are going to be hasty ones IMO.
 
IStock simply cannot match the earnings from the top 6 combined so none of these arguments for exclusivity make any financial sense.