I spent the last 6 months battling with myself over exclusivity at iStock or Dreamstime.  I truly appreciate both agencies, and what they have done for me.  Serban became a friend of mine outside of microstock, because of a few interests we share.  He has always been supportive of my efforts.  His successful efforts to grow Dreamstime made this decision so very difficult.

In the end, I decided to try iStock exclusivity, at least for a few months.

As I was disabling my files at Dreamstime, something strange occurred.  An image I uploaded in 2007 suddenly had an online date of 6/5/2009.  I could not disable it.  I contacted support and explained the situation.  It turns out my image had editorial components to it, and had been changed from RF to editorial just 5 days ago.  Hence the online date change.

Support understood my situation and disabled the file for me, freeing me to go elsewhere exclusively.  This was just one more example of Dreamstime's honesty, and support for their contributors, which made me truly proud to be part of their business and family. 

I want to publicly thank Dreamstime, their fantastic support staff, reviewers, and Serban especially for a wonderful 2 years.  My portfolio will hardly be missed, but I will indeed miss them.  Best of luck, my friends.  I hope we are together again someday.

That is great to hear that Dreamstime went out of their way to be helpful to you. Hopefully the benefits can be extended to those who do not know Serban personally.

Magnum -

Simplification.  I have a hard time believing you can use the benefits of exclusivity to replace the total earnings of several agencies, although both IS and DT offer perks (higher commissions, search placement).

I use microstock earnings for extra cash, not to support my life.  Therefor it is easier for me to make a decision not related to earnings.  I wanted to deal with one agency, and create images geared toward what I believed would be successful with that specific agency.  I also wanted to know that if there was ever any misuse or theft of my images (a growing problem), I would only have one agency to trace it from.

For the record regarding earnings, the gap closed considerably for me between IS and DT over the last 12 months.  I would be happy with either.

So what made you decide on IS over DT in the end?

Magnum -

Simplification.  I have a hard time believing you can use the benefits of exclusivity to replace the total earnings of several agencies, although both IS and DT offer perks (higher commissions, search placement).

I use microstock earnings for extra cash, not to support my life.  Therefor it is easier for me to make a decision not related to earnings.  I wanted to deal with one agency, and create images geared toward what I believed would be successful with that specific agency.  I also wanted to know that if there was ever any misuse or theft of my images (a growing problem), I would only have one agency to trace it from.

For the record regarding earnings, the gap closed considerably for me between IS and DT over the last 12 months.  I would be happy with either.

Yes, I agree, some of the staff were helpful to me too. But I am surprised that Serban helped you become exclusive somewhere else. That is a positive attitude which should leave good feelings on both sides.

Unfortunately, most of my DT sales are subs these days so I may have to consider goinge exclusive with IS someday too.

Freedom, I believe I was kindly helped by Dreamstime with some account problems I had shortly after joining, long before I knew Serban.   

Congrats Dan.
The way things look, being exclusive is becoming very attractive. There are only a handful performers and it's not that difficult to decide which 4 of the big 6 to go exclusive.  The rest is merely high vapor %ages and no real $$$ , unlike before where spreading the images made a big diff.
I have already made quite a few of my images exclusive with Dreamstime, and hope to do the same with Fotolia.  Will this make being exclusive with either more difficult? Well, I like to give it a year (since exclusive images require certain time before disablement) , then see which way I go. But who knows, it could still be the other 2 I did not mention here.

Although I can appreciate your sentiments and intent, I can also see how Dreamstime might see this as a bit of a slap in the face. You are in effect saying something like "I like Dreamstime a lot, but I've thought things through and it makes better sense (for me) to be exclusive at iStock." - not exactly a shining endorsement for Dreamstime, is it?

It's a pity, but I believe DanP68 is not interested in spending time at the forum. 

DanP has gone   What's that all about? Do you have to sell your soul to iStock when you are exclusive and not have any independent thoughts??

Yes, it's part of the new user agreement.