1
:  a person held in servitude as the chattel of another
2
:  one that is completely subservient to a dominating influence
3
:  a device, that is directly responsive to another
4
:  drudge, toiler
� slave adjective

intransitive verb
1
:  to work like a slave :  drudge

The OP was using a word as a metaphor, and people are getting all upset over definitions and now were into politics and Socialism vs Free Trade or Capitalism, name calling country against another. Silly!

ps I'm quite happy with what I make from SS, I'd like it much more if we had a better percentage. My largest frustration is trying to add more photos that will make more money and having them rejected for "lighting" or "Not sharp at full size".

If the truth is, most people are using these for small projects and we get 20% averaging $1-$2 RPD for our collection, why do they have to be like someone with an expensive controlled studio environment has taken them.

And on the same line, how the heck does a phone photo pass, that's taken with a sensor the size of the head of a 2 penny nail and a lens that's plastic and the size of a thumbtack. But a shot with a DSLR is "soft at full size"?

Yes we slave away for a small return. We are slaves to the Microstock system and agencies. We are not owned or sold into this position, but everyone has decided by their own choice to participate. (unless I'm wrong and someone here is not doing this on their own, for their own benefit, and is a prisoner or slave?)

how the heck does a phone photo pass, that's taken with a sensor the size of the head of a 2 penny nail and a lens that's plastic and the size of a thumbtack. But a shot with a DSLR is "soft at full size"?

looking at it in a non-sense lateral thinking way, i would say the reason for this is
- photo phone contributors will not grumble at earning 30 cents
because each penny earn is a penny to cheer
- dslr owners and other slaves like you and me ... are bound to grumble like we are doing here
so unless we start earning 28 to 120 bucks a single download,
we will never be cheering.

so, if you are the shareholders... who would you instruct ss to keep in the flock???

miserable fees, yes, but on top of this the Euro is in free fall !

as of today's quotation the Euro is now only worth 1.06$ ! it was 1.36$ just a few months ago ... it's a disaster .. if it reaches parity 1:1 it will be cheaper for me to live in eastern or southern europe at this point .. gone are the days when i could say that living in Asia was "cheap as chips"

as for slavery : considering even a cheap newbie doing his first assignment or his first wedding will ask no less than 2-300$ per day there's not much to discuss further about the ongoing situation ...  micro's initial idea was to be a place to sell leftovers to designers and the price (1$) was merely symbolic, meant to recoup the server costs ... it got out of hands and now the price is as low as 0.5$ while the quality is on par with expensive RM images that once were sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars .. doesn't make sense but now it's too late to complain, in any case it doesn't give stockers any exit strategy as they're forced to produce only the cheapest possible stuff as the ROI is too small and this will be always the Achille's heel of microstock, anyone else needed different sort of images will have no other option than paying a fair price for RM licences or hire people on assignment.

it doesn't take a genius to predict that while the quality of micro images produced so far is high the next wave will be quite a different story and the market will balance itself somehow, leaving space for a small "midstock" segment or whatever.

as for agencies being too greedy : yes but remember that despite this their net earnings are no more than 20-30% as far as we know and this clearly shows how expensive it's to acquire new buyers in the actual economy.

the next BIG THING in stock is : what will be the pricing of Adobe's Fotolia ? higher than micros or only based on cheap subs so to lower our fees even more ?

SS and the others will change their pricing accordingly and this will be a matter of life or death for many stockers in my opinion.

the other big thing is : will Getty crumble on itself and sold for a pittance ? what's next ? who will steal their remaining customer base ?

2015 is a time for changes to Microstock, and that will be BIG changes. I can only hope that some will be good for contributors and not just for the agencies.

Prediction? 2015 FT will pass IS, Dreamstime will drop down to the levels of 123RF and DP. The sales have to come from somewhere. The volume of new buyers is not expanding much anymore. If FT goes up, agencies below, will go down as Adobe/FT gathers a larger market share.

yes.
2015 will bring BIG changes in the market, Getty dominated the past 20 yrs, now it's SS turn, and Adobe could pretty much create a whole new market from scratch.

it goes further if we talk about Mobile .. Win 10 will be a milestone in the software industry because it will run on several different platforms and the new VIsual Studio will compile "universal binaries", this is a whole new game and will totally disrupt google and apple monopolies.

Korea has already 22Mbit 4G wireless connections, the era of desktop computers is definitely over at this point, more than half of computing will be based on mobile platform and content will be consumed on mobile platforms.

DSLR with good 24MP sensors are getting as cheap as chips, pocket cameras with 20MP sensors are getting better and better, so good they can now pass most stock agencies QC.

storage keep getting cheaper and bigger, internet connections are so widespread you can literally work with fast 3G/4G connections even on the top of a mountain or in a forest in Borneo or on the beach of a remote island .... this was unthinkable just a few years ago and science fiction 10-15 yrs ago.

on the other side, mobile tech has peaked and it's stagnant, no new "big next things" at the horizon for both hardware or software in my opinion.

google glass has been a fiasco, as expected.

but Oculus Rift and the new Sony headscreen have the potential to become a big blast sooner or later once the tech is more stable and affordable.

miniaturization : i've just read an article about a Daweoo Win10 mini-pc running on a USB Stick (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/18/microsoft_shows_off_south_korean_pconastick/) ... this is just incredible ... my very first PC was an 8086 running DOS 3.11 and Xenix with 640kb ram ... it seems yesterday and it weighted maybe 10 kg without the monitor !

all in all we're living in very interesting times.

I now use tablet for most things, but still need the desktop to edit photos and upload them.

I now use tablet for most things, but still need the desktop to edit photos and upload them.

i'm totally against smartphones and tablet as they're still a failure apart for portability and weight.
on the other side i'm enjoying a few puzzle games that run like a charm with touch screen while they would be cumbersome to play using a keyboard or a mouse.

you see, each platform shoudl really focus only where the hardware gives a benefit and a distinctive advantage.

i could think of many ways to design an app that allows you to edit photos on a small screen with touch screen, but the big problem is ... while the app could do its job it would still take 10 times more than using PS on a nice 30" screen on your desktop !

uploading won't be an issue sooner or later as 3G/4G lines will reach 20Mbit everywhere in a few years, i've already seen 7Mbit 3G lines even in third world countries for 10-20$/month with 5-10GB of data transfer.