When I see reviews about istock, here and elsewhere, I cant help to wonder how much these reviews are independent or genuine reviews rather than info-marketing for if there is one crappy microstock agency in this industry, it is by far istock.
To take the same scales used for review here, lets see the pros and cons of this agency.
Upload time: one of the longest of all when compared with Fotolia, shutter and other dreamstime.
Consistency in reviewing pictures: a batch of my pictures has been reviewed in just 10 minutes from the other side of the world, (on a Sunday!). Either the pictures were very bad or the reviews are made by robots on Istock. Bad luck for the first explanation, the same pictures have been accepted by all other major stock agencies, including the tougher ones.
Quality of customer service: To judge it, it would require that they have a customer service, but you can send mails and request for days before hoping to get even an answer.
Again, when after weeks an answer comes, it comes as an automatic reply from a server totally eluding the subject of your request or question and of course dont expect to find the answer on their messy FAQ and forum.
Interface, design, use of the website: One of the poorest in the industry, matching second rate microstock agencies like featurpics and so on.
Sales: no comments, really nothing to say about that since you cant sell through an empty shell.
Conclusion: istock belongs to Getty (which is far from being an advantage for photographers), so it has a lot of firepower to buy the opinion of industry insiders and other so-called independent reviewers, which certainly explains why it scores still so high while being so poor in general.
All the same, is it because of their past success or subsidiary status of getty that their main trait of character became arrogance doubled by incompetence, or was it always like that ?
