I got this email a week or so ago (I know there's another thread with a similar email):

Hello,

Between January 1-4 a bug occurred which incorrectly dropped your royalty rate by one level, meaning you were paid 5% less on downloads during that period. We have run a script to identify downloads that should have been paid at the higher rate between Jan 1 and Jan 4, 2012. Your account has now been credited with the outstanding amounts. Below is a summary of affected downloads.

    FileID         Amount Paid     Correct Amount   Difference         Date
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0003980625          $00.72               $00.78             $00.06        1/2/2012
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0013498542          $01.44               $01.56             $00.12        1/4/2012
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0017195985          $00.84               $00.90             $00.06        1/4/2012
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Amount Paid: $0.24


Then today, I got this email:

Hello,

   We have run a script that should have paid out your 2012 Redeemed Credit royalty rate from Jan 1 to Jan 4, 2012 to rectify the royalty change that occurred at that time. Unfortunately this script was processed incorrectly, inaccurate payment and information were sent via e-mail to those affected. We will be removing the incorrect payments made (today - June 22, 2012) and will insure the correct amounts are sent out as soon as possible.

   Total Amount Removed: $0.24.

   We apologize profusely for this inconvenience. If you have any further questions please contact Contributor Relations.

   Best Regards,
   iStockphoto



hahahahaha I can't stop laughing.  What a joke!

they truly are a joke

Same here. The money they gave me last Friday, taken away today.

They sure know how to give you a good weekend feeling but crush you the first day of the following week.

Not amused.

can they get anything right?

20.00$ removed today, not impressed.

Same here. The money they gave me last Friday, taken away today.

They sure know how to give you a good weekend feeling but crush you the first day of the following week.

Not amused.

that means you must have had more riding on this than my measly $0.24... yea, that does suck.

Errors can occur, in this case twice. What I like about this is that despite the amounts being inconsequential, they go through with telling the contributors about it and then correcting it, and then correcting it again when they realise there was nothing to correct

I can't be sure if the agencies I use are telling me about errors which affect me negatively, unless one day I receive a deposit and an explanation saying that it was because of an error.

Goodbye $122.. You were never mine but I enjoyed having you around 

That sux.

47.00 here

Managing a huge agency like this is a complex task, and then you have banks, credit cards, and many more variables. It's not a joke, I actually think that in this respect Istockphoto does its best. One can argue about their royalty rates, but they are very honest about it. That's my experience at least.

Yeah, even tyrants have bad days. I feel very little sympathy for them. They are arrogant, out of date and their luck is running out. They better change their ways before it's too late.

Managing a huge agency like this is a complex task, and then you have banks, credit cards, and many more variables. It's not a joke, I actually think that in this respect Istockphoto does its best. One can argue about their royalty rates, but they are very honest about it. That's my experience at least.

Hmmmm
On the other similar issue (different dates), I got an email listing two sales, but I had several more in the appropriate timeframe.
I contacted support, and the support person clicked the box informing me that small sales could be due to very old credits, discount offers, huge buyers getting unadvertised discounts etc.
I wrote back to say that this could not possibly be an answer to my question, which was about the number of dls I had in the affected timeframe, not the amount that was paid for each sale.
I haven't had a reply to that email either. It seems that they don't reply to queries about their original answer.
(Since I wrote, I read that not all sales in the announced timeframe were affected by the bug, so that may be the answer; but that was not the answer I got.)

Have you noticed that they don't exclude bad keywords any more from files, after resubmitting...?

So whats the big news about this?  if they didnt inform people they go frantic and when they inform people they still go frantic nah, sorry but theyre running a business and its their duty to inform any differances.

come on fellas, stop nitpicking.

...
come on fellas, stop nitpicking.

It's not news that iStock's accounting is flawed - and I think it's incompetence and terrible IT, not intentional - but with accounts being off, there's no such thing as nitpicking. The money's right or it's not. If it's not, it's typically not as straightforward as you'd think to know if it's off by a lot or a little. Given that they frequently don't appear to know - or at least can't make payments or back payments correctly - we can't rely on it being just a little.

I don't think there's anything specific we can do until/unless we get some solid data to work with. But I don't think it's a nitpick.

I wouldn't say these micro-corrections are a bad thing - maybe they show a committment to accurate accounting.   But I sure wouldn't want to be an IT guy at this company, with a pricing and commission structure, and search algoritums,  that are already far too complicated for my puny human brain, and are only likely to become more so.   I have to wonder how many of the technical people within IS actually understand it all? 

or maybe someone is skimming pennies (or salami slicing) like they did in Office Space and Superman 3??  They gotta fund those trips around the world somehow!

...But I sure wouldn't want to be an IT guy at this company, with a pricing and commission structure, and search algoritums,  that are already far too complicated for my puny human brain, and are only likely to become more so.   I have to wonder how many of the technical people within IS actually understand it all? 

Computers are good at dealing with lots of details and massive computations - humans don't have to be able to replicate it, just to understand the algorithm and have enough discipline in their software process to do decent QA.

And you also don't have to have any one person understand everything - that's part of the deal with large software systems. I think many of their choices and pricing schemes are a bad idea, but not because it's complex to manage from the IT end.

And the reason you wouldn't want to be an IT guy with iStock is they give off every sign of having a massive pile of dreadful code that's been band-aided to the point that the only real solution is toss it and start over (which isn't cheap or easy given the circumstances).

I doubt that H&F - or a new private equity owner - is going to want to spend money to put any of this right, however. So as contributors, we're stuck with watching them closely to try and catch their worst eff-ups and pester them until we get some amount that's close to what we're owed.

Quote from: stockastic on July 11, 2012, 09:27

...But I sure wouldn't want to be an IT guy at this company, with a pricing and commission structure, and search algoritums,  that are already far too complicated for my puny human brain, and are only likely to become more so.   I have to wonder how many of the technical people within IS actually understand it all?  

Computers are good at dealing with lots of details and massive computations - humans don't have to be able to replicate it, just to understand the algorithm and have enough discipline in their software process to do decent QA.

And you also don't have to have any one person understand everything - that's part of the deal with large software systems. I think many of their choices and pricing schemes are a bad idea, but not because it's complex to manage from the IT end.

And the reason you wouldn't want to be an IT guy with iStock is they give off every sign of having a massive pile of dreadful code that's been band-aided to the point that the only real solution is toss it and start over (which isn't cheap or easy given the circumstances).

I doubt that H&F - or a new private equity owner - is going to want to spend money to put any of this right, however. So as contributors, we're stuck with watching them closely to try and catch their worst eff-ups and pester them until we get some amount that's close to what we're owed.

Well, who knows.  I worked on software for 30 years, although not in this sort of a business.  My admittedly biased opinion is that cr@ppy software is usually caused by requirements that are overly complex, poorly understood and constantly changing.    

I would like to insist on one point, though, which is that I actually do know how to spell "algorithm" [face palm].
 

[I thought that perhaps "algoritums" was a term of art for algorithms so bad/complex/opaque that you lived on a diet of Tums when working on them

Yes, AlgoriTums - antacid pills for software developers.

It bothers me that months go by, and when I look at downloads for a photo I still see "Total royalties: $0.00".    When (seemingly) little things don't get fixed I see an indication that nobody wants to touch the code, because things are in disarray.    

Maybe key people have left, or responsibility for the code was transferred to some other group that embraced it as they would a dead raccoon.

They have, in fact, been "penny shaving" for years (I didn't know that term for it until now). All transactions are rounded down to the nearest full penny. With small sums it can make a very considerable percentage difference. If you have a sale that earns you 7.9c and iS "normalises" it to 7c, your percentage is cut from 15% to 13.3% - and as far as I know there is nothing in their terms that permits them to reduce your share in this way but it has been their practice since 95 or 96.
When I point it out (as I have done several times) I usually either get ignored or someone laughs at me for being stupid and mean enough to care about fractions of a penny, though I suspect that if iStock announced it was slicing another percent off commissions there would be uproar.

Not everyone ignored or laughed at you. It added yet one more thing to my list of reasons to leave, and I did. Most didn't. That means istock/getty got a stamp of approval for the cheating. In fact, they added one more salami slicer (that term cracks me up...thanks for posting the links, jamirae!) to it with the clawbacks.

Quote from: jamirae on July 11, 2012, 11:16

Quote from: stockastic on July 11, 2012, 09:27

I wouldn't say these micro-corrections are a bad thing - maybe they show a committment to accurate accounting.   But I sure wouldn't want to be an IT guy at this company, with a pricing and commission structure, and search algoritums,  that are already far too complicated for my puny human brain, and are only likely to become more so.   I have to wonder how many of the technical people within IS actually understand it all? 

or maybe someone is skimming pennies (or salami slicing) like they did in Office Space and Superman 3??  They gotta fund those trips around the world somehow!

Does anyone know how it works when your 15/whatever% doesn't round to an exact cent - do they always round down, or does it go up or down in the usual manner? I think there was an official answer to that last year, but I can't remember what it was.

I'm thinking they always round down, which is why there was a big discussion about it.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on July 12, 2012, 02:09

They have, in fact, been "penny shaving" for years (I didn't know that term for it until now). All transactions are rounded down to the nearest full penny. With small sums it can make a very considerable percentage difference. If you have a sale that earns you 7.9c and iS "normalises" it to 7c, your percentage is cut from 15% to 13.3% - and as far as I know there is nothing in their terms that permits them to reduce your share in this way but it has been their practice since 95 or 96.
When I point it out (as I have done several times) I usually either get ignored or someone laughs at me for being stupid and mean enough to care about fractions of a penny, though I suspect that if iStock announced it was slicing another percent off commissions there would be uproar.

Really excellent point.  I have always been bothered by that too.  Just thought I'd double check that you meant 2005 or 2006...?

Lol, yes, my decades are getting a bit confused now that i'm 570 years old. Goes with the territory, i suppose

Where's the joke? They identified the errors and are doing their best to repair and inform. This id excellent. If they didn't do anything I'm sure most contributors wouldn't even have noticed. And some companies would be happy to keep this quiet.