I'm into the eighth day without a sale, my previous record for the whole of the last 11 years was two or three consecutive days. I see some people are reporting sales in the New Year, so there are some coming through (I'd started wondering if they weren't going to bother continuing with real-time - almost - reporting) but has the tap been turned off for independent contributors?

last year I made about $7500 on IS. This year it is $4500 with about 500 new submissions.  It's dying a slow, miserable death in my opinion. Not dead yet, but getting there, and getting there fast.

And who is the king now? I still can't understand what happened to that big agency... For me they died in 2013. I left in Jan.2014 and now here's another proof I did not loose much and that was good decision.

Great that you can leave. Many of us would love to be able to do that.

As far as what's happening, I believe it's a series of things.

1. Constant tweaking of the system to milk contributors for more revenue, but it ends up affecting the buying experience - so buyers leave and contributors, like you, stop uploading or close accounts

2. Acquisition by Getty & venture capitalists have one thing in mind.....make ME money and don't SPEND a dime on anything that won't turn a dime instantly. This is perhaps the biggest contributing factor to Istock's demise of all factors as I view this as the parent root cause of many (if not most) trickle down series of issues.
   a. Don't spend money on systems upgrades
   b. Don't spend money on talent to properly fix the system
   c. Milk contributors for everything we can
   d. Make back door deals to pump up revenue (Google deal) at the expense of contributors...make us a bundle, give the contributor  enough for a gum ball.
   e. Change the search to milk exclusives; we can't pay them this much, we need to get exclusives down to 20% and pretend we care about them so we pad our ROI coffers.
   f. Let's create this credit system and make impossible tiers that will hold most exclusives and independents in a lower paying tier. Let's demotivate them and beat them down into submissive puppets. Oh did I mention that RF 123 also saw the value in sh!tt!ng on contributors and felt compelled to implement a similar system, thus controlling contributor revenue and padding their own pockets at our expense....TERRIFIC IDEA ISTOCK, you have helped other agencies learn how to screw contributors.

   g. They keep playing with pricing and have alienated buyers who now have to pay a lot more for the "cheap seat images" they were used to paying. This hurt the micro stock model they were trying to reinvent due to Shutterstock (see #3) and some buyers became vocal on Twitter and Facebook and left. This is all about revenue over the customer and when you do that you WILL LOSE CUSTOMERS and they did.

3. News flash: Shutterstock is the MS leader. We must compete with them.  Ok let's get rid of the strict acceptance policy and let in anything so we can build a collection the size of Shutterstock. No way we can compete unless we also have a bazillion images.  So a flood of content populates their collection, much of it garbage. And this combined with the pricing increases was a double blow to buyers; more lower quality images to sift through but at higher prices. Now the buying experience is worsened.  Buyers leave.

5. Nearly every time they make a system change it fails. The system is slow and clunky.

6. Their controlled vocabulary key wording system is so limited that good content cannot be found because they disallow so many common words or allow them but with completely different meanings, so you have to exclude it and
    a. add it in later (a lot of extra work)
    b. Don't add it and accept the negative impact on your work

I guess I could go on but I see these kinds of things as killing the company instead of developing a strong strategy, funding it and sticking with it.  Instead they seem to fling mud on the wall and see what sticks, and "we will go with that". 

This is what happens when you have big companies and venture capitalists take over a once profitable company...in many cases it's done at the demise of the company itself.

Three items that seem to have fallen out of their luggage in their rush to catch the gravy train:

1) Serving the Customer
2) Nurturing the Supplier
3) Trusting the Product

You could probably say that about the many western companies presently being eaten alive by Asian, African and South American entrepreneurs.

Not dead yet but they seem to be quickly headed in that direction. This latest bandaid they applied to the severed artery may have slowed the external bleeding but the internal bleeding felt by contributors seems to be severe.

And this will only get worse as contributors stop uploading or remove images because their sales have collapsed. IS will be left with an ever increasing amount of generic, outdated, and irrelevant images which buyers won't want to pay for. They will then need to decrease prices further. Contributors will make even less and continue to leave. This will continue until there aren't enough buyers buying or contributors contributing to turn a profit and that will be the end.

A few years ago when they started squeezing contributors I said eventually enough contributors would leave that it would hurt them financially and they would need to reverse the process and start giving benefits back. They already started to do that this year. The problem now is that prices have massively dropped over the past couple years and they may be in a bad situation where they can't afford to give contributors back anything and are watching their revenue freefall. It may be a downward spiral from which there is no way to recover.