Also, if you brought in more than $1,000,000 of business to iStock, they will throw you an extra 5%, so max is 45% now.

http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=861

Scroll down for royalty charts

Yep, they'd have to sell 1.4M credits worth just to get back to 20%.

Even exclusives are going to need to be sell about 4000 images per month to maintain the 40% rate.

It depends on how many non-exculsive contributors they have, but yeah, this actually seems like less money for the vast majority of iStockers.  Even if they had said more money for vast majority of exclusive I would still think that would be incorrect.

Like dgilder, after running some preliminary numbers this looks like it just massively delayed a 5% raise I was about to get for hitting the next cannister level.

I've been saying for a long time that more sites would start moving toward a performance based model. Where the people who make them the most credits/money are rewarded and poor performers are essentially discouraged through a less favorable compensation model.

ETA: It's a 5% delay in commission percentage (30 to 35%). But the increase from 30 to 35 is 16%. So as far as money in my pocket goes I've just been told the 16% raise I was going to get in a couple of months has just been delayed indefinately until I can increase double my sales volume. Which I plan to do but...

And it's pretty clear this move is all Getty. The new Agency Collection will have Getty, Jupiter and Punchstock to tap into the massive Istock buyer base.

Oh, and notice the commission is 20-30%.

I just started a thread in a local designer's forum about the pay cut for non-exclusives and told them that if they want the photographer to get a more fair payment they should shop their images elsewhere; I also gave links to SS, DT and FT. (I wish SX would still exist...)
I Also mentioned Veer because I think they would like their attitude.

I wish some of you did the same, just to get people to understand that iStock/Getty are greedy *insult removed* that don't care if the photographer will be able to pay his/her bills.

Totally sucky news - can't see any upside except perhaps for the factories with huge volume.

I will not accept 15% royalty rate. I will stop uploading to Istock and probably delete all my images.
This is too much..

Why do they bother to elaborate complicated royalty structures? It's a paycut. As simple as that.

This is bad. There really isn't anything positive about these changes, especially for independents.

Screw...

I've told you that Getty will play with most of people there... It is just a start...

Very sad joke for non-exclusives there!

[ADDED] I always forget the most important thing: What is next? Shutterstock downing to $0.15 basic tier downloads?
HAHA!