Late to the party but read both of these threads for hours.
My view:
There is a max exodus of exclusives and it may be accelerating. I dropped Video in June and I can easily say it was a good decision on my end now.
They don't really care about exclusive erosion, they are changing the best match to slowly but surely notching that RC system so that most exclusives get 25% and Independents 15%.
We all know that scrapping the RC system is the only way to get any sort of contributor attitude improvement. It has been made clear that is not in the cards so its a lost cause.
The Getty model is 30% or 25% depending on the artist deal for the most part so the iStock 35%, 40% or 45% is a fluke by any measure to the Getty system. They want to fix that bug and I believe they will do it for good.
The sad part of all of this is that it really doesn't matter what they do in the end, the damage is done and the constant influx of files into the microstock model makes for a bleak future for anyone except those that can build a 40%+ of new files every year.
Impossible in my view.