I am really curious to see how this new best match plays out -  the admins are indicating that the search function is going to rely more on the buyers' preferences than on favouring one group of contributors over another (exclusive versus non-exclusive for example) or one type of image over another (versus vectors, photos, old files, new files etc).

In the past there has always seemed to be one group up (or more up) and one group down (or more down) which has made it difficult to determine whether there is actually a drop off in all around sales at IS  - that is, the powers that be could always "cover up" dropping sales by saying some people are doing well and that it's just the changes to the search that is causing fewer downloads for any particular contributor. The IS powers have always maintained that its sales are up up and up (this is not a criticism - it's what businesses do) - and note I refer to numbers of sales here not profits. IS may be making up its revenue by increasing its sales prices even though the actual number of purchases is dropping or leveling off.

Now that it seems there is going to be an even playing field in the search parameters for contributors, curious to see if contributors continue to report drops in sales ... if yes, it should give us better data to try and figure out where the overall business strategy of IS is going and whether the constant price rising has had an impact or whether there really might be a market for "mid-stock".

Absolutely no complaints from me on Istock's sales this month. Another BME.

Same here __ blistering performance from IS. The price rise doesn't seem to have frightened many buyers away.

Quote from: shank_ali on February 26, 2009, 01:15

BTW i can;t contribute to the  istock forum but i still read it

... and it looks as if the same is finally true for this site.

Yep, no user link anymore. I'm not surprised but I also kinda am. He was toning it down a bit. But like everybody else around here who likes to test the limits it's always just a matter of time.

Now back to IS. My sales have been rocking all month but really up and down this week. Site performance has been kinda bad with the squid page up quite a bit. Maybe a reason?