After reading this thread at IS, I am kinda shocked with the massive SUDDEN downward shift in sales and income for 99% of the iStock community. And since IS is one of the major players, this trend must be industry wide.

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=347763&page=1

SO what is going on? Is it IS's site issues or something else? It does  not feel like a gradual trend since September is usually the bounce-back month. Hopefully it is related to the zoom and add-to-library issues (that should be fixed) but that seems odd that those simple features would slam the sales activity.

Have any of you veterans seen anything like this? Any ideas?

I've been around iStock since fall 2004 and I've seen a number of big ups and downs in that time - some related to earlier software eff-ups and some to best match lurches and shifts. I don't think I've ever seen anything like this before though.

It's overused to talk about a perfect storm, but I think they've got a combination of site problems (and the zoom and lightbox problems are biggies, not minor annoyances) following a year of relentless price increases, a deluge of dreck (mostly - there's obviously some good stuff in there too) from Getty and too many best match tweaks trying to keep the money coming and contributors somewhat calm. Can't count out the push to promote Thinkstock - they're almost caught up with getting my portfolio there after a whole year.

Also bear in mind that people's September numbers are better than they think they are - I used the beta of Stats Plus to look at my September sales and found my DLs were 12% higher and $$ 15% higher than the IS stats showed me. It didn't make it a good September, but it did lift it up from the gutter a bit.

I suspect that after so many other hiccups over the last few years, for some buyers who put up with things the first several times may just have had enough and moved elsewhere.

A long time ago, Fotolia nearly destroyed the functioning of their site when they moved to "V2.0" and it didn't work for a couple of months. I thought it might take the site under (it was still a relative newcomer) but they fixed the problems and did really well afterwards. They've undone all that good work more recently (long story), and it may be that it was easier to recover then (summer 2007) than now.

FT has recently appeared to be deliberately moving further back the images from contributors who get higher royalties - lots of complaints in MSG from emeralds whose sales dropped overnight to very much lower levels than in years past. It's certainly possible that IS might be trying to manage search results to try and sell more images on which they make the most, versus looking solely from the buyer's perspective. They'd never say if they were doing that, and there are other possible reasons for the seeming top-heavy bias in those seeing big drops at IS, but I have wondered if they were trying to do some sort of yield management on the search results.

Bottom line is I have no idea! But those are my guesses

Unlike ClaridgeJ my non-istock sales were all OK in September. Nothing to get excited about but nothing to cause any concern, and October had started well, too, even if I don't take into account the $350 commission from Alamy

Unlike ClaridgeJ my non-istock sales were all OK in September. Nothing to get excited about but nothing to cause any concern, and October had started well, too, even if I don't take into account the $350 commission from Alamy

My IS sales during September was fairly good actually and same as you, October started well. I was more talking about the industry in general as not what it used to be.

I am trying to promote my portfolio only on contributor friendly agencies, where is better deal for me...
I hope that everyone do the same...
That can be one of reasons...

Only problem is, contributor friendly agencies hardly sell that much. Its easy to promise this and that and to be contributor friendly when sales are rare. Should sales escalate, well then they wont be so friendly anymore. Stick with the bad guys.

I think it boils down to 2 things:

1... Not enough value for the buck. The pictures are not good enough to be so expensive. Means the demand is not high enough.
2... Bad Karma. An agency should not underestimate the effect of the words from angry customers and contributors. The whole net is full of negative posts about iS. IS is now famous for its endless greed and arrogance.


Is used to be an elite agency, with high demands and fine photos.
Now its is not anymore. Restrictions in amount of uploads and biased reviews has made the picture pool oldfashioned and not competitive.
Whereas exclusive content can be an advantage, it can also be a drawback when the exclusive content is not up to par anymore.
Add to that a extensive promotion of that content, and you have dug your own grave as an agency.

It looks like lots of buyers have gone to Thinkstock and lots more have gone to SS.  I haven't uploaded much in the last year, my istock earnings have tanked but my SS earnings are as good as they've ever been.

Perhaps the istock prices went so high that a lot of the buyers that came from the traditional sites have gone back to them?  Looks like Getty are selling at much lower prices than a few years ago.

I can't believe that istock has dwindled like this through complete incompetence, it looks like a deliberate strategy to move buyers to Thinkstock and Getty.  Will be interesting to see if they carry on destroying istock and make it a place that's only useful for a few exclusives.

Plus the search is randomly totally broken, i.e. sometimes a search gives you what you'd expect, give or take the spammers, sometimes it splits a CV search term so that your results give everything but what you wanted. Even the same term on two different searches from the same browser.

Plus look at the length of the known bugs thread compared to the tiny number of fixed bugs.
33 reported bugs, some very serious. 1 fixed bug.

I imagine, when they had their layoff round. They fired some of the essential IT people, those who were born there, down in the basement.
I also imagine that the whole IT base is made by chaotically growing seeds over many years on an insufficient framework.
My guess is it is impossible to fix, because its so interweaved.

Good find.
Its pretty precise.
LOL.

My guesses:

- High prices and much competition
- More competition
- Display of real prices
- Bad Contributor treatment and the consequences
- Global economic downturn
- Upload limits and stupid rejections: see my buyers experience in another thread. Where I found on a generic search term more than 100 pages of results in Depositphotos as well as in DT I found a whopping 6 (six) pages in istock. I go where I find what I need...

To me, it is not that surprising at all. I was waiting for it and it had to happen some day. On the other side other Contribs are seeing dramatic downturn on other sites too (which is not my experience)

So greed is their "Trojan horse"!

and probably yours too! 

Maybe they have decided w/ cash sales they can keep all the money and don't have to report them to us anymore.

When they announced the RC #^&$ I stopped uploading. When they forced the move to PP I deactivated nearly 2 orders of magnitude from my port. Curiously my income only dropped about one order of magnitude most months. PP income is similar to regular sale income now though - so unless they are actually stealing SS customers that could be the source for a lot of their drop. I know they actively recruited IS buyers to thinkstock.

In any case I hope they hang on to just enough customers to keep the big exclusives from jumping ship, but otherwise I hope they die a painful death.

There are so many points in their history where they could have either done the right thing by their contributors or done a brilliant move to completely dominate the industry. So many times they have failed to do either. They are still a major force in the microstock business though and probably will continue to be so for years to come.