Personally I am just tired of feeble attempts at entry into an enormous competitive and highly financial taxing industry by small guys with absolutely nothing new to offer, no marketing plan, no strategy, no niche, not much of business sense and clearly no capital.

The industry has seen enough of them and they all RIP.

If it does not have a fresh approach it can be as cute as a little kitten and it will still end up as a bulldozed frog on the tarmac, after wasting a lot of people's time.

I do not think at this stage it is a pessimistic statement any longer, by now it is just a realistic one no matter how it sounds. 

I also applaud initiative, but running of a cliff was done a few times now already...

How . Jon Oringer manage to convince everyone in the whole world to join shutterstock for a meagre sum of 25 cents per Dl is magical.

What are the dumb contributors around the world thinking at that time?

And now at present, we have someone that offer 50% and everyone is complaining abt this and that.

What is exciting?
I don't find nothing exciting there�

How . Jon Oringer manage to convince everyone in the whole world to join shutterstock for a meagre sum of 25 cents per Dl is magical.

What are the dumb contributors around the world thinking at that time?

And now at present, we have someone that offer 50% and everyone is complaining abt this and that.

You have to put Shutterstock's beginnings in context. At that time iStock was still very "young", as were Dreamstime and Canstock. Fotolia and Bigstock didn't show up until 2005. Although iStock had a head start on the other microstock agencies, it hadn't become so huge and successful that new agencies couldn't get a toe-hold. Just by starting an agency that was offering a subscription, it was offering something different from the other micros. No one knew for certain which of the agencies would take off - or if any of them would. The macro folks were busy poo-poohing the whole thing, suggesting all the microstock agencies would fail.

Fast forward to today and you have an agency-wannabe with some notion of attracting content without saying anything about how it will compete with many well-established agencies. This is no longer an emerging market or an experiment. We've also in the interim had several fly-by-night operations that made removing your content or getting paid a real problem, and that's made everyone cautious about where their content is uploaded.

And at the risk of being repetitive, 50% of zero is still zero - percentages are utterly irrelevant if there are no sales. Why would a buyer be interested in this agency? And if you can't answer that question, why would a contributor be interested in contributing?