I used to work in the search data team for one of the big full-price stock sites. On that site words like 'of', 'a', 'the', 'on' etc were added to what's called a stop-list - i.e. the search engine is told to ignore them.

In addition these words were never added as keywords in the controlled vocabulary (but could be added as parts of phrases acting as synonyms to preferred terms - so for instance 'bottle of' could be a synonym to 'bottle', so that a search on Bottle Of Milk would actually just be a search on Bottle AND Milk).

I notice now on the iStock site that if you search on Field Of Maize you get back the following prompt:

Field AND of AND Maize (Cereal Plant)

This indicates to me that 'of' has been added to the controlled vocabulary by someone who didn't think through the implications...

Got my first download yesterday - $3.50.

I've only got 79 images online so I wasn't expecting huge returns but I also expected a smaller collection to equate to higher views per image (due to less competition) compared to the same images on iStock, but it's not really panning out that way.

Even with my images lost in a far larger pool of images at iStock the views per image are way higher - which I guess is an indication of their much greater site traffic.

OK, finally got round to signing up on this board. Here's my VMP stats so far:

Accepted:  73
Rejected:    7

Images Viewed:  22  (30% of portfolio)
Total Views: 43
Most viewed image: 8

Sales: 0

The only other sites I'm on are iStock and, up till recently, Fotolia. Although I do OK on iStock all my sales are from old, established images; none of my  newer images are selling at all. Acceptance rate is slightly lower at iStock. Fotolia I gave up on as they failed about 85% of my images and I had one viewing in six months of the handful that did make it on!

So VMP is a far better experience for me so far over Fotolia but jury's still out on how performance matches iStock.