I am just sitting here thinking about all the recent events that have occurred on iStock for contributors and things are looking, well, a bit grim to put it lightly.

First you had the announcement of the new royalty structure and redeemed credit system. That caused a huge backlash and many people are still very unhappy.

They also raised prices on Vetta's, which had its share of backlash too from people who lost income as a result of reduced Vetta sales from higher Vetta pricing.

Then they brought in the Agency collection to try and use the success of the iStock brand to try and breathe some life back into the ailing Getty brand. A big faux pas. Everyone knows you don't sell high-end brands at WallMart. It doesn't work.

Then they started running a sale on Vettas, which caused more backlash and proved that they made a mistake in the first place by raising prices on Vettas too high.

Then they decide to re-jigg all the search engines and so forth right before the end of the year (and all go on holiday at the same time), so now searches are not working right, lightboxes have problems, and portfolios are not updating properly. This is most likely hurting sales for contributors that are affected by the data basing problems. What kind of an organization rolls out a new system which has bugs in it and then goes on holiday for a few weeks while it all goes haywire???

Then there was this big Christmas credit card fraud and image theft fiasco. Many contributors are now upset about the money that will be taken back from their accounts and worried about illegal use and/or resale of their images as a result of that. Then you got buyers who can't buy large sized credit packs now because of the theft that occurred and iStock no longer offering large credit packs to buyers, which may hurt sales as well.

iStock was supposed to announce the new redeemed credit targets for 2012 before year's end. That hasn't come and wont now until after the first of the year. They should have lived up to their word on this though and announced the targets this week.

Probably the exodus of some contributors, and buyers for that matter, will start happening right around now as they said they would back when the changes to the royalty structures were announced a few months back.

Then the forthcoming announcement of redeemed credit targets for 2012, which will most likely come out next week, and will be sure to cause even more backlash if they raise targets even higher.

So it�s all looking pretty discerning at the moment.

The one positive thing they did was announce the addition of the editorial collection, but again pricing for editorial has not been announced, and that could be another point of contention for contributors when they do announce the editorial pricing if it is either viewed as being too low or too high by contributors. Also, I can assume when editorial gets launched, uploads will be flooding in for months to come and review times will start to become very long with the increased volume of picture uploads unless of course they hire more reviewers. Unlikely though they will increase the number of reviewers.

I really, really, and truly hope that iStock pulls themselves together here soon. The last 3-4 months of things that they have done, changes they have made, and the things that have happened as a result of some of their actions has been very disheartening for many people.

Just looking at the bigger picture, its really time to start to question if they have lost course on steering the ship and if there are some even heavier rocky seas ahead for everyone. Let�s hope not though.