Couldn't find if anyone commented on this already.
It appears SS have been kowtowing to Chinese government requests to censor anything that is uncomfortable to the ruling paty. A sale is a sale, I guess...
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/06/shutterstock-china-censorship-tech/

Probly not a big deal to anyone here, but for what it's worth, payment processor Payza dot com was seized and closed and the owners arrested for running their currency transmitting business without a proper license.

Just a notice that my BS paypal address was changed by someone besides me. No one else locally has access to my computer, so my account was obviously hacked online. Bigstock was good enough to send me a change-of-account email notice, which alerted me. You may want to check your micro acct's, change p/words, etc.

Wow. My July SS payout was the lowest since Sep 2007! 

Leaf, you can delete this. Submitted just after another thread was started about the topic.

A different angle in the ongoing Getty-Google giveaway scandal:

It's been speculated on this forum in the past that Getty's long-term goal is to put all microstock out of business. Those of you here at the time may remember when they bought Istock they dissolved the profitable Stockxpert agency very quickly, and discussion went around about their desire to hurt microstock as we know it. Perhaps their 5-10-year-plan includes the decimation if not total annihilation of the micro model. It may not make sense to those of us primarily involved in micro, but the giant Getty's lifeblood has always been macro. Note the secrecy of this move and how much of GI's wholly-owned content is involved in this giveaway (zero, I believe). If they perceive micro as eating away at their future, well....
Personally, I don't think they'll be able to do away with micro completely, but this sure appears to be a huge blow in that direction. Any short-term loss to their bottom line would be seen as collateral damage necessary on the way to ultimate victory. Not a conspiracy, just cutthroat business as practiced for centuries. And, after all, Getty Images is 100% a business and not a charity.

Thoughts?

Just 3 days after I contacted support and started a thread on the DT forum warning contributors about their W-9's and SSN#'s being accessible to anyone logged into their account, DT took action. They closed off viewing access to the W-9 form/SSN # completely, and now you must contact support if you have questions about your W-9.   Wow! Somebody over there actually listens! I realize they can't and won't please everyone with the business decisions they feel they have to make, but this move speaks volumes about how they actually view their contributors.

Now, log in to you Fotolia account, OTOH, and as of this moment you're still be able to see your W-9, SSN#, and full ID-card scan. Of course, so can anyone else who logs into your account.  They've been contacted plenty of times in the past, but.....    'Nuff said.

Karimala already pointed this out in another thread, but I wanted to start one about this subject in particular, especially as a warning for U.S. contributors. If you go to your main login page (My Dashboard), click on Edit in your Account Information, then go to Contributor Parameters, you (and anyone who hacks into your account) will see your SSN in plain sight. Your ID scan is also available there and can be downloaded with a right-click.
  Of course, it's on an https page, so that makes it perfectly safe, right? Apparently that's what FT thinks.

Kind of cool, depending on your viewpoint---a keyboard and mouse made out of bamboo:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/07/going-green-with-impeccas-hand-carved-bamboo-keyboard-and-mouse/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29

Hey, I just got a $2.30 royalty from Istock for an extended license sale.  I'm guessing the customer had some very old credits.  Anyone else seen that for an EL?

Just read a FT forum entry by Jason Stitt, an Emerald contributor, stating that he just got $400 (that's four hundred $$) deducted from his account for fraudulent credit card sales.  I hear about far more fraud complaints from there than from any other site.  I wonder if they're even addressing the problem at all...

Don't know if this has been mentioned here yet.  I really hope this person is no longer shooting weddings:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218248/Newlyweds-win-court-battle-1-500-wedding-photographer-shoddy-pictures-include-missing-heads-car-close-ups.html

As an example,

http://www.dreamstime.com/thread_18291

What's so bothersome about a simple thread about subscriptions that they have to lock it so quickly??  And threatening to delete future ones??  Wassup?

Wow, and Microsoft even! (Imagine that?)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10317763-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Anyone else experiencing a sudden spike in sub sales at FT?  Is it just a part of their best match changes?  15 out of my last 20 sales were subs, whereas about the 30 previous to those were by far mostly PPD.

This isn't just for US citizens, unfortunately:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCkCWxv3kUE&feature=related

It appears these Senate bills are being introduced as a means of ensuring "national security" by regulating or drastically curtailing private use of the internet.  Perhaps just a false alarm, blowing smoke.  I hope so.

Regarding the issue with sub sales happening to some contributors even though they were opted out of subs, I received this email today from SX:

"You're receiving this e-mail because you opted out of having your content loaded to Photos.com and Jupiterimages Unlimited and we wanted to advise you of an error that occurred last week.

We were working on content migration between servers, and our Opt Out Process that excludes your content from loading onto Photos.com and Jupiterimages Unlimited was conducted out of sequence. This resulted in your images being offered from February 6 through February 11 on these two sites.

The error was discovered on February 11 and was fixed the same day. Your images are no longer available for download on Photos.com or Jupiterimages Unlimited.

You may see on your earnings report from February 7 - 12 subscription sales/downloads at $.30 each. In addition, you will be compensated with the Stockxpert PPD value at your normal 50% commission for these sales. You can expect this to be completed by February 20.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Please let us know if you have any questions or need further information.

Best regards,
The Stockxpert Team"

Sure, the incident shouldn't have happened in the first place, but the way they made it right shows that at least some people at StockXpert do take some thought for their contributors.  I looked in my account and confirmed that my sales were indeed credited. And best I was able to find, my images are no longer on JIU or photos.com

What would have been the outcome had this happened at Fotolia, I wonder??

Has this happened to anyone on Stockxpert??  I looked at my account this morning and found I had 4 subscription sales.  However, the strange thing is that I have never, not even accidentally, had my subscription option enabled in my profile, and I looked immediately and sure enough it is NOT enabled.  Did I miss an announcement that sub sales are not optional anymore on SX, or what???   I contacted support, but wondering if you'd had a similar problem and how it was resolved, if ever.

What are your favorite rechargeable batteries (especially AA-size) for your photo equipment, cameras, lights, etc?  I finally got an education in rechargeables, and realized that there's so much more to them than just buying any old set of chinese aa's and popping them in the cheap Walmart chargers I bought early last year.  What a waste of money those were!
Anyway, just wondering what everyone's experiences are with rechargeables, the most reliable ones you've found, etc.  I'm soon buying a bunch of eneloops and already bought 2 Maha chargers, which do a much better job than the junky cheap ones.

Did you see this one??

http://paradoxoff.com/mass-destruction-of-the-canon-cameras.html

Has anyone heard if DT is definitely going to implement a 12-month minimum commitment for uploaded images?  I read rumours about it a while ago but haven't heard anything since.  I don't spend much time on DT's site (and don't plan to) so don't know if they've mentioned it there.  One thing you can count on is that DT will not make it widely known if they do choose the 12-month minimum.  I'm sure that subscription sales have nothing to do with this possible decision......right?

Is anyone else having problems getting to the Featurepics website?  I haven't been able to sign on all day.  I don't remember seeing a notice on the their site yesterday about scheduled down-time. 

WOW!  Did you read on the SS forums about Yuri Arcurs' newest equipment acquisition for microstock work, a Hasselblad digital, 39mpx!!?  Using medium-format digital for microstock surely seems like overkill to me. 

I hope this doesn't become a standard anytime soon, or many of us will be sunk!  $80,000 for photo equipment is more than I can shell out right now (or at least this month.....)

Pete Bax on the SS forum sounded this alarm.  He believes a worm infection is possibly responsible for this.  He received a warning from the SS admin about his keywording.  Apparently some keywords were being added to his images without his knowledge and he was reprimanded for it!  "Dale Hogan" appeared in some of his keywords lists, which of course has nothing to do with his images, and thus caused the faulty keyword warning against him.  I've been playing with searches of "Dale Hogan" on various sites, and the results are really weird.  You can try it for yourself, but the main point is that you may want to do random checks of your keywords to make sure no unauthorized changes have been made to yours.

I've been considering joining Alamy.  However, I found this thread on their forum:

http://www.alamy.com/forums/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=939

Very interesting that some of their payments seem to be decreasing fairly rapidly, and also I read that they have regular trouble getting paid by some big purchasers, which means the photog gets zero until the purchaser actually pays alamy.   Perhaps it's not all it's cracked up to be for the trouble and work you have to put into it, in spite of some good payouts.  Any thoughts on alamy's future??
(PS- I like the way they refer to MS submitters as the "microstock Taliban," and try to blame MS for alamy's falling prices !!!    )

I found this on Gary Crabbe's blog, who I guess found it on Photo.net.    Not sure what the original book is, but I'd love to have a copy for my kids!

http://alecsoth.com/blog/careers/index.html#10

(Oops!  This should have a Fotolia subject line and not Dreamstime.  I'm not sure how to change that now that it's posted---sorry.)

Share your opinions of FT's upgrade to V2.  Here are my thoughts from the United States side:

--- Improvements: The only one I have noticed is that sales credits are immediately approved now rather than the original 3-day wait.  Oh, yes, and that hover-your-mouse-over-the-thumbnail enlarged view---wow.

--- Detriments:
     - As slow as or slower than V1.
     - New watermark makes for much easier thievery.
     - As of this writing a couple of my files still have no keywords.
     - The staff seem to be super-hyper-sensitive to any criticism, even worse than Istock, which is hard to imagine.
     - I still get their "floating status bar" which makes it impossible to see portions of my screen.

Overall, not much of an improvement for contributors, I think.  Sales are starting to pick up for me now that vacation-time is drawing to a close, so I hope that at least their search engine has seen a real upgrade.

Has anyone else noticed their istock royalty amounts slowly decreasing?  What I mean is, have you noticed your royalties per download shrinking?  For example, I've noticed that my medium downloads lately are usually nearer to 0.80 than istock's predicted 0.96 for non-exclusives.  I had a large sale today for 1.02, much lower than the 1.44 their model shows, and my large sales now seem to be consistently getting around 1.20.  It wasn't like that before, as far as I could tell.  Did I miss an announcement somewhere about decreasing royalties??  Just wondering if anyone knows why this would be happening.  If this is happening to more than just me, is it occurring to exclusives as well?  If so, not much of an incentive to go exclusive.

Have you heard about this site:  freerangestock.com ?   You donate your pictures to their site and make money by visitors clicking on advertising banners when they view your pictures. Right.  Here's an unedited quote directly from their photog terms: "First, make sure that you understand that the photos you upload will be given away and can be downloaded for commercial or non-commercial use."  The owner is apparently making the rounds soliciting photog's to join.  I guess if you are so desperate that you just want to have your pictures viewed and used by the world for basically free, then this site is for you.