I can offer a theory from the perspective of a user.  First I'm not surprised, and I'm sorry you have seen a drop in sales.  As you may know, Fotolia requires users to purchase credits for $1 each, but a minimum of 10 credits must be purchased each time.  Then, they keep any unused money once their timeframe for usage has lapsed.  In New York, retailers tried to pull this stunt by voiding gift cards, and the legislators put a stop to it.  It is theft, plain and simple.  Unless a user knows s/he will use all 10 of those credits, they are victims of this fraud.  Any business that uses this type of policy to fill a hole in their revenue should suffer in sales, and reputation.  Perhaps others got wise to their nonsense and went elsewhere for their image needs.  I hope you find a competitor who can provide you with the sales you hope for.  Best of luck.  I'm off Fotolia, and telling my colleagues to do the same!

istock credits expire too

These drives don't have good reviews. Hight failure rates...

Brilliant 

Just got another photo of fire flames rejected with the reason "We are looking for images that exceed the technical quality and creativity of the images already online. Thank you"
I have many photos of flames and I have not been able to get any of them accepted recently. It feels like there is a brick wall now built for this type of shots. The funny thing is all my recently rejected fire photos were shot with brand new Canon 5d Mark II in 21Mp quality. Half a year ago a lot of similar photos from me was accepted without a single problem. And those accepted were shot on an older 5D in 12Mp. Go figure.

Overall rank   214
7 days rank   85

7 keywords used to be relevant before, not anymore.

Did Fotolia customer service confirmed that too?

The problem is how do we register a collection of thousands of already published photos if we didn't register them continuously every three months?

Of course it is not the case now. I'm talking about future scenarios. I would not want the worst paying agency to succeed.

Quote from: Zeus on April 09, 2009, 09:32

I believe that Fotolia keeps somewhere between 60 and 70% of each transaction. According to you Fred, I am supposed count myself lucky that they don't keep more. In the past few months Fotolia has devised two sneaky methods to retain more of  OUR earnings. The first was increasing the number of downloads to attain the various ratings and the other was an increase the price of OUR images but decrease the commissions. Now in this thread, people are posting their experience with earnings since the inception of the second claw back method. If Fotolia can't advertise with huge commission they already retain then maybe they should go under. However I think it is just a matter of greed.

Peter

And don't forget that they took away the referral program without letting us know so we would keep all of our FT banners on our websites.

And that's not all.
1 fotolia credit in Europe costs 1 Euro. But most of us, submitters, have 1 fotolia credit value set to $1 USD. So when European customers spends 1 credit on a photo Fotolia gets 1 Euro = $1.31 USD and I get 34 US cents. That makes the actual comission from all European sales about 26%.

I've also thought about this recently and decided that most probably there will be no raise this year.

Overall rank   240
7 days rank   100

I have a great deal of respect for Alamy. The way they handle such situations should be an example for some other companies. Like Fotolia which comes to mind as an opposite example of how not to deal with submitters.