My favourite "controlled vocab" translation was the one they gave for "Venetian", apparently it means "inhabitant of Venus", which must be a shock to the inhabitants of Venice.  It was stuck in the CV for years but I think they eventually removed it.
So far, I haven't noticed any photos of inhabitants of Venus on iSTock, but I suppose they are hiding there, somewhere.

That's because they are Venusians - you used the wrong search term.  In this case the lack of images is not the CV but most likely the difficulty of getting Venusians to sign a model release!  There is one of a Venusian space ship - maybe someone can get them to sign a model release on their next visit.

PE potentially could be great, or it might just be a money pit.  They like to talk about how you get to keep 100% of the proceeds but that is not really true.  Up to $480 their commission is 100% and your net is zero.  You'd have to sell $960 worth to make the effective commission 50%.  To relate it to iS, you would have to sell $565 on PE for you to net 15% or $600 for 20%.  Anything above that and you're better off than at iS as an independent, but you would still make more off of equivalent sales at SS.  That may be possible for you big players but not likely for us small fry.  At how many small, new sites do you make more than $565 a year?

I wish PE well but will sit on the sidelines and watch what happens.  At this point I'd rather a one-time fee to set up my own site than continuing charges for an unproven entity.

Maybe something has changed?

I think it's a couple of rogue reviewers.  Either that or they have dramatically tightened down on acceptance rates.  I've been averaging 80-100% acceptance on most batches there for the past several months, then for the last two batches, 17/20 rejected, most for focus.  The same images were accepted 80-100% on all other agencies and are similar in quality to those that received high acceptance previously.  Will downsize and resubmit most of them to see what happens - in the past that has worked fine but not so confident now.

The union's intransigence was the final straw, but the company went bankrupt because of bad management and lack of innovation.  Their product line sucked and they did nothing to improve it or keep it current.  Wonder Bread originated in the 1920s and Twinkies in the 1930s.  When was the last time you had a Twinkie or gave one to your kids?  Yuck.  They were new and different 80 years ago but just don't cut it nowadays.  Management failed to keep the product line current and now wants to blame the unions for their own failures.  They could limp along when times were good, but the prolonged recession is weeding out those companies where the top managers are not deserving their high salaries.  They also had taken on way too much debt (sound familiar?).  For Hostess bankruptcy was inevitable, the only question was when.

Sure, mine are:
SS    0.53
IS     0.54 (including PP; 1.37 without)
FT     0.66
DT     0.92
123   0.79
CS     0.93

and over the whole year:
SS    0.60
IS     0.76 (including PP)
FT     0.61
DT     1.25
123   0.81
CS     1.05

Pretty similar to yours.

November is already 25% better than October and the second best month of the year and we're not even halfway through so my experience is different.  Might end up a BME.

Should be a BME or at least close to it for me on SS.  Almost a BME so far for CanStock and 123 is doing great as well.  DT solid, others hanging in there.  Hope it continues like this.

Last month I submitted two that actually were similar except for a different color cast to the background.  The first one was rejected for technical reasons and the second because it was too similar - to the one that was rejected so neither got in.  Weird.  Both for technical reasons I can understand, but how could it be too similar to one that wasn't in the database?  Both were accepted just fine (and sold) everywhere else except iS.  Oh well.

Usually 1-4 days. The slowest during the past few months for me has been 8 days.

Me too.

Why can't artists be investors, too?  They're not mutually exclusive.

I thought about buying some SSTK but wasn't enthusiastic enough to actually do it.  I just checked today and it is around $24.75 after starting at $21 - more than a 17% increase.  If you had invested $2000 initially you would have made more than $350 so far - not spectacular but not bad (and much better than return on some of the smaller microstock sites).  Certainly a far better investment than facebook!

That's how I did it, too.  I think the "correct" way to do it depends on what you want to know.  If your goal is to determine whether microstock is financially worthwhile relative to other activities then you probably should use total images, regardless of whether they get accepted - that will indicate return on total effort.  For a business that is what you will want to know.  If your goal is to see which agencies return the most per accepted image then do it only on those accepted.  That's what I do, because I want to know which agencies work the best for me and should be the focus of future efforts.  In my case for the past two years that agency is Shutterstock by a wide margin.  The two years before that it was  iStock.  My RPI for accepted images on SS has been nearly the same over the past 4 years, while iStock has dropped by more than half.  The numbers would be different but the trend the same if I used all images produced because acceptance rates are not that different between the agencies.

I tried ProStockMaster but it doesn't work with my computer's operating system - will try it if I get around to upgrading the OS.  In the meantime I use DeepMeta for iS and just ftp for the rest.