Apple is not a Mobile Phone Service provider. There is always room for innovation and new ideas in the marketplace.

I'm guessing you didn't read the article I linked.  Dvorak's point was that the customer device makers have to please is the service provider, not the end user, and that Apple couldn't offer the provider anything the other makers couldn't.  He was wrong because he assumed that, in the words of Jesus, "As it was in the beginning so shall it be in the end."  Apple bet otherwise, and appears to have been right.

There are ways to change the game, perhaps in how you deal with contributors but more likely in how you appeal to buyers.  I'd argue that appealing to contributors has possibilities if it attracts those who can produce valuable content but who are not involved with microstock today, or even if it gets them to produce work they aren't producing today.  Imagine for example a micro that helps to subsidize the cost of more sophisticated shoots, or helps to arrange them, or makes available equipment or settings in exchange for exclusivity on the resulting images.  How many of us would shoot and submit to such a site?  I'd certainly look hard at them.

Just because I feel like being a contrarian, I'd suggest you read this 2007 by John Dvorak explaining why Apple was about to get its teeth kicked in by existing mobile phone providers.  He was of course dead wrong, both for his conclusions and the reasoning that got him there.  Even in what seems a stable market there's opportunity for an innovative player.  Heck, stable markets are the best ones for an innovator, assuming they have enough backing and enough innovation.  I'd argue that both are required to change an existing game.

What they pay per download doesn't matter nearly as much to me as how much I make.  iStock pays more on average per download, but they both bring in about the same amount per month.  Fotolia generates about half of that, and everybody else produces less.  What they pay  for a sale only matters if I get sales.

Would I like to be paid more?  Certainly.  Am I grateful for what they pay me?  No.  It's a business relationship, and one that has to be mutually beneficial.  They aren't a charity, and neither am I.  Gratitude doesn't enter into it, except from not feeling like I'm being taken advantage of.

In any event, I defend Shutterstock because I see it being attacked and because I judge those attacks to be unfair.  Or should only those with a gripe be given a voice here?

No company is going to unilaterally decide to pay their suppliers more than they are asking.

Well, that's not entirely true.  How else do you explain Shutterstock's increasing royalties several times over its history?  Jon looked at his business, decided that he could raise prices and, once he felt he understood how that affected customers' downloading behavior, increased payouts.  Seems to me I was getting .20 per download when I started there.  Now I get .36.  If that isn't a company deciding unilaterally to pay its suppliers more, what is?

Of course, a combination of a down economy and more aggressive competition may entice companies to move in the opposite direction.  I hope not, but won't be surprised.

OT perharps... btw, which of the Big 6 has the lowest payout? This could be an incentive to join them.
Can anyone who belongs to all 6 tell us?

BigStock has the lowest: $30 for PayPal.  Then Fotolia*, StockXpert and 123RF at $50.  Then Shutterstock at $75.  iStock and Dreamstime bring up the rear at $100.

*Fotolia will let you cash out any time, but hit you with a fee if you have less than $50 in your account.

As others have already said, RPI is a poor measure of success.  It depends way too much on what you shoot and how you submit.  My early submissions were a combination of scenics, architecture and still life.  Typically, I'd submit one or two shots of a given subject.  If they were accepted and had sales, the average RPI would be high.  Now I'm shooting a lot more people, mostly in studio but sometimes on location.  The shoots are more expensive, with studio and model fees, and I'll submit as many good shots as I can.  So instead of one or two submissions from a shoot, I'll have dozens.  RPI will be a lot lower, even as I hope the aggregate revenue to be higher. 

Put another way, I'm trying to optimize total revenue, not revenue per image.

fine, but are we sure the buyers are aware of this ?

for instance about pornography use, i had no idea about it.
RF is universally sold as "do what you want with it".

Try Googling the phrase "Ignorantia juris non excusat".  Agencies make their license terms available to their clients; it's up to the clients to read, understand and live within them.  And I would dispute your second statement.  RF is not sold as you suggest.  Any agency that stated or implied such a thing would lose its suppliers and its content in a flash.

Contact the folks in contributor relations. I reviewed your rejections and MR's. The only one I see that was rejected was a file that was missing the Model release altogether. Sorry for the inconvenience but if you try contacting us directly I'm sure things can be resolved.

Pieman, are you able to see rejections that have since been resolved?  Two of the images rejected for the lack of a witness date have now been accepted; the other two are still pending.  The rejection emails were exactly as I posted.  I can forward them to you if you provide me an email address.

Every time I think I've seen maximal arbitrariness, iStock proves me wrong.  Today's batch of acceptances and rejections included four rejections:

Upon initial inspection, we have determined that your file Blonde requires a model or property release for it to be considered for inclusion in the iStockphoto library.

The following note was supplied by an administrator:

Incomplete information (addresses, phone numbers etc.) Please have a new release filled out and uploaded.

++missing signature date for witness++

I find a few things interesting about this one.  First, that the rest of the batch were accepted with exactly the same release.  Second, that this hasn't been an issue with any of the releases I've submitted over the past year and a half.  And third, because I always have the release witnessed by someone who was there to see the release filled out.  After all, how can they witness something they didn't, ummm, witness?

So I wrote in the date the release was signed (and witnessed) and uploaded it.  We'll see what happens.  And then we'll see what outrage they come up with next.

Is it useful to point out that "useful" has just one L?

Ha!ha! That's funny !   Partly related topic to elephants,  you have a curious-looking avatar, disorderly. Are those gorillas?

Gorillas?  I think I've been insulted!  No, that's a self-portrait.  I was on a ski lift coming down from one of the Andes Mountains near Bariloche, Argentina when I saw my shadow in the lupins growing on the mountainside.  Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to capture the moment.

Well - I strongly suspect they are going to reject even the similars!

I seriously doubt it.  Finding identical images is enough of a challenge, at least if you're going beyond  bit-for-bit identical files.  Think of the problems of parsing identical images that were saved at different levels of compression or by different applications.  But similar files?  Writing an algorithm for that invites a high percentage of false positives.  This presupposes that they aren't about to try manual comparisons, which would be too slow and expensive to be worth it.

I'm doing reasonably well at SX.  It's reliably fifth, although it's running ahead of Ftl this month.  Over the last twelve months, BigStock brings in a little over half of SX, and 123 is a little over half of BigStock.