NICE. not a BDE, but a nice boost. thanks SS.

Scott, thanks for coming here to try to keep us informed. It all sounds good but unless I get to play in the sandbox eventually I can't get too excited. I like hearing words about valueing the photographers and so on, but 30% isn't all that great. You also might want to take a look at what bigstock is doing to demotivate contributors these days.

Part time but I have no other job probably describes me best. From time to time I think about upping my game but then something comes up (like the trip to Patagonia I am on now). Still the stock $ are nice. I just wish so many sites weren't playing screw the contributor.

Luckily I have honed my skills of living for less over years of living in my truck.

DT always kicks off changes with how they will benefit contributors (at least when telling the contributors about it). When I look at my DT earnings graph the general trend is a slow rise with drastic drops for the 2 big commission cuts that were to benefit contributors followed by a slow rise again (except it has been pretty stagnant lately).

The similars policy always seemed rather poorly implemented to me anyway, it would be nice if they actually accepted things that were different instead of rejecting them as similar. At least now they are finally admitting that maybe the policy wasn�t the best idea after all. It only took what? 2 or 3 years?

Sales are about the same as last year, $ are less for me, more for them. It seems that actual $ per sale are even lower than the % drop would suggest. Probably some sort of promotional discount which comes out of our take also instead of out of their marketing budget like it should.

I uploaded most of my images to P5 directly, and when I searched I could no longer find the 123RF stuff that had been there. Considering that w/ the 123RF stuff we might get <<25% of a sale I am much happier to send it there directly. Reviews seem to take a long time, but otherwise it was fairly painless to get my stuff there. This month sales seem to have justified the effort. Hopefully that continues.

No way is SF middle tier for me. I think I made more on p5 this month than I ever have on SF total in over a year.

I made 3X my BS earnings at Vr last year - funny how mileage varies.  The ELs are nice, the minimal subs aren't. The reviews can be fairly quick or take ages - I just fire and forget there. They did mess up with the Alamy thing, but then they actually fixed it.

Maybe something about a fair way to deal with different currencies around the globe - fair for buyers and sellers without lots of games.

I like GL, although my sales look more like a bell curve than a growth chart there. I have been quite impressed with Pond 5 images lately, but maybe that is because most of my images there are new. As long as the sites pay decent percent and aren't too much trouble to upload to and don't have insanely low prices I'd say they should be supported. Sites like IS and FT have a long history of shady deals, others like 123RF have a shorter history of this, but it isn't a good trend.

I stopped uploading when they announced the RC thing, then when images were going to be forced into PP I went from about 950 images to 50. I kept ones that didn't get accepted at SS and that seemed to sell well at IS but not elsewhere as well as a bunch of old and smaller images. So I didn't really delete my port, but I did remove most of it. My IS income seemed to only go down about 70% for a while (a few months) and then it plummeted. Based on my December sales, I have essentially left Istock - but maybe not the PP.

I didn't notice any great boost at other sites, but my total has gone up the last 3 years. I think Alamy and SS took up the slack last year (2012), and Veer had a nice run in 2011 plus their dash for cash kicked in a nice bit in 2010 - they were flat in 2012 though.

IS was never a major player for me, they seemed to reject a lot of my stuff combined with the upload limits and the best match changes killing any promising sellers. Still, before they jumped the shark (v1) they were my #2 site with about 25%.

Actually it would be in their interest to promote level 1 and 2 images because they get a higher percent of each sale. Perhaps they are getting a bit of blowback from their greed - remember there is a connection between many microstock producers and buyers. Sales there were promising in the first half of 2012 but the second half of 2012 was pretty weak for me, so maybe that trend continues.

On most sites things haven't picked up after the holiday slump for me, so maybe they will pick up. Hopefully their buyers will go somewhere that I still get 50% of every sale though.

ETA - I have only 4 sales there so far with a whopping RPI of .304