I am a Emerald member.
Sales down 80%.

7 day rank from 120 down to 1600.

Fotolia is Dead for me!

Maybe we have something here. Im a small fish but my rank has gone up from ca 3000 to 2000, or even 1200 at some weeks.

Rimglow is right. Branding and style is important.

Does it matter?- If you get in on IS you can begin to upload all your crap, and have it accepted or not, including the initial 3, that just showed that you were somehow competent.
Actually I think that it is a good thing to separate the initial approvement from the sales department.

Like a contributor can prove his skills and then later on begin to deliver commercial pictures.

HA, it just happened to me!
They rejected 20 photos because of bad lighting.
Things like this:


Now I oploaded some of them again, with a note to the reviewer to take a second look and see if he agreed.

Kartels are unhealthy, and not good for competition and free market mechanismes, ans for "huge production costs".

No, there is always a guy who does not have "huge production costs", mabe because he lives in a cheap country, or maby because he think its fun to invest in photography.
Basically microstock means that all those photogs with high production costs are put out of busines, and  thats fine, exactly because they have high costs, and such pictures get cheaper.

Thats the meaning of competition, and now its global.
We are being croudsourced at the price of a bowl of rice.

Why do you speculate in this.
Just let them get back in operation.
It does not matter.

BUT... they had to raise prices, when they lowered commissions.
Else you would have felt it.

So they lovered commisions and raised prices so that we contributors did not make a revolution.

Generally your pictures have resolution problems. That would be reson enough to reject them at any site.
Resolution problems / noise, can be fixed by fx downsizing after a slight blur and contrast added.

Fx the baby was fine, but the person behind was not.

I started to watch, but couldn't deal with all the chat. I like tutorials that are to the point. I don't want to be entertained, at least not by a Photoshop tutorial.

I don't see a problem with doing more in depth work, but I think you need to break it into chapters with an intro. Very few people are going to commit an hour of their time for something like this, IMO

Same here. Topic misunderstood. You lost me at 4.32 min, where I already had to put up with 4 minutes of irrellevant chit chat. Get to the point man! rehearse the thing you want to show, find the crucial points, and do it in 5 minutes at the most. A tutorial is made for the viewer who wants to learn, not for the author to discuss chinese philosophy.

Ok:

Then I delete it.

;-)

1st one: underexposed, histogram not in the middle, dull colours, lens distortion (should be corrected) + horizon. And all numbers and brands must go away. Also there is noise, and you should resize the picture.

2nd one: Daring composition, wait with that till you have gotten in, It might however sell. Same problems with exposure  and noise as the above. Can be fixed. Gaussian blur 1 pix and resize, add contrast.
Youy do need to set white point and trim the histogram in levels.

In the long run, they are consistant enough.
I suggest you stop worrying.

If there is no money in it, then why not give it away?
We can have our ports op there sitting for them to use and resell in an affiliate circus.
Or we can deprive them of the opportunity to play circus with our rights.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of giving one of my pictures away to a South African painter.

She said, thank you very much!
People are nice, actually.
It made me feel good.