This was my worst month of the year. Lots of sites had returns in the lowest 3 or so for the year and there were no standouts. SS and Alamy had the highest return but they were both below average for the year. DT was back down to pretty sad and 123 RF was the lowest of the year. Pretty disappointing really.

I uploaded by ftp yesterday. After a few hours they still hadn't shown up to be processed. This afternoon they are there.

In the history of microstock, has there ever been a legally enforced image violation?

I got paid a fatter than usual EL from SS after they found a calendar company using images w/o paying for ELs and went after them.

They might be vaguely up for me over the last few months, but nothing dramatic (or that good).

I liked some comedian's response to that - something like "I went to a movie and they had a trailer all about how getting movies from the internet for free was stealing. I was like "Whoa - you can get movies from the internet for free?""

I think that if blog sites (like blogspot) etc. at least mentioned what you can and can't legally do with images from the internet that might be more useful. Some people genuinely don't know, but it is the ones that know and profit from the theft that I am more worried about.  - as click click said above.

I agree there should be an easy way to do it yourself, but there isn't. I sent them a sitemail and they changed them all for me.

Out of my last 20 sales 13 are subs, mostly low level but one is a 4 and one a level 5 - ouch. Actually what hurts worse is the 50 credit EL that I got something like 17.3 cents per credit.  I wonder if they switched the default statistics from monthly to quarterly to mask the sudden drop - although when this quarter is done it is going to be pretty obvious in my stats (unless things really pick up).

They rejected about 40% of my last month or 2s uploads (they really are slow) all for

"Composition, styling, and/or lighting do not quite reflect the aesthetic that appeals to Veer customers. Please review our Contributor Guidelines to get a better sense of what we're looking for. "

Which I can understand for some of them, but others it just appears that was the first button the reviewer pressed. I agree that submit and forget is a good habit for your blood pressure with the smaller agencies. Acceptance/rejection just seems like a random thing to me very often. Still it sucks when everything gets rejected, since there is no way it can sell if it isn't there.

So if you sell an image through them at Alamy for 100$, does Alamy get 40, and you and Yay each get 30 or does Alamy get 40 and Yay 10 and you 50?

Much better than how Veer went about it anyway.

Originally they didn't sell smaller sizes, so every sale was at 6$ = 3.20 - not too bad. Now that some sales are at the smaller sizes for less, I think I'll bump things up a level.

DT has actually bounced back somewhat from an absolutely horrible July for me - It is near my 12 month average and above average for RPD. I must admit the level 4 and 5 subs for .35 are painful to see though.  My acceptance ratio (on a small number submitted) is pretty sad though.

I must say I am enjoying getting 70% this week, it makes a nice change. Thanks Envato.

relevant search is supposed to weight the keywords according to previous searches and purchases.

Imagine you search "orange" - leaving out the disambiguation. a most popular search might return a very popular image of a woman in an orange bikini but a relevant search should return an orange. If you spam a picture of something else with orange it shouldn't come up with a relevant search but if it sells a lot it would come up in a most popular type search.

Also for the images that are actually many many images - for example animal silhouette vectors. If you search on "elephant" they would come up on top of a popular search but probably not on top of a relevant search - or at least not as close to the top of the search.

Now as far as bringing up generic looking images or images that aren't yours - well, to some extent that is the luck of the draw. Hopefully over time great images will sift up to the top and crap to the bottom, but I have seen plenty of images that are poor representations of the activity portrayed at the top of searches to have much faith in that. I think buyers are at least partly to blame for this. Also timing and luck.

I do think the sites need to address the spam issue and they need to be draconian with those who are genuine serial spammers.