If you haven't already, you need to learn to read Alamy's rather obfuscating sales reports so you know where things stand. The only thing that's right up front on the dashboard is your current cleared balance - which may be $0 even if you've made sales and the gross value of sales you made in the current month.

If you click on the Sales History button, that will show you gross sales and any refunds. This money is not what you will earn - you need to see the net amount and what has cleared by clicking the Account Balance button.

For every sale, you can see the details on what your royalty is - at least, if you subtract any distributor's take and Alamy's take from the gross sale, you can see what your net amount is. On the far right is a column that shows o for cleared, x for uncleared and a date if they've paid you already.

If it still made sense to be exclusive at iStock, I don't think I'd see the mass exodus of long-time exclusives that I've seen (not representative sample, I know).

I don't think the earnings numbers account for different media, so anything you see there for exclusive earnings may be hard to do anything useful with

You also should look at the current prices and royalties for illustrations. Just about everything has changed there since 2011.

...But, if this is indeed a cull, then why take down images that have been included in the purchasable layouts and sell well? It doesn't make much sense to delete an image that has sold, (and is still selling), several hundred times. I'm just trying to ascertain whether there is another reason. I have asked Canva a couple of times, but my emails are falling on deaf ears. Maybe they are too busy dealing dealing with customer complaints to listen to contributors.

I would just remind those who may not know about Canva's history, that asking questions and communicating about Canva here, with fellow contributors, can get your account closed. Ask me how I know that?

Specifically, I was (1) asking about why they were removing images that were selling; (2) asking for contributor guidelines about what images they don't want so neither they nor we waste time uploading content; and (3) communicating here that after they promised they would provide the guidelines, Lee Torrens sent me email saying they wouldn't put guidelines together as " ...the vast majority of our contributors don't need nor want them, so our time is better spent on the things they value."

Perhaps things have changed, perhaps Lee has gone elsewhere, but tread carefully if you want to keep your portfolio there.

Unless you plan to spend time in court and money on lawyers to argue the toss about questionable intellectual property issues, ignore all advice regarding intellectual property from the user unnonimus. It is irrelevant hair splitting over the possible interpretations of legalities if any issue actually went to court.

As a stock photographer, you want to avoid going to court - it eats up time and earnings and the goal is to make money not case law.

Agencies have their requirements - and they're not uniform - but are generally risk averse. As the photographer, you probably should err on the side of caution and get releases wherever possible. Don't end up like the photographer in Dance Steps on Broadway - he got the agency to take the photo down and still ended up having to settle the suit.

My goodness, look at the terrible reviews on Facebook.  Such a good product with a unique selling point.  How did things go so wrong?
https://www.facebook.com/pg/canva/reviews/

Their corporate eye is elsewhere - "Australia's Unicorn" is busy expanding...

https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news-analysis/canva-makes-first-acquisition-of-presentations-startup-zeetings-to-end-death-by-powerpoint/

And Perkins is the "...darling of Australia's tech scene."

https://thewest.com.au/business/rich-list/wa-rich-list-2018-how-sacred-heart-graduate-melanie-perkins-built-billion-dollar-tech-empire-canva-ng-b88795945z

I don't have any skin in the game (they terminated my account when Lee Torrens got upset over me reminding him of unanswered questions for contributors), but they have/had the potential to do something really different - as opposed to all the I-want-to-be-the-next-Shutterstock carbon copies. It would be a huge shame if they lost sight of getting the basics right - and reading that Facebook page is jaw-dropping - and let the whole project founder.

Many companies with negative comments clean those things up - which Canva hasn't - so I guess their heart's in the right place even though customer service appears to be understaffed or inept or...

Putting on a performance for the funders, analysts and tech magazines won't help if the product or customer service are ticking customers off.

I'm not submitting pictures of myself at the moment, but I have done. When iStock tightened up the rules about model releases to one per shoot, they made an exception for self portraits because you're never going to sue yourself - there's just no legal risk.

You had to put some wording up top to flag this - mine said (in red so they couldn't miss it, and still some reviewers did): "This is a self portrait. Catch-all release is allowed". Perhaps someone currently submitting self portraits to Shutterstock should suggest that they allow a similar exception.

The other thing iStock allowed was one release for a multi-day "session". I think there was some limit of less than one week. Was very useful when you use family/friends in a setting you're staying at to cut down on the paperwork. I believe subject matter needed to be similar for this exception to be permitted - so no mixing boudoir shots with tennis games and sports at the beach on one release.

There is no point in asking them for "answers" - they've already told you everything you need to know by their actions thus far.

Removal of large quantities of images would get their attention - if anything would induce them to change their mind, and it's possible that nothing would - think the late, not-so-great Dollar Photo Club. Think about what you want them to do - restore the old rate schedule, for example - and set a date by which they do that or the images get removed.

Anything less is a waste of energy. My view is moot as I left the agency when my royalty rate dropped from 45% to 40% because they're not doing well on the sales front but their failures affect my royalty rates.

I'm guessing they're trying to prep the business for a sale so they can get out. It's possible they don't want a contributor revolt as it would put buyers off, so they might act. I doubt that the fundamentals of the business would improve even if they did put the royalty rates back where they were, so it might well be a victory with not much of a contributor benefit. They don't appear to be investing in the business, or advertising in Google searches (you used to see their ads and thumbnails, but now hardly at all)

Mine just came through

Mine just arrived too

When you upload to the agencies, you are making a representation about the rights you hold in the work you upload. Each agency has slightly different rules, and you want to make sure you don't violate those and have your account closed which could cause losses to you much greater than any gain from using a sky image from a stock photo.

Look at section 14 in the SS terms to see what they expect as one example.

https://submit.shutterstock.com/legal/terms/

I have my own collection of sky photographs that I use whenever I need a sky - with something like that where you can so easily get your own, I can't imagine why you'd even consider using a stock image with all the attendant legal risk.

I googled "Dreamstime sues Google" and there was nothing recent - mostly the past legal challenges to the way Google behaves. Limiting the search to just the last week didn't improve things. Before concluding Google was burying the news on purpose, I thought I'd try Bing - nothing.

Perhaps suits against Google are so common that none of the business trade rags find this newsworthy? Google's parasitic, but given all the changes they make all the time, it'll be hard to prove that any changes they made that hurt Dreamstime were specifically directed at them.

It may well be that Google's recent changes hurt Dreamstime - and other stock agencies - but Dreamstime doomed itself long before 2015, and they never did better than a perennial #3 in the earnings rankings. The biggest problem, IMO, was their insane pricing policies - way, way too complex. They also had some bizarre games with search rankings on their own site (going back years, to 2007/8)  that probably didn't help the customer get the best results.

Given Google's deep pockets and army of lawyers, I can't see anything good coming out of this.

I didn�t receive February payment either.  And I�m traveling using a mobile device and can�t access the link to contact support.  Is there a phone number?

Not sure if these are for contributors or just customers, but 1-866-663-3954 (I think that's toll-free) and 1-646-419-4452 (regular number)

Works OK for me (Chrome on a Mac)

...You need to provide the licensing terms before many will join.

You have the terms and conditions for the site up now, but not the license you plan to offer buyers, and as Sean indicates, anyone who's been selling for more than 5 minutes will want to see the license - if you're offering the equivalent of extended licenses for a $5 price, it's a non-starter regardless of royalty rate. If you offer the content to partner sites, do we have the ability to opt out of those (which typically are a crappy deal for contributors as there are three mouths to feed instead of two).

Another red flag for me (from the terms and conditions) is the 90 day delay in removing content, especially for a new site with an unknown owner. I can appreciate you don't want to spend all the money to review content only to have contributors delete it on a whim, but look at it from the contributor side. Submitting valuable content to a brand new site is a risk - you could be the next big success as a stock agency or be bundling our files up to sell behind our backs and  until there's a track record for your agency, we won't know which it is. Even if we want to leave as a result of a change in the terms you impose a 30 day wait.

As others have noted above, you need to talk about how you're planning to market the site. Uploading images to a new site is work - no marketing means no return for our work.

Why will anyone buy from you when they can buy $5 images from Shutterstock's huge collection? Yes, they have to pay $49 for 10 images, but there's no commitment beyond that. Dreamstime has a one month "subscription" of 5 images for $25 (smaller collection than SS, but still a decent size). 123rf has a one month "subscription" of 10 images for $39. I don't think you can make price and a single item purchase much of a differentiator, especially when you're just starting out with a small collection.