I sell next to nothing on Pond 5 (I just have a small subset of my photos there) but I opted out.

I am curious to know more about this but I do not care for these "black box" deals where the agency tells the contributor next-to-nothing about what's being sold and for how much. In this case the big missing piece is the price - 50% of 3 cents isn't interesting, so telling me 50% royalties is completely unhelpful.

Also, 50% for contributors in other cases - Pond5's Extended License - is 50% of the net proceeds where Pond5 takes out the legal guarantee fee first. They don't even say how much they'll take in the contributor agreement.

Saying that they're marketing only to people who don't currently buy from them is daft - if the new customer comes back for a second round of purchases from this new program, will Pond5 turn them away as they no longer qualify? If an existing customer hears about the program and wants in, will they really refuse them??

This is akin to the stinking pile of trash arguments that we hear so often about the new lower subscription prices attracting new buyers versus just cutting the price and royalties for existing customers (Shutterstock is the most recent peddler of this rubbish). It's something you tell contributors to get them to go along with your plan.

Without knowing anything about the details, it's possible these deals could include upfront payments to buy into the arrangement (of which contributors get nothing) along with the very low per image/clip payments. Keeping the deal hidden from contributors is just bad policy, and even though Pond5 isn't the only agency to do this, I'm opting out until they tell us more about the arrangement. If big contributors go along, then it won't make any difference, but if they get too many contributors opting out, they may get a clue and explain themselves more fully.

https://www.shutterstock.com/special/partners

This says that BigStock's stuff is used at art.com (but some of the partnerships on this page are really out of date - the amazon stuff about wall art just shows a couple of "out of stock" items)

Complaining about badly designed software, software with bugs or the fact that instead of paying for a set of decent QA people, SS hopes contributors will do their QA for free is perfectly reasonable.

Doesn't matter what the year is.

SS is a public company that takes the lion's share of what buyers pay them to run an agency. For that lion's share they need to do their job, competently. Contributors can certainly report the odd bug, but it sounds from the SS forum posts as if this unasked for feature update isn't ready for alpha testing.

This isn't some cooperative project where we all pitch in - and if it ever was, it has long, long since ceased to be. Suggesting we should all just chill strikes me as dismissive and rude.

... but I don't understand why Adobe is pushing Fotolia to an end, with a super annoying reCaptcha and with almost no sales at all while other agencies are working fine, is there any difference between Adobe Stock and Fotolia

I understand that your account has problems, but once those are sorted out I think you'll see that Fotolia is still fully functional - I upload via Adobe Stock and check all my stats via Fotolia (because it has more to offer at the moment on the contributor side of things).

You can't always tell, but as many of the royalty amounts are different via the different sites, I know I'm still getting sales via Fotolia as well as via Adobe Stock. You'll see Adobe/Fotolia is the number two site on the list on the right - and that's true for me and at similar ratios. I only see the captcha on my mobile device.

Perhaps Mat Hayward can help you get your account migration problems sorted out - he has an account here and you could send him a message.

...What are the realistic earnings potential for having photographs non-exclusively in 10-20 sites?

Depends on the photographs and on the sites

If you look at the poll results listed here, they're roughly a gauge of what to expect from the microstock sites. The low earners are a waste of time - if you were already there, like I am at Dreamstime, it'd be OK to stay, but otherwise don't bother.

People have advocated using a mix of sites - some macro, some specialist (if you have suitable content), some mobile, etc. Stocksy is currently accepting new artists - have you considered them? One or more niches may work well for you and then you focus more on supplying them. It's hard to know without trying sites out with your content.

Some of the decisions are different for video or illustrations from photographs. Many photographers have branched out into video as a way to counteract the stagnant income (or decline) for stills. Occasionally there's something really innovative - Canva was the last site of that sort introducing micro RM licensing. There are always hopefuls stopping by here with a new agency pitch - mostly focusing on building the web site and not on finding and appealing to buyers. Most are come and gone pretty quickly, but there's hope that a newcomer might improve the list of choices at some point.

Spread the risk and stay flexible

The loathing of Getty started well before they stepped into the microstock world by buying iStock. They bought up lots of smaller agencies and then changed the terms of deals with photographers to boost Getty's bottom line.

They systematically cut back control contributors had over how their work was licensed - choosing RM versus RF licensing, for example. For photographs and for music. As Getty got bigger and more powerful, smaller agencies put work with Getty and percentages for contributors got smaller and smaller. Various efforts to move the focus back to the creator of images were started but didn't go far.

The royalty cutting went with all acquisitions, such as Pump Audio in 2009 where they promptly cut the royalty rate from 50% to 35% unless to changed to exclusive status. All sorts of tales of ethically challenged tactics.

There's a quote from an old article about Getty acquiring Photo Disc "Getty would probably prefer to license usages for several hundred dollars each rather than $49.95, as long as they can. But there are some very interesting advantages to the PhotoDisc model for the stockholders. With every PhotoDisc sale Getty pays a much smaller share of the licensing fee to the image creator, and thus keeps a greater profit for the stockholders."

Two rounds of private equity owners, Hellman & Friedman and Carlyle, have left the company saddled with debt - see here, here and here. Their struggles to deal with that financial bind resulted in more squeezes on contributors and Jonathan Klein's departure when he couldn't turn things around.

There are masses of articles about the various shenanigans Getty has pulled over the years, but I think you get the general drift from the above. Many times people have put up with the stream of bad news and pro-Getty anti-contributor changes because they made enough money at Getty that they couldn't easily walk away, but this doesn't breed positive feelings.

SS is # 9 on the "Challengers" list.  Adobe is #15 on the leaders lists - apparently we'll be using Photoshop via voice command before too long

"Rare is the 35-year-old tech company that can go head-to-head with the startups. But software purveyor Adobe Systems has seen its stock more than quadruple in the past five years alone. That�s thanks in part to its prescient 2012 transition to cloud-based delivery, which meant selling software via online subscription (rather than a box with a CD in it). That wasn�t the company�s first self-disruption�it invented the PDF in 1993 after it had already sold several successful design programs�and it may not be its last. Adobe is now channeling its immense scale and data troves into artificial intelligence applications. Soon you�ll be Photoshopping vacation photos via voice command."

The scoring system: " To rank the companies, each was given a score based on its market potential and its own capacity in four areas: strategy, people, technology and investment, and corporate structure."

There's an explanation of the ranking (honestly I'm not sure that this whole approach makes any sense at all, but you can play with the weights to see what difference it makes to ranking)

http://fortune.com/future-50/visualizations/challengers/?iid=recirc_ff_50landing-zone1

The thing that dropped SS down the list the most was increasing the importance of strategy to be much higher than the default

SS had a very good month - buoyed by strong SODs. Best month since November 2015; best October since 2013 (November has always been my top month). Compared to either of those earlier months, the SODs this month were a lot higher - which is both good and bad news. The bad part is it shows how the other mainstays (subs and on demand) have weakened.

Adobe was a BME (but I've only been back there since mid-December last year, so that's not really a surprise). In spite of that it was half of SS, so there's still room for them to grow a bit.

DT was pathetic - just over half of October 2016 and 13% of October 2013 (and yes, I do mean just over one tenth of the earlier total).

Alamy had only two small sales - I was beginning to think I'd accidentally deleted my portfolio

I have only a handful of files left at iStock so nothing that happens there is meaningful (variations on tiny)

... It is better to have educated agencies that understand copyright laws, than have uneducated and misguided agencies that have no clue about copyrights....

Then please do everyone a favor and address your arguments in favor of your point of view to the agencies, not to us.

For anyone new to the stock agencies who reads this: It doesn't really matter to a contributor what one country's copyright rules are. What matters are the agency requirements. If you don't meet them, they won't accept your content. Arguing law(s) from various countries with them will not help.

If you plan to sell your own work, erring on the side of conservative interpretations of IP (intellectual property) rights will avoid you having to spend money on lawyers that will likely dwarf anything you might make from an image. Your goal is probably to make money licensing your work, not get a legal education and drain your bank account.

But they've made Wall Street happy because the earnings beat expectations - lower profits, but they were slightly higher than the forecast. The earnings call transcript later should be interesting - although in general the analyst questions are so clueless and toothless that I shouldn't get too excited

If you read a bit further you'd see I did try with my 5D Mk II files and saw better results from ON1 with those (Chromatic Aberration was still a problem, but all that crunchy mess was gone). I have masses of CR2 files to test with, but I mostly care about Fuji RAW going forward and some software doesn't handle the Xtrans sensor files well