Sorry to hear that. People are screaming BMEs everywhere? I doubt it. Not a cosolation but I really dont think too many independants here are doing all that much better.

I think that sooner or later ss will not be as good a place as it has been up til now for image contributors view

Jon and I are kicking around some ideas on how to improve the search. We have an idea right now of maybe making a percentage based system to help return the results in a "best first" format. Example the phrase cow being searched and it finds the keyword cows in the list. That matches 3 of 4 characters, vs finding the word coworkers where it would be 3 of 9. So the higher percentage would be cows (shown first).

We have a lot more ideas and will be improving this search.

Quote from: stockastic on September 14, 2012, 18:21

Quote from: ShadySue on September 14, 2012, 18:17

Quote from: stockastic on September 14, 2012, 18:16

ShadySue does have a point although I don't see how that point implies a criticism of the OP.    It is true that if - for a given search - agency 'A' simply presents more pages of cr@p than agency 'B', it's not really a reason to prefer 'A'.  I think the OP was expressing disappointment that none of these agencies, despite their tens of millions of images, had what he wanted - and that he expected IS to do much better than it did.

And as the OP won't share with us the actual search, we can't find out whether it is a deficiency of iStock's search system or an actual lack of images.

Ok, I sense a money-making opportunity here, for those who have mastered IS's constantly-changing search functions.    Buyers need professional help to find the needles in that haystack.

Or they could crowdsource via the request new contest thread.
If you were going to pay someone to find stuff, they might as well go to a macro and get their picture researchers to do it.
OTOH, my sales haven't recovered this month, so PICK ME as your searcher! 

Ok, just thought I might share this little story: yesterday I got a small yet important Catalogue design job. The client wished at a specific place a Vector Image - nothing really special, a womans head with some symbols of a specific industry I may not disclose. Well, I thought that this would be a easy Job but found that I had to invest a little more time to find a suiting vector. I looked in 6 different places and learned that almost 90% of vectors of the desired style are just copies of one and each other. Note that the theme is not really something rare. In my desperation and urgent desire to shut the office down ( D: ) I decided to have a look at istock. THEY HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I found 55 pages of more or less relevant Vectors at DP, over 100 pages at DT, and six (6!) at istock. Furthermore the quality was average at best. Wow. I never thought istock would be such a loser but off course it makes me happy to see that they fail with _their_ policy.

One lesson learned yesterday:
1. upload limits are bad. Today you might be happy to safe some disk space. Tomorrow you cannot compete because you are missing content.
2. istock is dead.

I sent them a sitemail and they changed them all for me.

No they didn't. All images are priced the same. The only thing that changes the price at SS is the volume you are buying or the license you need.

It is quite clear that the majority of buyers prefer all images priced the same and it is probably the greatest factor in SS's success.

We have one site that, even with a pretty low rpd, manages to generate the most income for (most) contributors, has the simplest royalty structure out there and the most transparent pricing structures - coincidence??