I immediately said I would leave completely. Now I am toying with the idea of leaving only the old dregs of my point and shoot days and removing all else. As other have noted, after making considerable stink on their forums over the years, if I close my account completely, I'll likely never get in again, if things ever turn around.

I haven't uploaded in more than a year at this point, and don't miss it. I went independent in January over the previous arguments -- I can't even remember what the straw was that broke my back -- and sales are so pitiful that now I can't be bothered to give a . I'm trying out some other sites, slowly, as I have time, but mostly I'm just enjoying photography and not shooting anything that looks like good stock to me. And it's making me happier.

What I won't miss, regardless of if my portfolio stays or goes, is the constant turmoil that iStock consistently brings to my life every September and January. The love affair is over. And like any good breakup, I hope only painful things for them in future.

That is the direction I am leaning - removing all the images that sell on other sites and leaving a few to keep the account open. I think I'll make them all p+ before I delete the others.

Same here. Expect to get it the 15th or have it sent then or whatever. I had some issues w/ a Veer payment last year and they fixed it for me. I think it is just a rather unintuitive way of reporting things in this case.

just out of curiosity, are you an IS exclusive? what are they offering for Thinkstock downloads for flickr images?

edit duh - if you are thinking of sending to 8 micros you aren't exclusive.

My guess is that SS is trying to raise standards, but it is a tough thing to do. As usual it is a bit of luck of the draw with reviewers. Some reviewer might like your stuff, another won't.

here is one microstock fact:

An image that is accepted or rejected might have had the opposite treatment on a different day or a different reviewer.

That doesn't mean I don't still get upset when my images get rejected.

I never got the survey either, but you can bet I have some opinions for them now.

Remember, Istock doesn't call the shots anymore, Getty /H&F do. They see paying over 20% unsustainable, so where do you think they will try to drive traffic? As pointed out earlier, their salespeople were calling the big Istock buyer accounts to sell TS. The more content and buyers they can move away from IS the more they can sell at 20% or less for the artists. As an added bonus you get no IS sales to move up canisters or RC to increase your percentage. I wouldn't be too surprised if the long range plan is to gradually move sales away from IS in both directions so they won't have to pay those unsustainable percentages. Exclusives might even continue to make more money, but not as much as they would with their full canister royalties.

Every time I read an assurance from someone on the IS forum I want to add "yet" to the end of it. eg: "we have no single plans to move your content"...."yet". We all know how trustworthy their track record is.

...

If I were to delete my portfolio from every site with nutso reviewing, I wouldn't have it anywhere

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That's the truth for sure. It also seems to happen by batch making me think it is the reviewer not some automated system. I recently had a picture of Columbine peak in the Sierras moved to editorial - no people, no man made structures - just a mountain in the middle of a mountain range. I wonder if that was automated by a keyword. odd.

I agree the spaghetti approach seems to be the easiest for my blood pressure and stress. Make the images, shotgun them to the agencies and let them keep what they want. If images get rejected everywhere - especially for lighting or focus, I take note. Otherwise they get what they want and I keep from going postal.

1. money. At one time IS dominated the microstock industry and you could get a much higher % and uploads by being exclusive. Some people have done very well as exclusive and some still report higher earnings after becoming exclusive.

2. Getty bought out stockxpert which paid .30 per download and dropped it down to .25 same for pp. I think that they have raised that to .28 now. That rubbed many of us the wrong way. It seems they want to topple SS and many of us don't want to help them do so. Now they want to force us to accept their terms. Also PP sales do not contribute to RC totals. It appears that IS wants to move sales to PP where they make more and we make less.

3. At least sub sales at DT raise your image levels, and higher level sales even for subs get more $. At SS lots of sub sales will eventually get you .38 per sub sale. At PP lots of sub sales gets you lots of sub sales, but not a lot of $.

4. IS used to have lots of sales - a file could take off at IS and make many sales per day = lots of $. They have gradually lowered commissions, tightened the screws, reneged on promises, changed terms in their favor, made numerous blunders to piss off suppliers and buyers etc. They used to = 25 to 50% of most non exclusive contributors, now they are down more in the 10 to 35% range - that would still be pretty good except we are all sick of their greedy dishonest ways and they had such promise and goodwill and they destroyed that.

I guess everyone else said similar.

I'm certainly leaning towards pulling the plug there. The income and % of my income from IS has been steadily declining, so it really won't hurt me that much except for the pain of all the hoops I had to jump through to get the content up there. I will miss the $, but I fear I would miss my dignity more. I guess I have 'til the 28th to decide. Actually I am tempted to pull it all the 29th just to make more work for them.

(I am not on FT for similar reasons).

So...

If you say "no" to the new agreement:

-your files actually on istock are always selling
-istock can not mirroring the files to cheaper partner sites
-you can not upload new files anymore

If you say "yes"

- Your files are mirrored to other sites for cheapest price
- You are killing SS and other good earners
- You can upload new files

Is it right or not?

If that was all I'd be ok with it. I haven't uploaded since the last time they screwed us, but if we don't agree before Sept 28th, they will consider that agreeing - nice huh?

My results for "Morocco" look more like the iphone screenshot, but not in the same order.

The conspiracy theorist in me figures that they are making the best match shifts too hard to keep track of by implementing them at different times for different locations and soon they will push wholly owned content to accounts that aren't submitters. In reality they are probably trying to push their best guess of what the buyer wants with an accent on expensive and exclusive content.

I can see the value of showing local results for a search like "coins", but in general I don't like it when sites try to guess what I want instead of showing me what I am asking for.

" Our goal, and part of my new mandate, will be to make sure we optimize your earnings from your content. "

I can tell them an easy way to do this, and it starts with upping our commission percent.

Unfortunately I think the accurate translation as posted earlier was "...optimise our earnings from your content."

sigh.