...https://www.shutterstock.com/g/spetenfia
This is my portfolio on SS. Same for the Fotoliamore or less. I upload the same.

I looked at the first part of your SS portfolio, newest first. Without knowing anything about the details of the similars policy at Fotolia, I would suggest that you could consider selecting fewer shots of each subject to upload as a way of getting a better portfolio (and it would possibly then avoid issues with the similars policy as well).

I was struck by long strings of similar images where I couldn't really see a good reason for so many of them (it's always clear to me that horizontal + vertical + closeup + wide view work in almost all cases; beyond that it gets murkier if the subject is the same). SS appears to have dropped the similars policy it used to have, so they won't mind either way, but I don't expect the many near identical images will actually help your sales (and I know that it's always hard to know which versions will sell best).

For what it's worth...

They do this at the beginning of every month and the problems have been around for a year or two...

Some months they get everyone at the lowest contributor level for a day or two as well, but I'm at the right level today (although I think the rolling credit count is wrong because December is 0).

They do fix it up (I assume by hand) within a few days, but it's a pretty sad sack state of affairs that they can't just fix the software

Edited to add that my October is at zero too - I hadn't noticed that until mentioned above.

How would the owner of the private property on which the pictures were taken cut into your market for licensing the image to everyone else? I'd argue not much at all. So your thought that you're being taken advantage of is the loss of licensing revenue to this one customer?

As many of the sites are getting much more rigorous about asking for property releases, there's a very good chance you won't get to license the images at all without a release. It's never in your best interests to license images where there might later be issues over the commercial use of images of the property.

Make sure you give them the images with a license (like one an agency would provide but that is from you) that makes clear what they can and cannot do (so they don't upload them to stock websites, for example) and thank them for their cooperation

...Is 100$ a month viable via microstock photography these days. If not, what (if any) are the alternatives.

If yes, what would you suggest I do to improve my performance ?...

$100 a month from SS alone is not hard to reach, but you do need to think about images from a buyer's perspective - what could someone do with the image? Look at ads, any corporate marketing materials you see, web sites for various types of businesses large and small. How many images you need very much depends on quality and subject matter - out of the way locations and random objects will require much larger portfolios than high-demand subjects.

Shoot at least horizontal and vertical of anything you think is useful (many uses prefer horizontal but books will typically look for vertical); think about copy space around the subject, think about closeup and wide views. Make sure you get the details you need to keyword fully and accurately. For anything shot outdoors, try to pick times of day when the light is good.

Regarding keywords, your images need work. I saw an image of Bath Cathedral that had Canterbury as a keyword, oysters that had mackerel as a keyword, images with both Nagasaki and Tokyo, octopus which had moray and mackerel, but not octopus; all sorts of images with keywords for things I didn't see in the image. I'm assuming you're doing cut and paste without editing  - don't do that sort of spamming; it won't help your sales and some sites may suspend you for doing it on a regular basis.

Some things that seem boring - many home maintenance projects - have a good market as lots of companies in the business need stock images for their work. Things you'd never sell prints of can be solid subjects for stock photography. Search for things you're thinking of shooting on one of the major sites and see what sort of competition there is - and is there anything you can bring to the subject that isn't already covered.

Good luck

I likewise had started selling there, but left over their change of license terms - to include resale rights in a standard license. I had departed PhotoDune over the ridiculous changes in income reporting - you are credited with "income" that you never saw on their IRS reporting, so if I hadn't left over the license change terms, I'd have left over the tax reporting

And if I hadn't left over either of those two situations, the recent mess over removal of stolen content being sold on Creative Market would have probably done it

http://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/copyright-infringement-by-'claus40'/msg472586/#msg472586

These "marketplaces",  the worst of which is Fiverr, make their money on a sale and don't really care about the details. I liked the ability to sell Photoshop files which offered a totally different set of options for buyers, but Creative Market isn't the place to do it, IMO

Why rename it? I upload them as camera saves it. Like DSC_3456.JPG...

If you do composites, illustrations, or anything that isn't straight out of the camera, you need some sort of naming scheme to use. I prefer an organized life

I rename my raw files as well (date and a four digit sequence).

When you use a naming scheme, particularly for files in a series, it's a lot easier to deal with - the larger your portfolio gets, the more help these organizing steps are. So something from my recent remodeling series might have a Kit- prefix (kitchen), something descriptive - countertop templating - and the raw file number - 150707_0008.

If I blend exposures, I might have 161216_0206-209 for the range of raw files in the blend. There's lots more detail, but I think that the camera name is about the least helpful way to handling naming.

I don't worry about spaces any more - once upon a time they caused problems for file systems, but I think that's obsolete for the environments I'm working in, as are worries about length

can I save stats for all years in one go?
I have ten years to save....

I have twelve

After doing 2015 via the UI, I just edited the URL to change the offset (it's in months, so you add 12 each time) as it was quicker than waiting for the UI to load.

So &Offset=11&royaltyDisplay=monthly becomes &Offset=23, then &Offset=35, &Offset=47 and so on. Edit and press return and the dialog will come up with the new CSV to save

Look at this earlier thread on image spam - lots of examples of endless repetition of minor variations

http://www.microstockgroup.com/shutterstock-com/image-spam/

I think it's polluting the collection, but clearly SS thinks that big numbers of total images matter so they approve this schlock

This debate happened a year or two back - urging Tyler (Leaf) to enforce showing your identity. A number of people left even at the prospect of such a thing.

I've never been anonymous here, but I strongly support the option for those who need to be. Agencies are - have been and probably will continue to be - vindictive and close people's accounts when they don't like what a contributor is saying. Some people do not want it known they contribute to microstock sites (some macro agencies don't approve). Some people are concerned about copycats. There are probably other legitimate reasons to remain anonymous.

Spotting trolls isn't hard, even with anonymity. People who recently joined and start lecturing about how to do things in microstock are easily ignored too ("teaching your grandmother to suck eggs" is the phrase I grew up with to describe this)

The hardest part of anonymity is that you can't judge any comments about portfolio performance over time when you don't know if the person has 200 files or 20,000 and whether they've been doing this for a decade or 18 months. That seems like an OK price for keeping a broad range of people able to participate here.

Totally agree with the "Alamy Sucks" statement.... they managed to check ONE, yes the first one, didn't like it and hence rejected them all. ...we uploaded 6 images and the same BULLCRAP attitude - 1st one rejected, all rejected. ...

I understand rejections are frustrating, but for the benefit of anyone else reading this thread in the future, Alamy is very straightforward about quality control - no editorial curation, just checks for technical quality.

I've never had an image rejected by them, so I have to think that if you have had two back to back rejections, you need to inspect your uploads more carefully. Impossible to say what the issues are without seeing the images. Did you look over the second upload of 6 before submitting or just assumed the first rejection was a fluke and not a flaw in your work?

Dealing with rejections without bursting a blood vessel is important for longevity if you plan to upload stock - all the other agencies inspect for composition and their commercial value opinions as well as technical quality. Alamy is as good as it gets

I'll contract Sandra Cunningham (sandralise)

This is the third month when previous months sales disappear last time took about three days to reappear

With the old interface they had about a year where we'd be paid at the minimum level for the first few days of each month and then they'd figure out our actual percentage royalty and adjust all the numbers. I can only assume that they really aren't trying very hard to fix this "beginning of the month" problem.

Either that, or their software people are all terrible

joann, its an immense job for an agency to check millions of submitted images dragging them into google images one by one and then check through every returned result to see if it is legal usage or an infringment, not saying you are wrong, just saying its an immense manual job i am not expecting them to do.

You don't have to do it all the time for all submissions. I'm guessing that most of the cheats start out as cheats, so you only have to monitor new accounts closely - lets say for the first xx uploads. I very much doubt that contributors of many years standing suddenly turn to a life of copyright infringement.

And given the hoopla about visual image search and similar images at Shutterstock I would expect the check to be automated, not manual. I need to use Google images, but the agencies - bigger ones at least - don't have to.

The agencies need to earn their 50-60-70-85% of the gross, and protecting our content should be part of that.