My port is miniscule, please keep that in mind when looking at my data.

It didn't take many months before Istock and Shutterstock together equalled my top month at Dreamstime (with only half of the pictures due to upload limits and stricter acceptance). The other agencies are bonuses. The reason I quit was to be able to sell some pics as RM, not because I was unhappy with DT. But a larger total income is of course positive.

Note: the downhill trend started before I quit the exclusivity.

Pet_:
Good comment about studying your top earners to more productively submit more work of the same type.

MY WEEKLY RANT STARTS HERE:
Too bad iStock is the only site you can readily see how each image is performing. Why other sites make it so difficult to view our own images with their DL/Month, total sales, etc. is beyond me. You'd think they would figure out the more info we have of our own results the more intelligently we can contribute. SS is one of the worst, burying the data so deep it would take me forever to make sense out of which images are doing well compared to others. It's as if they haven't learned how to use a sort function.
   If it were my site I'd give automatic feedback to each contributor regarding good performers. Why not a "Your Best Selling Images" column? Or automatic responses to a hot selling image: "Have more like this? This is your number 5 best selling image."

I find SS quite easy: Performance stats details, 25-a-day/enhanced/OD. That's only two clicks, four if you want to see the other types of sales. The best performers are on the top of the lists.

It varies with the different agencies, but I do know that a lot of my sales come from one photoshoot.

I think disorderly could be right. My husband worked for a company once; when they started, he made a small billing program. As the company grew, he never had time to make a proper program, he just added fixes. Every month, he spent 2-3-4 days checking all the files manually to remove all the bugs. You can imagine what happened when he tried to quit. :lol:
The one who did the StockXpert-program has probably not continued in Istock. And Istock is not exactly bug free itself.

Last post on page 7 by Achilles:

For now we will accept the W8BEN forms without the ITIN number and will continue to investigate this. To be 100% safe we continue to recommend to use the "applied for" option and to send the documents to the IRS.

There is no guarantee we will be able to withhold at the treaty rate if you didn't provide an ITIN and you didn't use the "applied for" option. But once again we will investigate this and for now we will use the same withholding rates as if you provide the ITIN, given that you are from a treaty country.

Considering that the launch is not far, it is better to make sure that the W8BEN forms are filled. If you encounter any issues please email support. Hope this makes everyone comfortable.

http://www.dreamstime.com/forumm_23797_pg7

I read somewhere that you in the US have to pay the credit companies and banks to get to know how much you owe them. Is that true? I think it was something called a credit check or something like that, that you could only do for free once a year, and after that it cost a lot of money?

Do you have online banks where you can control your bank accounts, pay bills and transfer money for free? Or do you have to do this by paper and pen?

We got a cheque as a present for our wedding 5 years ago. That was the first cheque I saw since the 1980s, and I haven't seen one since. Everything goes via electronic bank transfers. I sympatize by principle to all paranoid tendencies, but I really can't understand why anybody would want to recieve money by cheques rather than getting them directly deposited to your bank.

Of course, Payoneer and Paypal are good alternatives to all of us who suffer from healthy paranoia. Identity theft is common, and precautions should be taken. But not if you have to resort to cheques.

BTW: Imagine all the threes you will save!

Our local governmental geologist got into a jam a couple of years ago:
I live in an area prone to rockslides, and large masses of rocks sliding into water has caused several local tsunamis, but it has been a long time since the last one. (~100 years). So the local newspaper interviewed the local geologist; "Will there be a new major rockslide anytime soon?". And he answered truthfully: "Yes, I expect it to happen very soon" and listed a couple of localities that are high on the risk map. The next day the newspaper had to publish an update. For some reason, the hysteric masses got the impression that it would happen tomorrow, they didn't consider that "very soon" in geology means "within the next 50 000 years".

I have no idea how they would make sure the customers stick to the rules, but I likes this part of their terms from the FAQ:

"License: The price for free download of all images is EURO 149 per month. As long as you have a license, you can download as many images as you like. If you stop the license, you can use the downloaded material for 12 months.

Prepaid Card: You can also buy a prepaid card with 100 credits for EURO 249,- (100 credits = 10 stock images). A prepaid card is valid for 1 (one) year. Afterwards the User Rights exceeds after 5 years.

Single Image: If your need for images is low you can buy single images for EURO 49,- a piece. The User Rights exceeds after 5 years."

This has been suggested in several other threads in this forum; that the rights to use the pictures should have a time limit. I wonder how well it works in real life.

I see a lot of colourbox-images in magazines in Norway. It looks like most of the major printing houses have contracts with colourbox and Istock, and that istock is only for the pictures they can't find in colourbox. High quality illustrations e.g.

:rofl: That gives new meaning to the favourite list on Dreamstime.

For the first time I have had several sales at IS in one day. 5 the last 3 days. Could the buyers be responding to the reduced prices?

Congratulations! He is perfect! Sooo beautiful. How big is he? He looks very strong, on the first picture he looks ready to start crawling. :lol:

It is a nice age, before they are able to run away from the camera, right?