how about " plus one" "+ one" "plus 1" etc.

It is like a bunch of gas stations on a busy corner. FT raises prices a few cents and DT across the street does too and then IS on the opposite corner does also and FT sees that they are still just as busy, but they make more money, so they raise them another 5%. Except in this case they are lowering contributors % age.

SS on the final corner maybe started out a bit higher and now they are still just as busy as they have always been.

Maybe that is a poor analogy, but it still sucks for the contributors, especially the mid to bottom tier ones.

I must say that I think DT is sometimes pretty far off the mark with their similars rejections... I had a bunch of similar yet different objects and after getting a few rejections I stopped uploading them, but I left one in the queue and they accepted that one and an older one sold. How do they tell that something is too similar to something that has been uploaded before? Sometimes their search returns row after row of near identical images though - seems they ought to fix that in search or have some way to have the artist stack similars behind one image instead of just rejecting a vertical image when a horizontal one has been accepted of the same landscape.

I also think that getting people to stick a heap of images together into one is a bad idea (at least for the photographers). They also often look horrible as thumbs.

As far as their levels system, it is somewhat advantageous not to have similars though, especially as level one images only pay 30% of the cheapest price.

Quote from: Yuri_Arcurs on January 16, 2011, 16:37

Istock knows what they are doing and are way better at finding fraud attemps than that.

iStock wouldn't be able to spot a fraud attempt if it slapped them in the face whilst wearing a t-shirt with the words "I'm a fraud" written across the chest. The only thing I think iStock are good at doing is marketing, everything else it would appear is a complete disaster.

Yeah, but IS contributors would spot fraud and out you - even if you didn't do anything wrong apparently.

I think if you did totally different material as contract work for someone else to upload to IS and never tried to use similars and rejects elsewhere you'd probably be fine legally and it would be hard to catch you.

IS has certainly shown that they will manipulate and twist things for their own benefit and I suspect they will more in the future. They have no honor. What anyone else chooses to do is up to them. IS can always just dump you for no reason if they choose, and you can dump them, it just might take a few years to get all your material free from them.

the way I see it is that Fotolia dropped rates and despite some squawking, they got away with it, so then DT did it with about the same results and IS said hey, we want even more too, except they were already taking too much as it was. I think they found the tipping point (and they did so many things so poorly in the last few months). I hope the trend reverses and rates actually go up, but I don't think that will happen, I just hope they don't drop any more.

I suppose it would be too much to ask for them to fix all the other problems before screwing us. It could have been years before I dropped from my 20%.

I think they are just rolling the "bridge" program out in order of seniority or total $ sales or something since they offered it to me a few days ago and I am hardly any sort of elite material (although I am firmly in the .36 camp).  I e-mailed a few questions to them (mainly about different size images) and got an auto reply saying they will get back to me and meanwhile I should check the FAQ (that I already had).  I also wonder about submitting SS rejects to BS.

If nothing else I'd love to have my early SS images ported over to BS. I wonder if there are a number of big SS players that aren't on BS and as this moves forward the BS file # will shoot up w/o any new buyers at least at first - meaning my sales will drop even more there. In the long run it should help sales at BS and possibly make our workload easier too.

ETA they did mention that anything marked as R rated on SS would not be moved over, so I don't think they are planning on changing that at BS

I thought the second world was the communist eastern bloc. (with first world being the allied capitalist west and the 3rd world being those that were unallied). 3rd world has come to mean undeveloped though and 2cd world has been dropped.

DT dropped a lot for me starting in Feb 2010 (in line with going from 50% to as low as 30%) and slowly started back up in the second half of the year. This is especially obvious looking at the quarterly results. December was down compared to Nov.

They do seem to run hot or cold every other week or so though.

Or maybe they had some specific people in mind and tweaked the numbers so that they came in at the levels they planned (like one indy kept 20% and so on). It is wise to put them a bit high and then lower them rather than the opposite. Also I suspect they expected more sales in the 3rd part of the year.

One of these days I'd like a camera that I can adjust that with... That said it looks like a useful tutorial, it looks like sometimes you might have written "DOF" when maybe "focal plane" would have been more appropriate.

Oh yes, they promised us they would be grandfathered in. Don't you feel happy now?

As far as I can tell they only control the number of upload slots you have (and maybe when you can go exclusive whey you are just starting out if you want to go that route)

this is the definition of graft I was thinking of...

"graft 2 
n.
1. Unscrupulous use of one's position to derive profit or advantages; extortion.
2. Money or an advantage gained or yielded by unscrupulous means.
tr. & intr.v. graft�ed, graft�ing, grafts
To gain by or practice unscrupulous use of one's position."

Sounds like some of the sites lately...