Quote from: tickstock on July 07, 2015, 15:16
According to the poll iStock sales for nonexclusives are up over 50% since last year.

I don't understand what that means.
Up 50% total sales for all non exclusives? Up 50% per image? Royalties or DL numbers?

I don't know how bad things are over in the photos section but in the illustration section over the past couple of months there has been an explosion of spamming by a small minority of contributors, both old and new, who are increasingly dominating the search results for certain keywords and topics. Page after page of very basic or very similar images from the same contributors.
Wrong keywords, zero quality control by iStock, a best match system that reduces relevancy, a bug laden unintuitive user interface, it's all gone to pot.
Any buyer doing a search and seeing the absurd results will probably quickly leave and try another site.
Are things any better on the photo side because it's now a waste of time creating and uploading illustrations?

When I first joined iStock a few years back all the review sites and all the forums held iStock in the highest esteem, with by far the highest standards and reputation for quality. It was with great pride when I got accepted. It's not something I boast about anymore.

I have a small port, less than 200, so fairly easy to check most of my port.
A couple of weeks back I started comparing DL numbers under the thumbnails in my port, not the old ADP, and the numbers for the same files in the My Uploads page and so far I've found around 40 extra DLs.
Whilst it's not possible to know exactly when the discrepancies for all the files began, I have seen around 10 DL increases for thumbnail details since starting to check without any corresponding increase in royalties or changes in the My Uploads page.
You're not allowed to talk about it in the forums, unless your post claims it's a bug showing false DLs, otherwise your post gets deleted especially by Kelvinjay who has become very trigger happy with the delete button.
I suppose the only way to find out for sure if we're being conned is to get known associates with iStock accounts to download some of our files to see if we get paid accordingly. 

I'm an exclusive illustrator and although I have a small port I haven't had such a sales drought for several years with a port a tenth the size. No sales since mid Dec.
I can't help feeling there is something more serious going on than just a holiday slowdown.

Just tried to log in and landed on the above apology page for a technical hitch they're trying to fix, with a 10% discount for the next 30 credit downloads as a sorry to buyers.
I hope this isn't coming out of our royalties, after all we're not the ones who screwed it up so why should we be penalised? If those who are meant to be running the site got a pay cut every time the site went down they'd try a lot harder to make sure it didn't keep happening.

But why would iStock create a new landing page saying
"Explore millions of stock photos, vectors, videos and music clips you can't get from the other guys"
if they wanted or expected exclusives to leave?
Exclusive files are the main thing differentiating iStock from the other main sites, without that iStock has nothing special to offer.
Having said that, they're doing a good job of encouraging exclusives to drop their crown. We'll have to wait and see. Six months from now the subscription and embedded image changes will result in either exclusives making loads more money (I doubt it) or our royalties plummet resulting in a mass exodus.

Was wondering if exclusives are still uploading to iStock as usual or, like myself, are stopping completely to see how all this pans out. Once our images are released into the ether for free the damage is done and I'm reluctant to risk wasting my time creating stuff that will never see a return due to this free giveaway.
Also, if we drop exclusivity will this automatically remove, eventually, our images from Getty and their availability for embedding?

Using IE8 I've found adding words in the left side "Narrow Your Results" window has no effect to the search, the page doesn't refresh at all.
However , including extra words in the main search window at the top does dramatically, and accurately, narrow the search results.

You're only supposed to upload vector files that are compatible with Illustrator 8 or less (or is it 10 as well now?) to accommodate those using a stone age version of Illustrator and yet it is these same people who are most likely to be using an older browser.

Well that experiment didn't last long, or is it just me?
I'm just a small part time indie player over on istock with around 40 illustrations and around 2 weeks ago a handful of my best sellers that were in the first few pages under best match suddenly found their way into no mans land, way past 50% of the pages, as did all my files.
Today I checked and they're more or less back to where they were before.
Whilst I'm happy to have my files back in a more salable position this constant screwing around and experimenting with best match can only serve to annoy and frustrate buyers. It's one thing messing contributors about but constantly doing the same to buyers means they'll give up with istock and go elsewhere.
Best match should (mostly) mean most relevant irrespective of whether there is a little crown logo underneath otherwise it becomes meaningless.
I say (mostly) because there should always be room for tinkering, no point an image occupying front page when it hasn't sold in ages. 

Rookie question from a part time illustration contributor to istock.
I've been with istock around a year and want to start uploading to other sites, and maybe leave istock as the new compulsory partner programme will screw us lowly non exclusives. What's normal practice regarding identity? Do you normally upload the same/different designs under the same/different name on different sites?
What are the pros and cons?
Thanks in advance.

With this post I hereby claim elevation from lurker to newbie.
Right, I'm off to start a million new threads.
(What do you mean I'm banned already?)