note that it would be impossible for anyone starting out to get to 40% with the current system.

Yep more people leaving IS would lead to more saturation. How bout as a special deal with give them upload limits at SS etc same as newbies have at IS    . Oh and special indie review times . The worrying thing for exclusives is the older (and sometimes newer stuff) is not a walk in for getting accepted elsewhere. There maybe some egos being trashed.

yeo. It happens. I think SS has a surge of images coming in and the reviewers have been told to get tough and new reviewers starting. Same for me - blanket composition rejections .

for a koala I use the keyword "bear". It is not a bear but my job is not educate but to sell and meet their needs. For a very young koala I have used the keyword "cub" and had the image rejected by the reviewer. "Cub" is correct "bear" is not. Not my job to make it difficult for buyers or to educate reviewers.

Hmm just thinking. IS is already second tier for most indies. Take out exclusives and PP and it is a very poor picture for the agency and perhaps worse for contributors sliding to 15% commission rate. I will not take pics down yet but it is not worth the trouble of uploading new images for very little commission if they even could be found. New images from from indies equals best match search death.

RESET REQUIRED. Bring back old commission rate equal reset starting point. Answer questions rather than lecture equal reset number two.

IS is a second tier agency with high prices and poor contributor loyalty. It is a struggling off-shoot of Getty and is somewhere lost between macro and microstock with confusing searches and buying choices. It lacks the freshness of new content other agencies have with a slower content growth and less variety of contributors. It prone to image fraud with a high level of been effectively given away and no commission to file owners.


Sorry if you do not believe this is 100% correct.  just wait 12 months and then look.

As said earlier you can be living in a false environment as an exclusive. Leave and you get a dose of reality. Many shots won't get past current reviews on SS (even though these can be very variable). Time to rebuild and suck up the initial pain or stay at IS as a protected species facing possible extinction. The best time to give up being exclusive was probable 12-18 months ago. We can not go back in time. The best time to do a road trip in Europe was 40 years ago sad but true.

Yes go back to exclusive! Great idea! Also could everyone else join him please?

Is your monitor calibrated??

first time. 9 out of ten I think but it was 4 years ago. I was in IS and was not going to bother with SS LOL. I was talked into it and it is very worthwhile.

Agree with whats been said, Also - face in shadow and yellow cast on first . Insufficient dof on shots. Make sure your monitor is calibrated for wb.

raw these days does not take time. The raw converter and tools save time. If you shoot in a studio jgp sRGB is fine. For travel,sports and wildlife raw and a wider space as a starting point is a godsend. Likewise weddings, it is not controlled raw and a wide space give la
latitude.

i shoot raw and use smart sharpen or selective channel filtering using a mask. Most parts of an image should not be sharpened, especially any sky.

raw to prophoto for processing and then sRGB for jpg uploading

Suits are not all dumb. They can look at IS and figure out it is best not to get greedy. Nice to receive the email.

Not sure why people need a "style" I shoot whatever is in front of me. If you love photography shoot all and any and vary it up. Mind yo my wife says I lack "style" lol

http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?gallery_id=172054

Bigger question is: what can they do about it?

These things are hard to reverse.

Profit -They cut royalties but can not go much further. At zero percent royalty they would make less in six months than they 12 months ago. You can not keep cutting and contributors bleed but at a point they give up or die off. Accountants seek to increase profit by increasing profits increasing prices and decreasing costs. Generally a good way to kill the market and reduce supply. How could they fix it once done??

Exclusives got a respite from reality when the best match was changed but in a declining market share all that they were doing was giving them more of the shrinking sales. It was a one off. They are now feeling the heat. Being at the top of the search when less people are buying is not a help anymore. Now independents and exclusives are peed off.

Exclusives may have left it too late to jump ship. SS and others are getting pickier in their image reviews.Putting a big port onto to SS would not be straightforward. Many may go from lenient exclusive reviews at IS to tough reviews at SS.

PP sales make up more than IS sales for most of us so what is the point of IS??? As a way to get to dodgy poorly paying sites?? Many joined IS as a way to avoid that.

Software??? Will it ever recover?  Fraud?? Seems more of a problem there than anywhere else. Nothing is fixed. Upload limits? Less variety at higher prices with less happy contributors and buyers. I have retired from business writing and teaching but this has such value as case studies.

I take a 17-40 for landscapes and architecture, 24-105mm for general and a 70-200 f4 IS for lots of stuff .. because I like it.

They have less sales due to price increases and customer relations/site issues. Initially less sales were compensated by higher price per sale. Sales go down further due to PP cannibalism and price hikes. They must have worried about backlash from loyal exclusives and pushed them up in best match (independents are already as pissed off as they can get so why worry about them?). Sales fall more and then they are left with even fewer options. You can not push the exclusives files further to the front (they are already there). Customers are not getting any more cheerful. Hard one to recover from. You could not push royalties lower? For me PP outperforms IS.

easy to say that SS way outsells IS. The thing is however IS limits uploads so most people end up having a lot more images in SS. With the changes to royalties IS only gets worse. IS used to be a great place to sell as an independent. Now it is just for a very exclusive crowd. I would not take images down but not keen on uploading. Still not sure how they sell an image for 8 cents commission to me. Alamy gave me more revenue over the last 30 days than the micros.

they should care about the customers and have a link to Shutterstock there ;-). Maybe SS will gie 10% off to new customers defecting?

7 cents! Ha Ha Ha . You got robbed! My last sale there was 8 cents! Whoopie.....sob..sob

Averages??? Head in an oven and arse in a freezer = comfortably warm!

yay!

Also I do not bother to upload to IS . Maybe one image in 12 months. Still get sales with old files that have had previous downloads but unless the search is changed to give independent's new images a fair viewing it doesn't seem to make sense to waste effort. Mmm maybe it has changed? Must look.

reset doesn't work for me. Default keeps going back to exclusive.  I Just deleted files they put in as exclusive and in the free section. It costs them money to do this. Inspection just to delete.