They responded to my complain that the editorial image are not marked as editorial. Saying again that they are sorry, but this image collection should had not been online yet. Say forwarded the this to their techs and it is hopefully soon fixed.

Looks like the images that are live from me there are from Veer, and YAY. But it is only a very small part of my portfolio.

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Does Yay have editorial?  I've never looked into them.

More great news: "Visual now represents Shutterstock"

Hopefully you are joking?   

"She into her new job 3 months now and not a single communication!"

That is the part that scares many exclusives I know. Rebecca hasn�t even given an interview to introduce herself to the marketplace and the several hundred thousand business partners that istock has. I have never seen the CEO of a huge multi million dollar business act so strangely.

Surveys are useful, but they cannot replace active leadership.

It just reinforces the fear that all the other stock sites have dedicated full time managers and want to push their brand aggressively forward and istock gets a part time project manager who still has time for her "real job" at Getty. Maybe she is putting in a 48h work day into 24 hours behind the scenes, but if you sign up for a leadership position you should be able to step into the spotlight and feel comfortable in that role.

The successful artists in microstock are good because they have the mind of digital entrepreneurs and many come from a real life business background. They all understand the importance of communication and know what it means when a management avoids discussions or becomes invisible.

I know that everyone on the team works extremely hard, to read how the reputation of istock is falling on sites like these must be painful to watch.

I sincerly hope istock rises to the challenge and finds a way to turn things around in 2012.

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To me it says that Getty decided that a friendly relationship with contributors is not important.  Personally I think that they decided that a while ago and this is a continuation of that decision.

Quote from: cthoman on November 11, 2011, 16:03

I'd think you'd need quite a few people to rig it. I've never seen my vote even make a dent in the numbers. That and some of the illustration only sites languish at the bottom despite regularly outperforming sites in the low, middle and top tier.

If you can't even get illustrators to have any influence on it, I don't think a few people with an agenda have much of a shot.

If the illustration sites have less voters that doesn't change the amount of earnings. If a site has 50 people and someone votes $10, that's the same as six people on the top sites voting $10.

In other words, one high vote on an illustration site, counts for six times more than one high vote on a top tier site.

294 votes SS
275 votes IS
300 votes DT
275 votes 123RF
294 votes FT
26 votes ClipartOf (each vote counts 11 times what a SS, DT or FT vote counts)
177 votes DP
58 votes PhotoDune
250 votes CanSTock
49 votes Pond5
49 votes Veer
260 votes BigStock

So I might guess that as PhotoDune gets more members and ClipArtOf gets more members, it might level off a little instead of having a small number of very happy members?

DT has more than SS and FT by a small number, but still, it's more.

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This makes a lot of sense to me.  It would be helpful I think to have the number of votes on the first page.  I think some type of chart showing the number of votes over time on the second page would be really useful as well.

Quote from: lisafx on November 11, 2011, 17:33

Quote from: Noodles on November 11, 2011, 14:36

I'm only trying to focus on why some people are reporting such few sales on iStock from their huge portfolios. My sales are quite good right now.

Well, I think you need to keep trying, because "crappy portfolios" is not the reason.  The sales crash is reported by most diamond level contributors, regardless of portfolio size, subject matter, or quality. 

I agree there seem to be some concerning trends. But I suggest you guys remember that only a fraction of a fraction of contributors even visit the forums on IS, and even less post their results. Even out of the top 50 diamonds, i think only a few have posted, and surely mainly the disgruntled ones. Unless I missed it, I've only seen 1 of the top 5 post and he was up a little over last year. Just sayin... The sky ain't falling yet

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If you are right and we lack data to draw a conclusion, how can you know that the sky is not falling yet???

Wonder how easy is it to rig the earnings poll?  I would guess that poll results influence where people upload with companies that move up in rankings getting a burst of uploads.

Leaf, is there any data you track or can share that would help the community identify trends that might be a bit suspicious?  Graphs over time showing the number of votes per company, so a big spike in votes one month to the next would be easy to spot?  Information about the number of voters that only vote for one company?

Know some people don't like/care about the poll, but as somebody else pointed out, what else do we have?

I don't get it.  123 CS FT are always tied for the bottom and 123 often wins.  They earn between 1-3% for me, some months it's not even  a full 1%.

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Don't know if this is what is driving the issue, but I'm a diamond on Istock and former exclusive and SS and DT won't accept the vast majority of my images that I've had on IS because of their restrictive acceptance policies whereas 123 and CS have taken almost all of it.  As a result, My sales on 123 and CS are pretty good.  Maybe other new to independence or new to stock are having similar issues, so relatively speaking, those people are reporting growing sales at 123 and Canstock?

Thanks!  I updated the partner thread.

DT got back to me today..the image in question is not in their database, free or otherwise.

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Have you been able to figure out where this image came from? 

Quote from: michealo on November 02, 2011, 06:51

Quote from: leaf on November 02, 2011, 05:54

Quote from: michealo on November 01, 2011, 06:44

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on November 01, 2011, 01:27

Year on year my fotolia earnings are off 65%, my 123 earnings are off by about 2%. That still leaves fotolia ahead by the price of a pint of beer. I think the vote given for the two agencies is a credible result.
If people are fiddling the figures, they should stop because this is about the only resource we have that shows the relative strength of agencies.

My gripe is the granularity.

I think going from 1 to 2 is about $2.50
going from 6 to 7 is $200

yeah, point taken.  The polls should get an overhaul to fix that.  I have played around with a few ideas but haven't put anything into action yet.

A thought too is having two IS polls, one for exclusives and one for non exclusives, as it is almost like two different agencies

A great idea!

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Agreed

Yeah, Istock screwed the links up about 6 months ago.  I think there is a thread here and one on Istock on how to fix it.  Using DeepMeta, I fixed it in about 30 seconds.

How are you finding the historial data?  Were the earnings bands the same then as they are now? (meaning is a 4 today equal to a 4 in 2008?)

It is interesting that 123RF has not really moved up as it was 4.0 then and 4.1 now, but rather that FT has dropped from 4.9 to 4.0.

Also interesting to see how much less profitable MS is now, or perhaps that profit is spread around to many more sites?