Looking at my payment history from Jan 2013 to the end of May 2014, my sales are 46% US (I'm based in the US). Friday is already the weekend in Asia and Australia, so it's often less good than other weekdays. Lots of people in the US take off for a few extra days around the Independence Day holiday, so it doesn't surprise me to see it a little slower than usual.

But when you consider the number of countries in that 54% of my sales, I would guess none of them approach the US in terms of size of stock sales (again, for me; other people's content will sell differently). So when the US is on holiday, my sales show a noticeable drop.

what was the "gist" of his bye message for those of us that missed it?

Here's what Leo has on his own site:

http://www.clipartillustration.com/symbiostock-beginning-to-end/

So the (very rough) summary of things as I saw them (and I may have missed bits as I haven't spent much time in that forum of late):

Leo had a new system in the works, plus a "transition" release to help people get there - but for the transition you dropped any child theme and all the sites would look the same. Not sure what the work would be to move an existing site to the transition as I didn't take that release.

There's a link to a latest release available from GitHub posted elsewhere on Leo's site, but again, I don't know what version or if that supports child themes or not

http://www.clipartillustration.com/symbiostock/

In the now-defunct forum, Leo had a poll to vote on whether people would pay $10 a month to get updates automatically on their new sites. I wasn't completely clear on the alternative, but I think the new code would be available free if you did the updates and maintenance yourself.

Although there are 180 sites, after getting 9 no and 2 yes votes on the poll, Leo declared everything over and he'd be shuttering the forums in 7 days.

A day or so later I saw a post that said he'd been contacted by several people who hadn't had a chance to vote. There was also a comment about the possibility of some alternative to $10 a month - a percentage of sales. Leo said he was bowing out although he might make fixes available as needed (because he'd be keeping his own site up and running) but the forums could stay up for site owners to support one another. But then the forums went dark a day or so later. I didn't see anything (e-mail or forum) that explained why he'd changed his mind about leaving the forums around.

There was a lot of useful information in those forums - long posts, code snippets and how-tos, tutorials, etc. Lots of people spent lots of time putting all of that together. I don't know much about hosting a forum, but I'd have guessed one of us with hosting could have taken that over to keep it available for all of us to use.

As Michele says, there's the Facebook group - good for keeping in touch, although minus all that stored information in the forums...

It's similar to favorites. When  you look at someone else's work - and are logged in - you can click on the heart on the top right to collect it. On your gallery (profile) page you'll see a tab for Collection nnn (with whatever number of items you've collected).

You can also follow people - I think you get a notice when they upload new stuff versus not if you just collect works by artists

Did you notice any change in your sales volumes or income, either good or bad, after opting out?

The problem is that you don't/can't know given the lack of complete and detailed sales reporting.

I see variations from month to month when I haven't changed anything, so unless I knew which sales had come from a partner site in the past, I couldn't really gauge any changes. And the even harder one to know is if an agency has participation in something as a factor in search criteria so your sales on the main site could be affected by an opt out. DT, for example, had at one point in the past said that forum participation was a factor in search ranking (I think that's ridiculous, but then it goes along with other factors DT has mentioned are search factors at one time or another).

Thanks for the congrats. Great that they put one of yours on the home page Mike (mine never have been, BTW, so the image must have been found via search) - in general, that type of up front exposure can't be bad.

I understand about the watermark issue, but I'm living with FAA's almost useless watermark already and there's always a theft risk from all the sites that legitimately use my purchased images, so I've decided that I'm not making the lack of a watermark a no-go criterion, at leasst for now.

For those of you on FAA, I've noticed a lot of what appears to be trawling through my portfolio (over days and weeks) from what appears to be a single location. I worry that someone's lifting all the watermarked previews from there as I can't figure out why there'd be so many crawlers.

For Crated's search, I get some very odd results on some searches, and checking to see if it's keyword spam, it appears to be that they search descriptions. So one description of a shot of Bear Lake in Idaho says that it has been called the "Caribbean of the Rockies" and so the image shows up in a search for Caribbean. Given how awful some people's keywords are (lack of keywords, I assume from contributors who aren't selling stock) I guess they figured this would help.

So happy for you, Jo Ann! It's nice to hear about it when things work as they're supposed to.

Thanks. Wouldn't it be nice if things happened that way more of the time?

I did increase my percentage take a bit (I had left it close to the minimum before) .  If any other MSG member has had a Crated sale, it'd be nice to hear about it/them - just to see how things are progressing with the site.

Glad to hear things are starting well for you - and in the summer too

What the support spiel ignores is that the way subscription plans work, buyers do not download all their allotment.

Shutterstock survived for years (prior to the ramp up of all the non subscription products) with a payout per sub download that exceeded the buyer price *if* a buyer purchased everyone of the 750 images they were entitled to.

To suggest that they'd have to drop the royalty to 15 cents in order to pay more than 30 on a $9.80 sale is ridiculous. And I wonder how many people let their one month allotment expire without purchasing all they paid for - probably fewer than for a 25 a day subscription, but if/when it happens, DP makes out like an even bigger bandit.

And credits expire too - at most sites after 12 months - so having an expiration date doesn't make something a subscription.

Jo Ann, Sean, could you contact them and say to them we will leave this page if they dont change in one week this plan?

I'm just an adviser here - I have never been a DepositPhotos contributor.

Unless Jon Oringer has no involvement with Shutterstock in any capacity, I don't expect to see exclusivity - artist or image - at Shutterstock (I'm excluding Offset as it's not included in the pricing plans on Shutterstock).

He's said no - often H*ll No - over and over again.

At this point, I wouldn't trust any agency with artist exclusivity, although I would consider image exclusivity as long as there wasn't a long lock in period. Things change. Agencies get purchased. Powerful companies throw their weight around - exhibit A would be Getty which has reduced royalties for photographers and musicians steadily with everything they've acquired. And that is on purpose - they control distribution to be able to control their costs as well as prices to buyers.

Shutterstock is my biggest earner and I wish they weren't. They need some serious competition. For the moment, if they can keep going after Getty's business with higher end clients, that will benefit those of us who are with Shutterstock and not with Getty (and I realize those who are still exclusive with iStock won't feel the same way).

Given Getty's track record and Jon Oringer versus Jonathan Klein, I'd go with Oringer and Shutterstock if I had to pick a single agency, but I'd go to pretty much any lengths to avoid picking a single agency again (been there before and left).

It's June - summer is often a slow time.

My 123rf sales so far (and June isn't quite over) are ahead of last June, though down from May. Again, that's what I expect based on typical patterns for me.

I left Veer in March this year over the lack of an opt out to their secretive partner programs.

They won't give you a list of partners and they pay you the standard amount as if the sale was made on the Veer site even if the partner is selling for much higher prices (which many do).

They refused to offer an opt out - I asked. And don't forget the fiasco of them uploading Veer portfolios to Alamy (which they removed after a massive contributor stink, but they didn't notify us of this up front; communications with contributors are terrible).

I had only a portion (just over 800 images) of my portfolio there and the money was pretty decent - about 6 or 7 payouts a year. But it wasn't enough money to entice me to put up with their overall terrible behavior as an agency (their uploading and CV and slow reviews were horrible, but I'd have lived with that if everything else was right).

If you're not already with Veer, I can't see any good indications to start.