I long since stopped comparing months to other months or years to years. Too depressing. Instead I look upon each sale as a burst of sunshine that defeats the gloom for awhile. Thankfully I don't need to make a living at this.

I wonder how they got those with no watermarks.
I couldn't find any of mine there. I feel slighted.

Whenever you hear a phrase like "getting your foot in the door" or "getting your name 'out there'" you know you have a big sucker sign hanging around your neck.

For me the Summer slowdown began Jan 1st and will end about August 1 which will be when the Back to School slowdown will start and then end on November 1 when the Holiday slowdown begins and runs until January 1.

Top right side of this page--absolutely. Al of the others are a waste of time, IMHO, despite easy uploading. Even checking those monthly isn't worth the effort.

With so many faked photographs discovered from major news organizations I think this approach is sickening. It further erodes faith in the editorial world, even with the disclaimer below the photo. Readers do not live in a vacuum. It would be very easy to lump this example in with the latest faked news photo and come to the conclusion that "they all do it".

  The other objection I have is that it confuses the story being featured. I'm thinking while reading the text that this model isn't "real". I wonder if this story is faked too. Maybe the intention was to deceive the reader as Bernie deceived his customers. If so, The New York Magazine was successful.

  For stock photographs I often pose as a doctor, jail inmate, golfer, senior citizen, etc. But I'm not mistaken for someone famous. At least I don't think so. I would think that the 3-d modeling idea would be a better for stock if it was generic, with no confusion with someone famous.

That was happening with my images also for awhile: CS4 Mac. But only with IStock. When I complained to IStock they said that they were working on it. Lately its been working fine. Sorry, no explanation that I can come up with. The only change in my system was updates to my Mac OS...now at 10.5.8.

With 260 of my best Yay has registered 0 sales for 1st party sales, 2nd party sales, 3rd party sales, 1000th party sales, etc. this ENTIRE YEAR.

A business broker would have a struggle trying to put evaluations on micro stock images. You've got an extremely small supply of goods that are made much smaller as a percentage of the supply every day. You've got an increasing "decay" rate of effective sales due to those new competing images coming on line. I don't think the annual earnings evaluation method would mean much in this scenario. 

And you've got the mercurial nature of each site regarding pricing and business practices. That's a huge uncertainty factor that would further devalue such an evaluation. Add to that the fold rate of second and third tier sites with next to zero payout possibilities. And there doesn't seem to be any "comps" of earlier similar sales. Or, for that matter, any market at all if the major sites won't honor the copyright sale to another party.

If they came up with a value at all it would likely be a few cents per image. Still, sites could find it profitable at a low enough price to offer to buy them.  It wouldn't surprise me if some site isn't considering this method of supply already.

Assuming a site paid zero for a portfolio they would add an immediate 20% to their bottom line with nearly zero cost. If they paid, say, 2-3 months income stream for those images then their "payback" is 2-3 months. The 20% additional bottom line profits continue indefinitely. Not a bad investment.

I don't agree that the sites would be competing with customers. The sites would not be creating images or accepting/rejecting them. The images have already been accepted and are selling irrespective of who owns the image. It would be a service to photographers who could rely on a site to purchase the images at some predetermined price should they wish to sell through change in interest, retirement, death, etc.

I'm speaking of getting the images for very little money. Like cheap. Really cheap. My guess is that there are plenty of images that can be purchased outright for, say, one or two months projected earnings. As an example, if I had to sell rights to images in order to liquidate an estate for heirs, I'd take whatever I could get for a fast sale. Add to that those who just want to get out of the business of micro at any price. I could see a formula for a given portfolio that could yield profits in a few months.

Another mystery of this business. Maybe that's why I get quite a few "incorrect white balance" rejections even though I'm certain the white balance is correct. ??

I work in Adobe RGB 1998 and submit them as such. I'm sure that the sites all do different conversions. It may be if you are embedding sRGB ... and then the sites also assign sRGB,  it may be doubling the sRGB effects. Those effects to my eye add saturation, mostly in the reds.

I've noticed that with my small point and shoot Canon that is only sRGB, images look much redder when opening directly into PS (not with RAW) than do images from my RGB 1998-set Mark III ds.  

If I have PS open jpgs in RAW, RAW converts jpgs from the point-shoot Canon sRGB back to RGB 1998, thus losing the camera-generated saturation of sRGB. At least that's my experience.