I'm getting lost again. Am I the oligopolistic capitalist, or is that someone else? Because I wouldn't mind being the oligopolistic capitalist for a while. It sounds like fun. Can I buy some $6000 shower curtains? Just imagine

Only if you are the only curtain producer in the world.
To Molka: the free market isn't nice at all, but everybody gets the same chance. The US (in general not fond of regulation) has one of the toughest anti-oligopolistic sets of laws in the world.
As to Rockefeller, wasn't that the guy that co-invented private banking money-printing in that conspiracy on Jekyll Island in 1910? 
Ah well, here is my ZeitGeist again... A gift from the little prick 

To your last point, a couple of years ago at the PDN photo show, there was a seminar about selling stock in todays market ( or something like that ), and one point that one of the presenters made was that 40% of stock sales start as a google search. Google image search could very easily evolve with pricing comparison, given how much Google likes to get in other companies businesses and give it away for free. Although this might increase competition, it might also accelerate the race to the bottom for pricing of commodity images.

The large sites keep their mouths shut about this but I had private exchanges with some smaller sites managers (especially one) earlier on and they both told me more than 50% of their (sales) traffic came from Google. OK this might be biased since they sold little and they didn't do much marketing, but still. I'm currently more on image SEO forums, time permitting, than elsewhere. The new Google Images will be the key, I believe.

As to bottomline pricing, that's why it's a bit foolish to upload to sites that undercut the mainstream, like Thinkstock and Crestock. Sooner than later, buyers will find out and then you're burned. It's also reckless, even now, to upload the same shots on Alamy as on DT for a very different price point. People that do that shoot themselves in the feet, but it's a free market and a free world. Isn't that wonderful?

Transparency, freedom, low entry fee (an internet connection and a decent cam), both for the buyer and the seller. Oligopolistic capitalists beaten by their own weapons. Ah, just Imagine .

I'v got a brand new idea that will make microstock totally obsolete: the tap-on-the-shoulder model.

You obviously missed Flickr.

About animal images in general - what type do sell?

Just look. Why are you asking for the obvious? Don't you know how to handle search engines?
Look at this dog shot (378 downloads on DT alone). Can you match it?
Check Eric Issel�e. He only shoots animals: 36K sales. Can you match him?

I could imagine shots such as this: http://stirredreality.com/stock/1.jpg (I know - poor lighting, obstructed background, focus is off by 5 mm and there's dust in the foreground)

If you know it (that goes for your first 5 shots too) why ask?

Do more exotic animals help?

Can you match this lion?

For instance, I have taken plenty of close-up shots of snow leopard kittens and peregrines (all at too bad ISO but otherwise fine).

Otherwise fine? If your ISO is off and the image is noisy, just upload them to Flickr or FB.

Do you have any general ideas here? I've looked through what sells on the sites but I honestly can't seem to find a consistent theme to it.

Keep looking. If you think any of us found the holy grail, do you think we would spill the location to our (future) competitors and educate them?

Honestly, I didn't want to mingle in this thread since I would sound rude. I thought it was a joke. If you seriously ask if this shot has fringe (the fringe is an elephant in the room but the image is totally flawed on every other aspect: commercial usability and especially lighting) and "you're not good enough to tell", I suggest you search another hobby. Judging from those 5 snapshots, you just have no talent. Sorry but it will save you time and needless frustrations.

You may block and curse me now.

I very carefully read stockmarketer's post and found it to be exactly on target. Absolutely accurate. I agree with every point he made.

+1 - the OP got a heart - a very revealing and wakening-up post.

I kept out of the iStock complaining threads since it serves no purpose and it takes time. Since iStock (and microstock in general in the limit) is "unsustainable" for me, I basically stopped uploading. Not as a "punishment" but since it makes no sense to buy props and spend hours in Photoshop working for 1$ per hour.

I agree with the OP that it is "capitalism" that steered the downfall of the (small) contributors, but in a less favorable way than he does. He probably meant "free market", but real capitalism is the worst enemy of a free market. Both are different.

In the Marxist framework, capitalism is the phenomenon whereby capital goods (production means like land, machines, capital)  or leverage becomes concentrated in the hands of a few, mainly by not giving a fair reward to the workers by alienating the fruits of their labor.
Free market is the phenomenon whereby the price for a good or service is only determined by the invisible hand that matches supply and demand. In the free market, value is not determined by the intrinsic value of a product or the work you've put in it, but by what someone else wants to pay for it. In stock, the saleability of an image is not determined by the time you put into a shot and the post-processing or the cost of the props and models, but how the buyers estimate it by buying it or not. As such, the free market can be more cruel than just capitalism but it's fair since it offers a flat transparent play-field to all players with no entrance hurdles like (a lot of) capital.

As to the big stock corporations, they didn't start as capitalists. They started with almost nothing (like Google) but they had an idea (calling it "vision" in hindsight) that by mere chance, took off. The first mice get the cheese but the pioneers also are the ones that get the arrows in their back. There are many more pioneers than mice. You can't really tell in advance or everybody would be rich. There is also no special merit in being rewarded by the market with a particular venture since it's all about guessing, failing and scoring - by chance. A monkey is still as successful in predicting Stock Exchange fluctuations as a financial guru. The "vision" thing is only applied later, like in Evolution. Many organisms try, a few are rewarded and control the species thereafter.

There are a few people with real vision, like Steve Jobs. He proved himself time after time by introducing new original products. Stock corporations didn't prove themselves at all. They don't make their products, they merely distribute them. Doing so, they destroyed the free market by becoming oligopolies, like every capitalist loves to do: full control of the market by omnipresence. They accumulated their wealth by alienating a part of the earning of image creators and let them and them alone take the burden of the free market, fighting and eating each other. Creator A loses, creator B wins. The agency doesn't care: it always wins.

The model that the OP proposes for the disgruntled ("start your own site, sell yourself") has face value but doesn't make sense since the free market is gone. Nobody can invest enough capital to fight the oligopolists any more. No RF site started after 2005 ever made it, even if they were better.

Yes it's capitalism, and the freedom it offers is illusory. It's the freedom to starve. What for instance, does freedom of speech means when you can't pay a medium to be heard? What's the freedom of press worth if you don't own a press? What does freedom of education mean for someone that can't pay college fees?
It's all as illusory as democray, where the outcome of the voting process is largely determined by the guy with the deepest pockets to buy advertisement space and time.

Who can blame them? "Start your own site"   Or vote with your feet: thousands of new feet are born every day. The oligopolists can only be beaten by their own game: a Google-like super-search engine that also offers price comparison. This might restore the free market again. Maybe.

I should also add that of my top 10 earners, 7 almost never or never sold at other sites, and vice versa. Which leads to think the best match is hugely manipulated, much more than on DT and SS since the overlap between good sellers is much larger there. This far-off best match plus the fact that recent files (of 2010) sink to the bottom and never sell at all made me stop uploading even before the royalty cut announcement.

"A series is any batch of photographs that, when uploaded to Dreamstime, will be rejected as too similar".   

What I miss the most is the analytics.  The ability to long in every day (or several times a day) and review my sales data.  The daily tracking... the historical data... it was all critical to my workflow as it helped me to understand sales trends at different sites.

It will probably sound very rude... but... with 72 sales on DT in over 2 years, and 9 (!) sales at iStock in over 3 years (on average a sale every 4 months), why you need to track/analyze your, ahem, sales "several" times per day? Let alone have "historical" data critical to your "workflow"? With that number of sales, I would just login in every other week and remember everything by heart. I'm flabbergasted.

Ahaa...I have been using Headline! I thought it must be me who was doing something wrong Thank you very much! This should make things easier

Yeah, sometimes I'm useful.  Had to find it out all too.

And what does that statement do for me anyhow?

Dreamstime at least removes all IPTC info from the sold image. If the buyer puts it online somehow, the image will start its net life (Google Images etc...) as an orphan. If the agency wouldn't do it, the buyer probably would since IPTC gives a 10K overhead to a web image. That's why recent copyright tracking tools rely on image recognition, rather than on IPTC. IPTC is faster removed by the sites/buyers than you can put it in.

What do you think is the best program for ITPC tags?
I use IrfanView now, but there are some agencies that doesn't read all the data!

All agencies read the base IPTC scheme as Irfanview supports, except... Veer. I had to help the LO programmer out long ago on this. For tagging, I still use my own script FD-tagger, copypasting to Irfanview. I hope Veer will follow the industry standard one time soon. The industry standard is not the private XMP scheme that Adobe wants to push down our throats.

what the heck... I went from 6 persons ignoring me to 9.. why is that? all my latest post are so weak in terms of aggressivity...

Yes, you used to be much better at it.