Any serious business owner would show a lot more interest in fixing all those bugs on the site and also communicate what the plans for the future are.

The business owner is Getty. Why would he put money in a competitor of Istock? Rumors are that most of the staff is fired. What Getty's plans are, nobody knows, but StockXpert as we knew it is gone.

http://www.zymmetrical.com/blog/

The idea of stockastic is not that bad: an independent review house (food health inspection) and a clearing house to guarantee your ID and legality and verify/archive your model releases while keeping your privacy. Assuming every photo then comes with an inspection and verification fee, plus you have to maintain your own site and do the SEO (adding presale costs), - the real issue is then what the difference is with a stock site like Zymm, that gives 70% and allows pricing. 

One good reason to still do it is the tsunami of "low commercial value"/"we don't need this" rejections of technically perfect shots, that start to plague all the sites. A contributor is at the merci of what they think is salable, and sites often neglect the long tail.

Quote:

In November of 2006 I received an email from Bradt Travel Guides. They had found a photo of a condor in my gallery and wanted to use it for the cover of a new guidebook on Peruvian Wildlife. They offered a price, I countered, they offered the same price, I accepted. Now my photo is on a book. It�s on a real book in the real world. Cool.

After selling the photo I thought � hey, maybe I could sell other photos! The obvious place to do this was on stock photography websites. I tried out some of the leading ones. Most rejected the photos I submitted. One popular stock site actually called the photo that I had already sold as �unsellable�. That was funny.

So this, Steve�s story, and a few others around the office got us thinking. What gives the editors of stock photo sites the right to be policing the marketplace? Shouldn�t the buyers decide what suits their needs? Shouldn�t any photo a photographer wants to sell be able to be placed for sale? As we found out, the photo you least suspect could very well be the perfect photo for someone. This was the beginning of ClusterShot.

I never had any problem with FT payout, although they are relatively slow. My last payout request was on 18/3 and I received the $ on Paypal on 27/3. That's 9 days, like Freezing.

Wow! You get a whopping 5$ + 5$ for uploading your 20 best, and you'll get up to 25% commission (that means less mostly) on a sale.

"start downloading world class vector files instantly for as little a $0.5" : so if you get up to 25% of that download, that means you'll earn up to 0.12$ on that sale.

No address, no TOS, but the domain is registered by... Ron Chapple. Strange.

about wiredtree.com you really need to use their service to see why I will never leave them

I know. I bookmarked right after reading. They have great sections on coding and on MySql. I was just amazed they used a Nepal domain. The English is that fluent that I'm sure they're not Nepalese. I hope they will continue to support you since Fotomina certainly needs a better search engine, IPTC: many beginning sites struggle with IPTC (please include newline in the keywd separation, and FTP.
Why didn't you work with lightboxphoto?

Need proof? Just take a look at the most downloaded images for 'car' on iStock: click here.

Well the sports car are illustrations, with one's own design, which is a very cool way to solve the copyright question. The SUV is an existing brand: the thumb is still there, but the image has been disabled.
There is however this minicooper which even has the brand name in its keywords. I figure this one will be gone soon too.

I want to run my own restaurant, but no one will come in unless they know it's approved by the health inspector.

Explained like this, it sounds like a very good idea. Especially the universal image search engine by Google etc... they added metadata and surrounding info recently to power Google Images, while before, the search only relied on file names. If they would buy the Tineye technology (which I expect) they could even sift the duplicates of the same image on several sites, included those of the customers that bought it. Personal sites will have the same chance as stock sites. Paypal has developed some cool APIs to sell from a personal site directly.

A certification organism of reviewers would be a major asset then, since they can attach technical quality labels in an undisputed way. No rejection for similars nor LCV. Let the buyers decide... Darwinian approach. You've got a great idea there, when will you start implementing it? 

What is your experience with the best TYPE of photo you have sold on Fotolia. I'm curious to know what has been doing well for everyone.

For me nothing at all. I have no clue what sells there or what they want. Rejection reasons are very mystical, so I don't read them any more. There is also no way to see what images were rejected, at least not for me. I get a cryptic rejection site mail with an image number, not even a thumb or a title.

They are my lowest selling site. My 7 days rank went down to an all-time low of 8000+. I don't understand them at all. Many claim it's one of their top sites, for me, it I go down all the time despite regular uploading: last 7 days rank = 8060+ coming from 2000+ a year ago with half the portfolio. Submitted: 600, accepted 400, lately going up to 85%.

Perhaps contributors like Arcurs (he says FT is his best selling site) made private deals with FT to get precedence in the search engine. With the last commission deal made in such a sneaky way, I also lost my trust. There was also an incident 2 years ago when my password change didn't work, and support never replied. I just got an email much later when I mentioned it here on the MSG. It turned out they changed my password to 'fotolia' and it staid like that for months. Very difficult to guess for a hacker  .

The password on my FTP is still a mystery, so I have to upload by HTML: more than 3 images at a time fail without any error message. Given the cumbersome upload process, included their much too complicated and overlapping categories, the time to upload isn't really worth the meager sales, so I stopped uploading last March.

you can stay pagan if you choose, but hell, going that far back isn't quite my cup of tea. not even sure if tea was found just then during the neanderthal age 

Well, she was mentioning the "real" meaning. And you can be a pagan with a DSLR too 
It's fun to see how the rabbit and the eggs survived 2000 years christianity, so deep inside we probably are all pagans. Whatever.

Obvously, it wouldn't be a one-man business, it would require resources and investment.

Well then it's a stock site. Unless you would do it all by yourself. The argument that you can set your own prices also holds for Zymm, Cutcaster and Featurepics.

If history teaches us one thing it is to find a way to CUT OUT THE MIDDLEMAN.

To be effective for SEO, you'll need to combine several photographers. To have similar quality, you need to have trusted long-term reviewers. You'll need a coder to maintain and extend the code, and not one that runs away in the middle of the project like what happened on YAY. You'll need at least 1 full-time staff for offering support to contributors. and to buyers. You'll certainly need an accountant. You'll need a CEO to coordinate it and post to the MSG. Well... this is another microstock site. 

The point here is that buyers shouldn't have to switch searches to find the best (i.e. most 'relevant') images. New images need to be peppered in with older best-selling ones, but not at their expense.

Well that's what caused the "whining" (default=downloads) and in fact, during those days I sold only "old" images with downloads. The tweaking goes on since the last 2 days, I sold about 1/4 very old (2005) and a few very new ones (2009). So there is a mix already now, in the relevance option. Just keep doing your benchmark "airplane" every 4 days or so, and you'll probably see a difference.

That's how the microstocks got the price of a photo down to 25 cents, over a period of years.

0.25$ ? I get many subscription sales of 0.19$ on Gods Gift to stock: iStockphoto.