Deals like these totally undermine any trust you can have in deposit as an agency. I just deactivated 200 files. I will continue to supply deposit but it will be content suitable for "deals" like these.

What a terrible disappointment. They must realise that the artists are connected worldwide and you can�t hide these things.

And what a shame how shotshop is treating their artists. Claiming to payout of 35-75% on their website and then paying out less than 1%...

I removed my comments about shotshop, because like you say we need more information.

Especially how a sale with credits on shotshop turns into a subs sale on deposit. That is not acceptable.

The best solution is if they offer an opt out from resellers as well.

If deposit pays out the normal commission instead of a subs sale, I really don�t see how people can complain. After all deposit is just trying to sell the content with their own price system in other countries. And because they offer files cheap they can probably close these deals. I am sure many agencies offer reseller deals and getting in is also a competitive challenge.

If you are sending files to deposit you accept their price system. Which again shows how important it is to divide ones work by price point and quality and feed the agencies selectively with your content.

I think their view counter doesn't work properly.

it took me a long time before my files began selling on pond5 but now they sell regularly.

Basically for video I could probably do with just pond5 and SS, they get me 80% of the sales.

Yes, would be great to hear results. especially compared to getty and others...

You�ve done an amazing job Leo! Symbiostock will be alive and well and new driving forces will emerge.

All the best!

Exclusivity join / leave page is currently broken btw.

Really? So people cannot go exclusive even if they wanted to? And those that want to leave have to write to support?

To me it looks like they want to turn istock into a stock version of flickr. They have a lot of experience with flickr and have a large team of editors that do nothing else but sift through mass of files to find what they need for the getty collections. The artists then consider their amazing "luck" to have their files discovered and moved "upstream" to getty.

And obviously if they find an artist or more often a production house that they want to keep they will offer them "special" exclusive contracts via Getty.

The RC system makes no sense in a system with this kind of flooding. Nobody can shoot their way out of this swamp. The artists that can deliver top quality will all need to go after a getty contract that also handles their royalty rates on istock,the way yuri and the "professionals" do it.

For the indies it does�t matter that much, because istock is just one income stream out of many. what istock loses in clients and good will, will be picked up by the other agencies.

It is the traditional istock exclusives that are being punished.

LOL! 

I think a ton of people will be dropping the crown in the coming months. They really have no choice. New work does�t sell, there is now 5 times more indie content coming in than exclusive content and the prices for exclusive content have gone up again. And then there are the "special exclusives". And the RC levels/targets have not been adjusted for the massive influx of indie files who can upload without limit now.

Exclusives will be a marginalised breed by end of the year, if the trend continues. Even if best match still favours them, the sheer volume of new indie content will swamp them out.

istock used to be an agency for high quality content where nearly 50% of the content was exclusive to the site. Now it is just a portal for everything the market has and files then get moved around the way the agency sees fit. The artist has no control over pricing although he/she knows their own specific niche best.

Very sad to watch, but I am glad I made the difficult decision last year. I keep hoping that istock gets new managers that will make it shine again. Even if I am indie, it is still hard to see what is happening there.

But I guess SS and now Dreamstime are the ones really making a visible effort to attract the artists.

Some of the brightest and most honest posters here were anonymous. It was a great pity they quit when it was suggested that anonymous posters were no longer welcome.

But you can usually recognise the writing style, if they are also active in the wider community. This is a very small industry, people know each other.

I don�t think people mind if someone is anonymous. It is just when they visibly attack people who are not anonymous, talk down their portfolios etc...that you will get resentment.

And of course if you claim "my results are fantastic - I am earning xyz" while everyone else who is not anonymous and has been posting results for years publishes the opposite...well, it is simply hard to see if what you are writing is real.

Like you say, if someone is genuinely and consistently describing accurate events and has an intelligent and interesting opinion and ideas, the voice will be respected in time. But to just come and "pose" as being knowledgable...well, you simply have to be very convincing in what you write. Was tickstock convincing, especially in the beginning? I think he got better at communicating over the year. But he also put a massive amount of time into practising his forum voice.

To the point that now people wonder what happened to him and where did he go.

I still believe Getty should have given him a House contract and not make him pay for files in the PC collection.

Active, positive social media communication - there is a market value, a price you can attach to that. He certainly earned that contract. And I am assuming his work is good enough, although I have never seen it. His enthusiasm for Getty seemed genuine to me.

The only professional approach is to bring in a competent admin with a service oriented mind set to explain what is going on at istock and act as a bridge to their own forums and the wider community. The way Shutterstock does it...and many other agencies.

Back in the days I suggested it several times, but sadly noone took up the idea.

I don't know if Getty cares about real community building, or if they even understand how community building works.

The istock forums are a desert, most activity is taking place underground. Even the yearly sales thread for all of 2013 has less than a hundred people posting out of over 30 000 artists.

If they don't know how to reach out to their own people, including the  many admins who used to be very active on the forums as well and seem to have completely disappeared...how will they understand the dynamics of msg?

rogermexico was the last real community builder they had. I am not seeing anyone else being able to get the vibe of the people, make them trust him/her and draw them in the way he could.

I don't know if tickstock was a paid getty employee. But he was the most active poster I have seen all last year. And I don't see any active istock exclusive posting theway he did.

But I believe they should have paid him, or maybe reached out to him to become an official getty admin for msg, if he wasn't already on their pay roll.

So we will never know the real story...just another stock industry mystery that seems to have disappeared on Jan1st.

And maybe one day...getty will have an official admin on msg...and if not...the industry will keep moving on...

Ok, so we know it is not the editorials that are oversupplied Thanks for the info.

The high volume overall does surprise me. If I look around me most images I recognize come from stock factories or artists I know. But I guess there must be many more smaller teams that shoot high volume or real amateurs that keep uploading everything they shoot.

So these are images we don't really see in the market.

At the microstockgroup the number of people registered is quite steady.

For every month stockperformer shows you the uploads to any agency for that month. And if you have downloads, you will see them next to the files.

It doesn�t work exactly like the lists on istock, but it is the same for all agencies, so you can go and look at your monthly uploads and results quite easily.

You can ask them any question you have, they will reply really fast.

It is worth trying them.