SV can be criticized  for many thing, but most of them, I've learned to live with, and sales seem to be increasing anyway. There's one thing however, that I find so outright stupid, from a photographer's, a designer's as well as from SV's view, that I feel something should be done:

Medium resolution at SV is 1600x1200 pixels, which is around 2MP. Very small, and not enough for a good quality, full page print. Large resolution is 3000x2300 pixels, which is just under 7MP.

That means, that images from 6MP cameras, and there are lots of them about, some of them of very high quality, which would normally print very well full page (A4 format), are reduced to the measly 2MP size (or at least, that is how it looks to the customers).

An obvious result must be that designers fail to download images that may or may not be large enough, but since the designer can't know that, it's safer to go somewhere else. In the end, all involved lose. The photographer, because he loses a sale, SV likewise, and the designer, because he has to search further for a usable photo.

I tried to take this up with SV support around 6 months ago, but to me, it seemed like they didn't understand what I was saying. Does anybody else have thoughts around this?

Nobody will be able to read any of the text on the backside when you get that down to name-card size.

With the review times they  have now, if they introduced ftp, it would probably be well into the next millennium before they could empty the queue. The upload system they have wouldn't be so bad if it didn't time-out all the time.

It must be said though, that I have increasing sales there

Oh, but I absolutely support FP's business model. They pay me a 70% commission, as opposed to 20% at some other agencies. No marketing in the world can change that. In addition, they accept the photos that I think are stock-worthy, they let me decide the price of those photos, and they let me upload the number of images that I want to upload.

I earn much more money on IS and SS, and will continue to do so for many years. But if the short term earnings were the only thing that dictated my photographic work, I would not be a photographer anymore, but merely a supplier of photographic images, with no other interest than counting my earnings.

God doesn't have a very big market share in this part of the world, but the spirits have shown me the way to a shop where there's a mint, used 135mm f/2.0 for sale at a reasonable price. I worry about what will happen to me if I don't follow the advice of the spirits. I may even end up as a Canon user in my next life. Shrug.....   

I'd better buy it then   

It's rather unpredictable. Agencies like Canstock can survive a long time if they have low costs. I guess some of those with eastern European roots do their programming and web-design there, at much lower cost than in the west.

Server capacity is cheap, and software/design competence can be cheap. What does cost money is marketing, but if you don't do much of that, costs can be held at a very reasonable level.

A cool concept, like LO, doesn't sell photos. Lots of images online, reasonable prices and a functional search engine does. There have always been lots of small macro stock agencies. I don't think that will change much in the micro world.

Don't worry about the review times, worry about the sales.

Since January, my profit per sale at DT has gone down every month. Now, it's down to $0.82, which is the lowest since December 2006, and down from $1.49 in August 2007. Is volume going up? No, but the subscription sales are increasing at the cost of credit sales.

This is a very disappointing development, and while DT in my case was fighting for the second spot with IS until recently, it looks like they will soon be overtaken by FT as well as StockXpert.

What to me looked like one of the very best microstock agencies, is apparently being teared down by the greed of the owners. Very sad indeed.

They reject most of what I upload, and I hadn't sold anything since I joined more than two years ago (it was the first agency I uploaded to), but guess what: today, they sold one of my photos. It was for the lowest price possible, $20, but it generated $14 for me. I think I'll hang in there for a few more years. Maybe I'll reach payout before I retire 

With my portfolio, clearly FP. With as little as one click per image, I choose price, resizing and licensing option.

This sucks 

The market is too big and too diversified to be dominated by anybody, particularly with IS' new policy on copyrighted items like cars etc.

For me, SS is still bigger, and DT equal in size to IS. In addition, StockXpert, 123, BS and not least FT are growing fast. This is not the time to put all the eggs in one basket.