I think the mood is more dismay than surprise. And we all (I think) retain that childlike wish for a happy ending...

I have lost track of lots of details with IS, but is it a change that indie files are 4 credits for small and Photo+ is 5 for small?

1-4-07-10-15-20-23 for indie files and
2-5-10-15-20-25-28 for Photo+

I feel a blonde joke coming on...

When I left exclusivity (I had not participated in Exclusive+) I made the decision on what to go into P+ on the basis of sales rate - not revenue per sale. A big boost is getting 2 credits for the XS (given the volume of those, doubling the price is very good). I think anything that's a dime a dozen - a lucky best seller - is the most likely candidate to have sales drop off and thus not a good candidate.

I also think that E+ is much riskier than P+ - because the price differential is so huge, whereas P+ is just indie files at exclusive prices (it was, now they're actually cheaper than exclusive which is even better).

I did have a few files that were shot at the HQ 'lypse (and which couldn't be on other sites) so I put those into P+ too.

I don't like it, is the short answer.

But like most relationships, the issue is who has the power, and unfortunately, contributors don't have much. Even if existing microstocck contributors acted together and pulled our portfolios, it wouldn't take the agencies long to recruit more people to take more pictures of handshakes and goldfish jumping and pretty women in phone headsets. At the beginning of the micros, the agencies wanted to build their business and those of us willing to supply them were treated better because they needed us and it was a bit of a gamble as to whether anything would pay off. With success the agencies became very greedy and took more because they could get away with it (and I would note that some are definitely worse than others, with SS remaining a lot less awful than the group as a whole).

But that says it all, IMO - the best we can do at the moment is celebrate the least awful agency, spread our work across multiple agencies, avoid the bottom feeders and keep an eye out for any good new opportunities. I don't know that I have the energy to build a whole new portfolio for any agency or group - my thought is that even if that worked for a bit, once they got successful, the cycle would repeat. I can make a decent part time income from this and the flexibility suits me.

And I do have a deep wish that Karma will get the slimebuckets who took a good thing and effed it up for contributors to line their own pockets.

@Sue, the best way to see totals is to download  CSV file once they've finished and you can see a separate column for PP downloads and $$. The reporting is truly sucky on the IS my_uploads page (you'll have to be logged in to IS for that link to work) as you can't sort by download date, only by total PP downloads, total royalty or approval date. If you want to check an individual file you can then see when it got PP downloads, but that's a pain.

I have PP sales for every day but the 27th - not sure if they're still working on it, but I'll wait until tomorrow to download my CSV and update my stats spreadsheet (I like to keep IS sales separate from PP sales as well as updating my total for the month from IS).

I can still see my port by searching for my real name in double quotes. It's been stuck at 1097 files for many weeks now. Not sure if they've given up or whether we'll see another lurch at some point.

My last sale at DT was just after noon on Friday - and Friday was a weak day (it's often the slowest weekday as Asia/Pacific is already having a weekend). Nada so far today.

On Tuesday, I thought things might be returning to "normal" after their search engine problems, but sales Wednesday were half of Tuesdays; Thursday had a grand total of 1 sale and Friday was just 4 subscription sales.

For the month so far, downloads are down 30% on last month and $$ are down 34% (by contrast, SS sales are so far down 15% over march and IS is (a) in first place this month and last and (b) April is up over a strong March).

So other than a bunch of happy DT exclusives (and I'm sorry, but anyone who is exclusive at DT just isn't interested in making money out of their stock portfolio) I can't see anything good about the recent changes at DT.

Blaming contributors for DT taking a bigger share of the total is just lovely - it'd be funny if I weren't a contributor.

Why do we not hear anything about DT doing something to raise itself from the bottom of the top tier agencies, a position it has been very comfortably holding for years? Dicking around with the prices and royalties won't bring in more buyers or increase the amount current buyers spend. If they had something to say about growing the business overall, I'd be interested to hear it. Until then I await news of a new 37 level pricing system with 14 buyer discount programs and a iPhone/Android app to help buyers figure out what they're actually paying...

When royalties do not keep up with annual inflation, it is a calculated cut. No raise since 2008 ='s a 10% pay cut.

But they haven't raised prices during that time either.

So the buyer gets a price cut (if you wish to call stable prices in an era of low inflation a price cut) and we take a share of that along with SS. The issue is that in SS's case, by and large, the agency and contributor are rising and falling together. At all the other agencies, their pricing changes bring up the agency income the most by taking more from the buyer and giving a smaller share to the contributor.

I now had my second refund at Veer this month. With the number of sales they have, that is really disturbing. Anyone ever heard an explanation from Veer about this?

Read my post a few above yours - they say credit card fraud

How utterly predictable, if tiresome, that there's another "Good news! We raised prices and you get the same as before, not more!!"

If you're cutting the contributor's share of the payout, at least have the decency to be explicit about it.

More for the agency. Woo yay!!

I've had updates during the day so far - I think I've checked 3 times and each time there has been something new.

But I have seen what appeared to be delays (no sales during a typical busy part of the day and then lots showing up when it'd typically be quiet). It's a bit buried, but you can see the time of download (although I don't know what their server time zone is for those) but I'm too lazy to check on those assuming a "typical" number of sales show up each business day

Catherine Deneuve, husband's preferences, going for long grey hair and then completely out of the blue sub sales . I'm just kidding Jo Ann. Great look!

I have 15 subs out of the last 20. They could at least give me ss quantities if they're going to do that to me 

Stream of consciousness communications are pretty scary, I grant you - Squirrel!

(The squirrel reference will not make sense if you missed the movie "Up")