If amazon doesn't find a way to exclude junk like this, they'll render the whole self-publishing thing unusable. If google can try to sort out link farms from real sites, I'm assuming amazon can try something to eliminate this sort of mass plagiarism.

I recently had a friend of a friend who wanted to talk about turning an interest into photography into selling stock. I did a Skype chat for about an hour, sent her e-mail with links to some resources for learning more. I didn't mind that level of involvement.

I do find that people who ask for help fall into two general groups - those who are willing to help themselves and those who expect to be spoon fed. I will generally do a lot to assist the first group and nothing for the second. Getting rid of those who want everything done for them I typically do by giving them some set of things they need to do before asking the next question. As they're typically not going to do those things, they don't come back. If they do, I just wait longer and longer between answering each e-mail.

A long time back, someone in the SS forums who had seen me answer a question for someone about a rejected image asked if he could e-mail me his image to fix it for him. I still can't believe the nerve of someone asking that of a stranger, but I replied that he'd learn nothing by having someone else do it, so he'd need to give it a try himself. Never heard any more. I bet if you gave someone an assignment to take and edit 10 different images as if for the SS application and to come back to you when they had those in a Dropbox folder, on a DVD or on their website for you to review, you'd weed out the serious ones from the time wasters

I put all my best sellers and recent images that started to sell well into Photo + right after I left exclusivity in June - you basically have exclusive pricing on independent images (2 credits for XS, 5 for S, etc.). It's hard to tell as IS has been heading down the toilet bowl with such vigor, but I think P+ has worked very well.

The "lock" does not mean the files have to stay at IS, but if they do, you can't switch collections until 6 months from the last switch is up.

I suspect they did this to boost their revenue, but as the pricing is identical to exclusive files, I don't think there's any buyer resistance to paying it (I obviously have no data to back that up) as so much of the imagery on the site is already at that price.

iStock Dec 11 vs Nov 11 was down 40% in $$ and 35% in DLs.  Compare iStock downloads Dec 11 to Dec 10 (not fair to compare the money as I was exclusive in Dec 10) and they were down 65%

November is my strongest month and December's always down a little - 5% to 25% over the years.

You really don't want to get a Scot going on the subject of the English - what are you all thinking? Or perhaps the many centuries of politics and fighting in the British Isles are not well known elsewhere? I think Liz was gently pointing out the the island is England, Scotland and Wales, currently all part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

I have just received an email from 123RF entitled '5 Benefits From Your 123RF Registration In 2012'.  It does not mention the cut in commissions at all.  This shows that emails from 123RF do get through to me in the normal way (this was not in my spam folder or anything, just in my regular mail inbox).

I repeat what others have said - I did not receive the commission cut email from 123RF and yes I have checked my spam and deleted folders.

Now please own up to the fact that this email did not get sent to everyone and you made a mistake.  We are not all making it up!

I didn't get any e-mail with that title. I just checked (a) my spam folder and (b) my 123rf profile to make sure it showed the correct e-mail address, which it does (I haven't changed it in years) and (c) my site mail at 123rf (the most recent thing is vector price changes from nearly a year ago). Nada.

I used to get newsletters from 123rf via e-mail and haven't had one of those in a long time. Perhaps there's something broken in how communications are being sent out to contributors.

With this many people not getting things 123rf says they're sending, this is more than just a spam filter problem.

Quote from: jsnover on January 05, 2012, 10:14

they don't want to spend any money on contributors if they can avoid it).

Tsk, Joanne, you must know they're "very focused on bringing a supporting structure and exceptionally Minilypse-centric year to the community".
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=339075&page=1

I've a bridge I'd like to sell you...

I would love to have back what was there in 2009/10, but when they can't deliver PNG support (beyond saying it's "coming soon"), Feast looks like a distraction and Logos look more and more like Miss Haversham as the cobwebs collect, I have a hard time getting too worked up about this latest initiative. Oh, and I forgot to mention the Facebook Christmas cards and the new-and-improved referral program...

I know you know this, but with so many things changing all the time, it's really hard to pinpoint cause and effect. So SS had a great last three months but was it greater for those who had pulled their IS port than for me who still had mine? Hard to say.

You might try to contact David Gilder who dropped exclusivity and pulled his whole port when iStock turned on its contributors last September. I don't think he frequents MSG much but his site has contact information.

If you've ever read about bacterial films (meaning a collection of bacteria on a surface, not a movie) nothing much special happens until they're there in sufficient quantity. It may be that there is no immediate effect of one or two photographers leaving iStock, especially if those anecdotes about how buyers work that we've heard here are true - that buyers choose a site and stick with it rather than shopping around for each purchase to find their chosen image at the cheapest price.

However, if a site outage, price increase or other disruption causes buyers to re-evaluate where they shop, possibly the reduced choice at iStock might be a factor in their decision to switch or change which place they shop first. Perhaps when they do and they wonder where all those great images of seniors went to, they ones they used to buy all the time but aren't there any more, your portfolio not being there any more (along with others) might be an influence.

I have thought about removing my iStock portfolio more than once, most recently at the end of December where indie sales were so awful and for a while it appeared they were ramping up the transfer to the partner sites. I was thinking that once on Thinkstock/photos.com it would take iStock forever to remove the files, so if all indie files were buried long term at iStock, leaving the only measurable sales from the partner program I wanted out.

I decided to wait until the New Year and they did improve things quite a bit; they've also stopped transferring files (mine anyway) as I'm at 14 files in the PP and holding for weeks now.

I'm back on that fence again

That may explain why my stats looked OK for yesterday. I had beach day The shots that sold were all of beaches or waterfront in various parts of the world. Back in the missing time it was other stuff, mostly Christmas. So if there was no overlap between sales on the two periods, yesterday's sales would have been left untouched.

Edited to add that I looked at the bar chart for download totals for yesterday (4th) and noticed there was one more download listed than was showing. I checked a best-seller file and sure enough it accounted for the missing money and was shown in my_uploads for the December 2nd even though it has sold many times since.

In the recent past we've had balance numbers go up and down unexpectedly (server problems), admin adjustments made with no notification and then there are partner program sales (I apparently had one sale at the end of November from the 10 or so that were then transferred). But seeing the sales in a bestselling file has never been "off" - if it shows there, it happened (at least they've never effed it up before, so until they do we can view it as a stable indicator)

The scary thing is that if no one had mentioned this I would never have checked and it wasn't immediately obvious that something was wrong. This time there's no missing money, just a crap display of what sold, but they keep messing up with our payments and we have no progress at all on more detailed reporting of sales/refund data. If I could post in the iStock forums I might go stir up more trouble on the subject - it's possibly futile anyway (writing code costs money and they don't want to spend any money on contributors if they can avoid it).

... Do not advertise on their website that accepts video? ....

That's right, they have an announcement about "news" for contributors from early December. That was about video, but the changes in royalties should have been there as well as via e-mail - and e-mail is as well as an on site notification.

I clicked on the wrong button - brain fart - but I can't fix it. I think polls can allow a vote change - can you do that?

I believe there are employment opportunities for you in Calgary, Ontario. If you can fix bugs then you could probably write your own paycheck with unlimited overtime.

Calgary's in Alberta - just a hair West of Ontario. I had written, and then deleted, something similar in my post complimenting them on their speed. I decided I was being gratuitously mean, if accurate. You are apparently voicing my less kind thoughts

And now I'm seeing the search results I'd expect - your turnaround on fixes is excellent.