Is this anything other than celebrity snaps? If not, it's competing with EdStock but very little else of what microstock sells. Seems largely irrelevant (beyond their wish to pay microstock back for ruining their lives - aren't they a bit late for that party?)

That e-mail's been around for a long time - standard for all deactivations, not something they implemented recently  as part of this descent into microstock hades

The number one best match for "South Carolina" the State is an image of someone named Carolina Bacardi who is in Los Angeles.  Surprise surprise it's an Edstock image and it is how the Best Match is supposed to be, not a good sign.

In addition to that, there's a raft of other incorrectly keyworded images up front. One of the Hooter's Air launch (the shot was in Georgia but got keyworded with SC because the flight was going there), and one of a group of people at a premier for a film (in California)  (one of the kids is Carolina).

It's horrible spam

I'm definitely opting out. I have only a small number of files on Veer (painful upload and glacial review process), so quitting altogether if they later drop the opt out will be easy.

If they are serious about having a subscription offering, they'll need to do something about reviewing so they can keep a stream of new content coming to subscribers. Perhaps they're really doing this to dump a bunch of wholly owned content into a subs plan and outside contributors just suffer the collateral damage of industry-worst compensation

I don't want to downplay your case John - it's a shame that you can't get either agency to act - but the butterfly head girl is not in any way shape or form something someone could claim was their own creation (I'm assuming the tree argument was that they might have had a similarly bent tree in their back garden as the reference for their illustration). Slapping hibiscus on top doesn't cut it.

Has someone contacted IS and SS or the IS artist(s)?

@atramos. I don't think any of the microstock sites would take images on that basis. And for anything to sell it needs to be keyworded. Dreamstime has a keywording service, but (a) you'd have to pay and (b) editorial images (what you'd have to do for the unreleased images) have to have a detailed description, date and place shot, and you have to enter that.

Unless you have some jaw-droppingly wonderful images in there, I can't imagine any agency doing the work it would take to sort out 30K images for you.

I submitted one, I wanted the icon bling. Lol!

But you didn't need to submit a logo - I got the icon bling automatically just by being a vector contributor

I saw Sean post the other day in the thread on PNGs - coming soon - saying that he was taking a "Logos" approach to PNG. When they actually do something, he'll start considering submitting content.

I didn't submit any logos, but I feel for those who did. And iStock can't even have the decency to just kill the project off so people can pull their content to use elsewhere and try and salvage some value from the hours they put in.

In a way, iStock is like one of those bad clients that strings you along with more promises than cash until you have the common sense to just walk away

... However, I know 3 people who have dropped exclusivity and they all had major drops in income that are yet to recover. Be warned, it's not any better ( and in some cases considerably worse) anywhere else....

I am not primarily an illustrator (I have a small portion of my portfolio that is illustrations) but I left iStock exclusivity in June. It is absolutely true that you'll see a temporary drop in income during the transition. I think the real issue is where you think things are heading. If you believe that over time, your situation will improve at other sites, versus continue to decline at iStock, perhaps it's better to take the hit now and get started building better search position.

You have more options with other sites (JPEGs of your vectors if you don't like a particular site's vector pricing). Over time, your SS income per download will rise as you earn more. You might want to unbundle some of your more complex illustrations to sell better on sites that have a one price for all vectors policy. If you do raster illustrations, or other derivations from your vector work, you can sell those (something iStock doesn't welcome).

It's too soon for me to say better/worse on returning to independence after my 3 year stint as an exclusive, but I'm pretty close to certain that if I had stayed exclusive at iStock, my 2011 income would have been less than 2010 anyway.  

I have the same name everywhere except 123rf because when I started with them, they made the account and loaded images from DVD, so they made joannsnover and I'm jsnover everywhere else.

Many times you end up with different images at different sites because of differing editorial policies - SS likes raster illustrations and IS for the most part doesn't; DT has stringent restrictions on similars from a series, so they'll be missing images others have, and so on. If you do vectors, look at each site's pricing scheme to decide if you're happy with it. For all sites except iStock you can upload JPEGs from your vectors if you don't want to sell the vector originals.

I like to think that people would know my work even if I changed my user name from one site to the other If a buyer shops at one or two sites - SS and IS, for example, it'd be nice to make it easy for them to find your portfolio wherever they're shopping that particular time.

I can't really offer any useful comparisons as I'm still in transition (from exclusive to non).

I will say that SS has been doing very nicely and that the percentage of OD and ELs really helps to bring up the returns. IS has been highly erratic - some decent days and some weekdays that look more like a bad weekend. It seems as if they're doing particularly poorly in Europe (based on the money I see when I get up in the morning on the West Coast of the US when Europe's business day is almost over.

September is half over, but right now the IS earnings are less than half of August's - it's never been like that in the past. SS September earnings so far are 68% of August suggesting September will be stronger.

I think that under H&F's thumb (via Getty) IS has been making moves that are not customer focused in any way and have such a short-term profit mindset that they're hurting the business. The continued software eff ups and the long time before what's broken gets fixed don't help. Even loyal customers, eventually, get to a point where they've had enough.

The dropping download numbers (look at the monthly sales threads on IS) are not a good sign, even if there's a temporary sweetener of some higher priced sales.

I like DT's approach - if you accidentally click on the "if you reject it make it free" box you get a warning dialog asking if you're sure. The fact that they put the check box right next to the terms and conditions check box makes that especially important, but if their UI were better, I still think the confirmation's a good thing.

I have ignored whoami, but seeing as Lisa quoted her, I think it's worth pointing out that StockXpert was not sold to Getty but to Jupiter Images. Once Jupiter was purchased by Getty (something Peter had nothing to do with), Getty closed StockXpert.