Considering the totally crap state of the site at the moment, it's been a pretty good January. The month isn't done yet and it's already better than last January by 20%. My best month of the year is typically November, so I would never expect January to be a BME.

Clearly there are some odd things going on - another contributor reported going from $2,000 a month last year (don't think they said if that was average or best month or what) to $800 in January and even given the slower time of year, that seems like a massive drop.

I will say that after I turned exclusive in August 2008 they started messing with best match as they worked on best match 2.0. It wreaked havoc with my sales and the only reason I stuck with exclusivity was I figured I should give it at least 6 months. best match 2.0 made things much better for me.

I don't know if what you're seeing has to do with site breakage vs. buyer departure. If it's the former, giving them a few months to fix things might make sense.

Another buyer has left:
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=297572&page=1
ostensibly on the 'price of Vetta/agency/E+' issues, but it's hard to say, as s/he admits that these pictures are 'better' in some way than the normal-priced ones. Like I could complain cashmere isn't as cheap as cotton knits. (and hey, moths don't attack my cotton knits).

BTW, I read the thread before the other agency name was redacted by Mr. Moderator. It was Veer, and the other XXX is for Corbis, Veer's parent.

Regardless of the slightly odd way of expressing his/her frustration, I think the message we keep getting over and over is that buyers at budget prices are feeling ignored/frustrated/priced out of the market. I honestly don't see why having premium collections necessarily results in this - as long as you don't get stupid and greedy and try to push the premium material down everyone's throat.

I hope to see those collection filters in operation very soon. The fact that all the other Getty sites don't offer any sort of ordering of results is not filling me with confidence that we'll see them back at iStock, but we'll just have to see if they do what they said they would and get them working again.

I still have accounts - with nothing for sale - at several other sites. With SS, for example, you can set something in your profile to disable it, so that images can be uploaded but not externally visible. With the other sites there's no similar master switch (AFAIK), so files need to be disabled/enabled individually.

SS does inactivate your account after a certain time (I think it's 3 months) but e-mail to customer service will reactivate it (I did that once when the partner program was introduced, but calmed down when they made it optional).

The only other prep thing to consider is keywords in your images. If you've been keywording for the IS CV, handling synonyms and phrases is something you'll need to work on. So the IS search engine maps multiple terms to the CV one, so you only have to enter the CV term. For other sites, you need to include those synonyms if you want your images found - so sunshine, sunny, sunlight, sun all map to a choice of two CV terms Sun (Sky) and Sunlight (Light Effect) on IS. If your image contains only Sunlight, you need to add the synonyms. Handling of phrases varies a bit from site to site as well - I think SS needed quotes, for example.

Not sure about your choice of color space, but when I last uploaded elsewhere (August 2008) none of the sites handled images in spaces other than sRGB automatically. Thumbs in AdobeRGB look awful in a non color managed browser (or everywhere if whoever's making the thumbs doesn't include a profile). As a result I always converted my images to sRGB when making JPEGs for upload. I stopped doing that after I went exclusive, but unless something's changed at the other sites in the interim, would probably need to make new sRGB JPEGs for those in AdobeRGB so they don't have dingy looking thumbnails.

Part time work from home Mum.

I was a software engineer, development manager and prior to that marketing and pre/post sales support for software. Had my own graphic design business for a couple of years in between, but the money in the software business was much, much better.

SS has been very smart. Back when they gave raises annually and were still raising subscription prices, they'd put the price up for the buyer, let that settle for a few months so they could track buying patterns and then announce contributor increases. They apparently have been able to  get decent stats on usage patterns that hold up - probably because of the large volume of subscribers.

You were first - cartridges are now spoken for

I'm not very motivated to shoot and upload at the moment, but my I have never and can't see myself ever going for the "good enough" approach. It's personal pride and also a sense of investing in making my portfolio the best it can be. 

The only way "revenge" can be taken is when 90% of the independent contributor from IS and FT delete their portfolio.
And that will only happen when SS offers exclusivity.

I can't see SS ever offering exclusivity. They just don't care about premium or exclusive stuff - only about having a regular supply of new images to keep subscribers happy. They have nothing to gain - they actually make more the fewer images a subscriber downloads every month.

Your target (microstock submitters) is wrong.
Agencies exist because of buyers.
Give buyers what they need elsewhere, and they drop those agencies what you don't like.

Look in the history. Slavery didn't ended because slaves stopped working, but because there were people who stood up and made other people understand that it's not ethical to benefit from slaves work.

Point taken, but there is no obvious place for contributors to take their work. Even the agencies who get highest marks from contributors have reduced commissions to increase their share of the take. I can't think of one agency (not even SS) who hasn't done this. And I'm not counting minuscule agencies with no marketing budget who give 90% to the photographer as 90% of almost-zero is still almost-zero.

When the microstock end of the business was new and agencies needed images, contributors had more leverage. Now that there is real money in it, all the agencies want a bigger piece of the pie and are not as motivated to keep contributors happy.

We (contributors) are both beneficiaries and victims of microstock's sucess.

It's sure nice to see more familiar folks from the forums in Istock's glory days here on MSG....

Next think you know Peebert will be here and the world will be right again

And any clever clogs who is thinking of pretending to be Peebert will really have to crank up the rhetoric - Peebert made Gostwyck seem like the church lady!

Mostly photos, a few illustrations. I have some digital paintings, but I only sold those via other agencies before I went exclusive with IS, so none currently for sale

I seem to remember her asking me if I wanted a little cheese with that whine when I complained about a rejection for a different reason altogether following a resubmit of an image! Probably 2004 or 2005. She became an inspector, briefly, I think. But that was back in the days of Peebert and a somewhat more wild west atmosphere