They've said in the iStock forum that the payment will be late December, so I don't think there's any point in applying pressure to them to pay up now.

Currently, I work with Pond5 and Shutterstock, but I no longer work with Adobe. I'm actively searching for other options to sell my videos and trying to avoid "all-you-can-download" agencies.

Did Adobe ban you?

When I left iStock exclusivity I submitted my videos to Shutterstock, Pond5, and a few years later Adobe Stock, on a hard drive that I mailed to them. That little LaCie Rugged drive has travelled a lot of miles back and forth. It was a few years ago though. You should contact the support departments of the agencies you are interested in submitting to and ask if you can send a HD.

Have you asked this on iStock's forum or directly to their Support? I'm not sure if anyone here can answer.

I doubt that they have made specific changes to the algo. My observations have been that their algo includes a degree of randomisation.

Yeah I had this happen recently but it resolved itself.

Someone in Germany paid US$140 (my cut was US$20) for a coloured pencil drawing done 15 years ago by my daughter when she was 5. Had a few other higher priced stills too, so it was a good month for stills. Not great for video through, with low RPD. I hate the way iStock/Getty undervalues video.

I had the highly unusual experience yesterday of uploading a photo (non-AI, non-editorial), having it reviewed, and getting its first sale all within 24 hours! Several others from the same batch also got reviewed in a day. But about half the batch remains, probably sent to the slow queue.

they are extracting still images out of the selected footage.

You are confusing this with videos being used to train Firefly. This thread is about videos for the free collection. Adobe are not going to put still images extracted from videos in their free collection.

How is this specific to iStock? These example keywords don't look like they have been disambiguated at all.

This sometimes happens to me but it's infrequent enough that I can cope with it. The funniest one was when Pond5 rejected a nebula animation for being AI and iStock simultaneously rejected it for being made from NASA elements. It was actually made with fractals.

I also wanted to say that it's not exactly a new thing. I was an iStock video exclusive way back in 2008-2014 and we had to submit these kinds of screenshots and explanation for every single digitally created video, to show we weren't using presets. After I had been dutifully doing it for a few years I was messaged by iStock's @VCR/Jim (anyone remember him?) and I was informed that they trusted me enough to alleviate me of this tedious task. Nowadays I occasionally get asked for screenshots on iStock.

Do you have any other case studies of contributors experiencing this sort of evident stability? It's not my own personal experience on AS.