Let me know if you figure out a way to upload only 13 images and end up with 100 in the iStock cue. That would be very helpful.

It's always useful to try to think through why things happen. In this case, I cannot believe that Sean could be sacked without the personal approval of Klein. Anyone lower down the food chain would be inviting disaster to sack someone who may well be the second or third biggest money-spinner not just for iStock but for the whole Getty empire.

So what will Klein have taken into consideration? Obviously Sean has been pesky, highlighted the Google deal needlessly (and therefore is a loose cannon, and "not a team player"),  encouraged damaging behaviour against the company by releasing the deactivation script, takes it on himself to criticise senior management decisions and acts as a lightning rod for those malcontents. His record shows that he has no intention of amending his behaviour, in fact the Greasemonkey script shows he is getting ever more out of control. Sacking their leader would be the biggest signal iStock could give to other troublemakers that bad behaviour will no longer be tolerated. So he should go.

But what will the cost to the company be? He brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but that could just be redistributed among other submitters. His portfolio had a considerable following, so if he goes some major clients might transfer their accounts to wherever he goes next. He's in touch with the Stocksy operation, so getting rid of him will dump one of iStock's biggest assets straight into Bruce Livingstone's lap, making that danger far worse than it is already. Or he might go to SS and the others, who are stripping away iStock clients already, causing additional erosion of the bottom line. Once he's gone, he'll be able to snipe from outside and there's nothing that can be done about it, but since iStock's managers have completely failed to keep him in line, that probably doesn't matter much. Getting rid of such a major industry figure cannot pass without comment in the trade press, which could be damaging (memo to self, book major advertising campaign in trade magazines and tell them we don't want a big fuss over this) and it might spill over into the newspaper business pages, which would be a nuisance. The internet will just be a mess, so all in all the company's image will take another hit.

Cost of sacking Locke? Probably several million dollars a year in lost sales, bad publicity and transfer of business to rivals. Cost of keeping him? Continued meddling in the company's business, attacks on our policies and general troublemaking.

He can go, it's worth a few million dollars or even a few tens of millions  to get rid of him and give ourselves the freedom to do deals without being embarrassed in front of important partners. (Sheesh! The way that guy from Google spoke to me last week!) There are a lot more deals we can do that we don't need him to be highlighting and criticising.
.....
That's how I see the thought processes working, anyway

Very good perspectives. But in addition to the reasons you gave I think iStock perhaps saw another opportunity for some added knock-on benefit in the timing of getting rid of Sean.

This benefit being the fact that Sean had helped the Ground Hog day crowd in deactivating their images with an automated script which was perhaps even pivotal in the success of some of the file exodus taking place to begin with.

So Getty wanted to show everyone that removed, or is thinking of removing files, that nobody is going to threaten them with this tactic now or ever again. And to prove it they set an example by terminating 12,000 files themselves and pushing out one of their most successful contributors. This in their mind shows everyone that they are in control and they don't care if people pull a few hundred or even thousand of their own files or not. Thus they figure removing the head from the chicken, in this case Sean, that they will prevent any future attempts contributors might plan to threaten them with on file removal.

Personally I think the repercussions of what they did to Sean is going to blow up in their face 10 fold in the long run. But hell, they saved their egos, proved that no one contributor is too important to lose, and in the process showed everyone who is boss. Or so they think.

Meanwhile I wish Sean all the very best and have no doubt he will land on his feet 110%.

There is all this talk over at Camp-iStock about tweaking the dials on the best match. This is what I was talking about when I said before about "too little and too late" measures to try and breathe life back into the site.

All that's going to come of this "dial tweaking" is a few different files are going to sell than the types of files that have been selling most recently. Is it going to increase sales for people? No, how could it?

As we already know, best match only controls what files people buy, but not how many.

So while people have hopes of a best match tweak messiah, you can't sell more files to people who aren't there to buy them in the first place.

And Getty isn't going to do what they really need to do to increase traffic which are things like lowering prices and spending money on marketing campaigns. So everyone should get used to the status quo of sales and not be hoping for anything more. You will never see Getty reaching into their pockets to spend money to make money unless it is to buyout another small stock agency and bury it.

I also don't think we have hit bottom yet on iStock. Many people this month are poised to sell less than they did even last month.

That means if we follow the heavily declining buying trend that started in September, then February could be even worse than January.

I guess that serves us right for believing in fairies. Maybe the next person from HQ who shows up with empty promises of ways to improve our sales will be named Santa.

Perhaps a gold crown being thrown off a bridge?

If you look through the portfolios of the top 10 iStock contributors, nearly all of them added new images in December and January. What message does that send to iStock/Getty and tell you about the continued commitment of iStock's top selling contributors despite falling sales, shake-ups, shake-downs, unethical Getty practices, etc?

I guess none of the top deck will be joining this little tea party because they know where their bread is buttered.

So while this group will be deleting, they will be adding.

One of the most disconcerting matters in all of this is that, in part, the fate of our future success on iStock (or lack of at this point) comes down to some celestial entity named "Search Fairy".

How can a self respecting contributor look one of their friends in the eye, when they ask how iStock is going, and reply "Well, you see, it all comes down to the Search Fairy".

What an insult to intelligence and next friends will be asking me if putting teeth under my pillow has helped my sales in any way and what my fortune teller has to say about all this.

If you really stop and think about the way iStock is running things at this point you almost have to question your sanity for continuing to take a serious approach when in fact they certainly aren't.

And so if the control of how content is displayed to buyers on the iStock web sites comes down to a fairy, then I can just imagine how much of a goat rope things really are.

Yes, of course flooding iStock with expensive Getty content doesn't help either brand. Its like trying to sell someone a Gucci bag who goes into K-Mart for a ruck sack. But the fact is they have done it already and it's clear to everyone that the site is flooded with Getty content. No doubt about that. So that confirms their greed and desperation is outweighing their sensibilities.

With Getty's traffic also falling to all time lows they are far more worried about Getty falling down the slippery slope such that they are willing to turn iStock into the sacrificial lamb if necessary in their act of desperation.

But when they started this offensive they probably didn't think it would kill iStock's traffic so quickly or at all. They probably figured, with the ability to search on iStock by price range and collection, the micro buyers would still get what they need whilst also being able to convert some of iStock's massive buyer traffic (which Getty is now lacking) into higher priced content buyers. A self fulfilling prophecy though as we have come to understand.

Surely it's all blowing up in their face. There is no doubt. If the economical micro stuff isn't selling as evidenced by the monthly stats threads on iStock, then you can be rest assured the more expensive Getty macro stuff definitely isn't selling in place of it. The buyers have simply packed up and left for a place that offers them content in their desired micro price range.

But as I said, Getty admins went into this with both feet and so far they haven't shown signs of trying to reverse the downward spiral they created. And as I said, my guess is they won't as I am sure it was a very senior decision maker who was behind all this and he/she will entrench the company with his/her decision saying that the offensive plan simply needs time to become successful followed by some words of wisdom to keep all the staff morale up like "you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs" as everyone starts worrying about their job security amidst iStock's ailing revenue.

The sad thing is I think the buyers have already said how they feel about their new macro content scheme by leaving. And the rest will become history.

What is also interesting is how in the past when they made bad decisions they were quick to reverse them back. But that's when iStock was more in control of its own fate. Now that the decisions are made by Getty, and their new partners who want to see profits increase ASAP, you won't find them backing out of major decisions so easily. They will sum the blood bath up as temporary growing pains. But in the end no growth. Just pain.

An interesting analysis of iStock's traffic as at 8 December 2012:

http://www.statscrop.com/www/istockphoto.com

From the link above:

Istockphoto.com has 13 years old, it is ranked #625 in the world, a low rank means that this website gets lots of visitors. This site is worth $90,497,289 USD and advertising revenue is $17,286 USD per day. The average pages load time is 1.769 seconds, it is very fast. This site has a very good Pagernk(7/10), it has 569,100 visitors and 4,609,710 pageviews per day. Currently, this site needs more than 972.78 GB bandwidth per day, this month will needs more than 29.45 TB bandwidth. This site is Listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory. Its seo score is 90.5%. IP address is 74.113.152.32, and its server is hosted at Calgary, Canada. Last updated on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 07:27:19 GMT.

There is already a long thread about this. This subject has been well covered already here:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/istock-is-hacked/

I find it interesting how all of a sudden sales fell off a cliff for most people when they rolled out the site changes at the beginning of September.

But why did sales fall off a cliff? Well, because in part they flooded the site with more Getty Agency content than any buyer could ever need and pushed lots of iStock best sellers and E+ files to the bottom of the heap.

So I think it's clear what happened really. The best match didn't break and the buyers didn't all run away so quickly all of a sudden come September.

What happened was Getty saw that we are coming into the high selling season on iStock. So they felt what better way to make more sales on high priced Getty content (with only 20% contributor payouts) than by pushing all the popular selling iStock images out of the way and to the back of the best match and move all the Getty stuff right up front on iStock.

At the same time, all of the top selling E+ iStock content was supposed to be moved over to Getty since around the end of the summer if I recall correctly. But alas there was site problems all of a sudden with the content migration onto Getty and the iStock content didn't get moved over to the main Getty site really until the high selling season was nearly over. Interesting coincidence there too.

Now all of a sudden iStock is finally starting to acknowledge a best match mix problem as countless contributors point out issues along with screen shots showing examples of how the best match is so heavily weighted against iStock contributor content.

Again, very serendipitous timing though with their tweaks to the best match the other day to try and appease iStock contributors, but given the fact that the high selling season is now over. In fact, the best match tweak came out only once we are into December, one of the worst months for sales of the year.

Is the timing of all of this perhaps only coincidence?

Meanwhile most iStock contributors were scratching their heads wondering how iStock could possibly roll out all these site changes and allow the site to get screwed up as we came into the high selling season. The truth is they didn't screw up the site at the beginning of September. They merely screwed iStock contributors out of their rightful selling opportunity during the high selling months and Getty came out the winner instead.

I also find it interesting how Getty content on iStock comes up at the top of the best match results and how E+ content on Getty comes up so low in the Getty search results.

I guess what we are seeing is how little value iStock contributors really have to Getty and how they are only really interested in using the iStock site traffic mainly to sell more Getty content via iStock while iStock contributors get cannibalized by the lack of sales on iStock's own content.

I also imagine September through November were good sales months for Getty contributors with lots of Agency collection pictures on iStock.

Now it makes more sense why the HQ admins say that sales have been meeting "their" expectations. They are speaking of Getty as a whole.

All of this will also help improve Getty's bottom line for next year as many iStock contributors miss their RC targets and end up falling down on their royalty rates.

I would love to think none of this is true. But I think a lot of the evidence is their to support all of this.

That's very sad. I feel your pain. I wish I could rename this thread I started to "The Fall Of The Man On The Street" because in the end Getty will still stand.

Only the people doing the hard labor to create content, and trying to continue to make a living from a business model they were all lead to believe had a stable platform, are now being left to fall with no safety net.

We only have ourselves to blame I guess when we assumed a company wasn't capable of destroying a good business purely out of greed and mismanagement.

One day people will look back at iStock as a case study on how a multimillion dollar Internet company painfully destroyed itself in the course of a few of years.

What a pity.

Personally I couldn't care less about 'more communication from her or others from Getty', I don't go to iStockphoto for social networking I go there to see if they're selling my images which, correct me if I'm wrong, is the purpose of the site. I'd rather nobody from HQ communicated with me, instead I'd prefer they got on and did what they're meant to do and sell our content.
The problem is, as we've seen on many occasions, there will be a select number of naive contributors that will believe this BS and reply with some heart felt, vomit inducing dribble thanking her, and to this end as normal nothing will get done and the site will continue along the downward slope that it's been on for the past couple of years.
So Rebecca if you read this, don't bother replying, not even on your precious weekend, just get on and do the job you're being paid for, it's not an impossible task as thousands of other bigger companies than yours can/do run and maintain a sales website completely trouble free, oh and stop pretending that everything is fine at iS, I,we,you and the rest of the industry all know it's sinking rapidly, it may come as a surprise but quite a lot of us keep track of sales figures you know.

Extremely well put. Truer words never spoken.