Looks like DT is shooting themselves in the foot. Screwing up keywords on good images will result in drop of sales - not just for us, for them as well. I wish they'd stop being stubborn and drop the entire thing.
I am receiving more than 30 comments a day for flagged images, and 90% are irrelevant. My portfolio is over 10, 000 images, so I figure I'll keep receiving those for a while.  Dreamstime admins,  please hear me - I will not waste my time going through all of these comments every day. My time is better spent elsewhere. If you remove relevant keywords from my images, wiping out years of hard work, you will not only reduce yours and mine sales, you'll also give me a good reason to stop uploading to DT.
The problem with Dreamstime is that it looks like they still stick with the crowd-sourcing idea - for both images and now keywords - and this kind of thinking is getting more and more outdated today. Microstock has matured - we have serious professional buyers and serious professional contributors. It's basically a new RF stock business. For the crowds, there is Flickr and other places like that, where they can share and interact and comment on each other and don't have to pay. But you can not rely on amateurs anymore in microstock - yeah, many of us and many of the site started that way, 5 years ago or more, but times have changed. Not seeing this and not being flexible in your ideas is not good for the business. Let's hope DT won't have to learn that lesson the hard way. 

Well said, but it will probably fall on deaf ears.

Aside from silly referral pimping, how are contributors taking advantage of new contributors? 

I think they were referring to the vultures that hang around places like the SS forum to prey on new submitters and then try to sell them their books and/or courses.

Yeah a lot of the editorial (by which I mean the 'I was there so I took a photo') type of shots that sell are bizarre.

I'm not sure I agree about having the same info available for RM as you get on the micros, given a choice I'd have choose to not have my download figures available for all to see.

With every post to this forum, you are advertising the referral links you despise. 

Not all of us!

FTR I don't despise referral links, I despise the people who's aim it is to make money from others rather than do the hard work themselves, and I don't post links here because a. I can't see the point if someone's reading my post here there's a pretty good chance they've already looked at the sites and therefore had their cookies (or whatever the technical term is) logged by that site and b) I don't want to encourage copycats.

I have referral links on my website but that's aimed at the buyers.

You're nearly right, in both the cases I mentioned it was obvious quality wasn't the deciding factor by a long way, it came down to the simple fact that a buyer wanted an image of something and these were the only ones available, it wasn't so much about exclusivity either the image is (or was I had a quick look and can't find it now amongst the wash of similars!) still for sale.The fish market example has a story behind it, mention the big 'tuna' sale to anyone that's been with Alamy a while and they'll remember, at a contributor event a few years ago Alamy showed the image in question, everybody initially thought it would be in relation to examples of the type of quality they're looking for i.e. we don't want crap like this, but instead they announced it had sold for 35k ish and it was to point out that sometimes the subject matter is more important than the technical quality.

The windsor castle prompted the usual debate of how everyone else could have taken a better shot, but guess what - nobody had. Believe me it was not a good shot, but amongst the thousands available it was the only one from that angle and the client (a travel company I think) obviously needed that angle.

You can learn at least two things from this, technical quality isn't always the most important factor to a buyer, and you never know what will sell.

The shot was in wild. I have a witness for it. It was in Cactus garden in Palm Springs. The bird was on the branch, right in front of me, because hummingbird feeder was close. I didn't have my SB-800 with me. The bird was there for several seconds, so I made few shots, and the next moment it was gone.

You're missing the point, the whole idea of wildlife photography is to take images of the subject in it's natural environment and make it look so, you can use flash but you need to do it in a way that it isn't obvious that flash was used, or of course there can be professional studio shots of wildlife done with professional lighting. Your images are neither of these and as such I can totally see where FT were coming from when they said it didn't reach their required level of aesthetic quality, it looks like a snapshot done in a zoo. A quick search on the web brings up many images of this bird ( a lot of them as public domain images) which are far superior to yours, so why do you think FT should take this shot.

Out of interest what lead you to believe this species is endangered, on all the sites I saw none of them mentioned anything about it being endangered, in fact quite the opposite.

What about this image. This species of hummingbird is endangered.
It was rejected for: "Your photograph did not reach our desired level of aesthetic quality."

They should have also added that birds shot in captivity require a property release.

Just having a rare subject does not qualify an image as being a good stock image, it's shot sitting on it's perch in a cage using what looks like an on camera flash.

Yes Richard, you missed something.  Read the second-last paragraph in the original posting.  The info you found is about the "Congress" not the "Conference", which is aimed only at agencies and much more expensive.  Take another look and let me know if the conference suffices as an excuse to get over to Dublin. 

Doh - I'll blame you for not wanting to draw people away with a link 

Eventually found your part on the CEPIC site : http://www.cepic.info/congress/2010/programme/new_media_conference

Do you happen to know whether attendees to your day would benefit from the reduced hotel rates the 'congress' delegates get.

There is definately something up at DT, I've got 5 flagged images today all from the same person and all dated 23rd Dec 2007!!

What really annoys me the most about DT's stupid flagging system is that they've flagged the keywords they've obviously used as a phrase which when viewed together don't apply to the image, but the keywords I have in the file are not entered as a phrase and as single keywords they do apply.

Don't worry, the same will happen with microstock : fresh indian, chinese, vietnamese, philipinos willing
to shoot for peanuts and flooding the market.

Out of interest does anybody know how these folk are getting their images onto the sites, for the past three years the scaremongers have been shouting 'look out the Chinese are coming' I'm just wondering in they're doing a sponsored walk or something on their way to hand deliver their images to iS and SS HQ.

Let me explain to you as easy as I can.I study management of business and the first thing that I learned in my 1st year was that no business exist without competition.YOU CAN NOT BE TRULLY GOOD IF THERE IS NO COMPETITION.Let me give you a example where would microstock bee if there was only 10 photographers submititng?Do you see those photographers earn 1 MIL per month?You and others like you see the competition and always struggling to get better make more exceptional images that sell that's why competition is a very important factor in microstock and anyother business ,if there wasn't any competition anybody would do what they like sell what they want there will be chaos....So don't be so selfish and understand the basics of a business first and then criticise...
Thanks for all  others who honestly answer the pool

I hope you haven't paid for that business course!

Generally in commercial business the idea is to make as much profit for the business as possible, I'm intrigued to hear your analogy of how you do that by helping other businesses in the same sector as you take away your market share.

There's nothing wrong with being on amicable terms with your business rivals, and to sometimes group together where the aim is of mutual benefit to all concerned but to encourage them to compete against you is not something I'd recommend, on this business course have they given you any real world examples of where a successful business encourages more competition.

I always wonder why so many people take what Yuri says to be a reflection on the industry as a whole, his business model is unique to say the least and yet so many people seem to think that if he can't sustain a viable profit it means the end of microstock, if his RPI is dropping it could mean one of many things that relates to how he operates his business not neccesarily the microstock industry.

Every once in a while Yuri will make a statement that makes everyone talk about him and predict the end is nigh, then life goes on until the next time.

I spent a few hours the other day looking at blogs, reading interviews and statements from many of the self proclaimed experts in the stock industry all predicting what the future holds, having read them one thing became blatently clear - it's a business and nobody knows what will happen.

I predict in a few months time we'll all be having the same conversation.

If you specialise in only one type of photography and yet the standard submission process is asking you for diversity I'd bypass them and contact someone direct in management and explain the situation, I can't see the point of asking a specialist to submit ten different type of photos that they don't normally take and wouldn't submit anyway, the inspectors have a rigid set of rules that they have to follow and I think you've just fallen foul of that side of things.