The companies should split their take among partners or not so partners as the case may be. (so say 123RF takes 60%, they can split that however they want with the partners - and if there are more than one, they can choose how they split it all up). Instead we get this - how about inmagine then selling the pics back on 123RF and skimming another 60% off the top again (or whatever level they do) - and then 123 could put them back on inmagine - I am sure they could get the contributor royalty down under 1%. 

I wonder who else is doing this?

October started out great for me at SS, then after the first week or so my earnings took a nosedive. Over the past couple of weeks sales have been significantly lower than normal. Very disheartening considering that October is usually my best month of the year otherwise. I think they must have changed the search algorithm.

I must be on the opposite selling schedule - my first week was awful and it has been quite good since then other than the usual weekends and 2 other days.

agreed. Their rejections are plentiful and appear to be arbitrary. On almost all other sites I can guess which images might get rejected - there, other than guessing every one will get rejected I have no criteria to judge.

Maybe they think their image library is big enough or who knows. I mostly just fire and forget for submitting there, but when I do look at the rejects it is curious. If they were a bigger earner like SS I'd be pretty annoyed, but luckily they aren't.

Also if you have a small portfolio and a small number of sales you will be at a lower level and make a much smaller percent of each sale. It takes a whole lot of sales to get back up to the 50% they used to have.

It has nothing to do with a royalty rate change. IS realized they had made some sort of accounting mistake and then made another mistake in saying it had to do with royalty rates. Supposedly all will be revealed next week.

Since this meant they had to give us money it was probably something that happened years ago - so why they couldn't have crafted a proper e-mail is beyond me, but most of their actions are beyond me.

Another question - should i delete images that did not sell at all for a long time?
I don�t want to make them free as Dreamstime suggests.

set them so that the default is to delete - not to make free. I think they are not deleting them at this moment.

Confidence in IS is not running high for me - but it is nice to get a 2 month income correction (so about a good SS day). I wonder what their screwup was this time and how long it has been going on.

I have to disagree w/ Scott at least in the subjects where I know the subject matter some of the worst photos are at the top of the search - as far as technical things go - this would be like a doctor wearing the wrong clothes, holding instruments backwards etc. and spam - don't get me started on that. Obviously the buyers don't really care about technical accuracy for this stuff.

Looking at my own pics - it appears the difference between the best sellers and also rans about 1/2 the time are things I have little to no control over - review times, indexing, search changes and so on. That doesn't mean that the photographer won't do better w/ better images, keywords, etc.  but that isn't the only thing that makes the difference between page one and page nobody ever sees.

Probably the best way to find a hot niche is to make a keywording tool and then track the users obsessively...

Otherwise serious market research, or spray and pray (and keep track of what actually is selling)... Depending on the niche creating a lot more work to fill the niche might not actually increase your income much  - but it might help deter or fend off poachers.

DT posted the worst quarter since Q3 2010 for me. 3 underwhelming months for me. Sad because May was good and June was my BME at DT.

This quarter was 2 months of  slightly above avg dls but low RPD and one month of ok RPD with lower DL #s.

true, no relatively recent images have seemed to get any long term traction, although I guess that would really take long term to see.

I agree every image should rise or fall on its own - one of the problems with many of the sites like IS, DT, etc. I think I was on Alamy over a year before I had my first sale (for something like $5 of which I got 2.70) then 6 months later I had another small sale. During this time they changed their minimum size and I made an effort to get stuff uploaded. a few months later I started getting regular sales (with around 700 images) and I think I have only had 2 months w/ 0 sales since then. They are often my number 2 site after SS but sales seem pretty random events. My last 3 sales were $225 $7 and $74 (that is what the buyer paid - I get 50%). My sales were better in 2012 and were down about 1/3 in 2013 and are lower again this year. Upload is a pain, but it is probably worth it - or at least it was in the past.