It wasn't my intention to upset anybody in here or to solicit their seemingly "self-deflecting" insults.  I have simply decided that the more people in this industry that know the truth about istock, the better.  I'm not making anything up, just providing pure facts.  From there it is up to the individual to decide what to do with those facts.  To my critics, I'm not a "hater" just somebody who is tired of the fact that iStock continues to profit off of the ignorance of others.  It is my theory that if everybody understood exactly what goes on behind the scenes at iStock, many would choose to take their business elsewhere.  That's all folks.  Please allow me a moment to put my "flame" retardant suit on before you begin with the insults.... ok I'm ready now.

Ok, so after being inspired by this thread yesterday, I got brave and called up 3 local production houses to tell them about istock and their poor treatment of contributors.  The response I got was quite mixed.  Company 1: Thank you for letting us know.  We actually do use istock for a lot of our stock needs and I will certainly pass this information along to other producers that we work with.  Company 2: They didn't care about what I had to say, treated me like a telemarketer, etc... not that I entirely blame them as this was an unsolicited call.  Company 3: Yes we are aware of the issues with istock and have slowly tapered off our use of them.  We typically try other stock sites first to see if we can find the subject we need.

I'm going to try to call a couple more today.  Can you imagine what would happen if everybody started doing this??  What we need is a leader to organize this "movement."  Individually we can't accomplish much, but together we are a force to be reckoned with.

As long as we're dreaming and talking about off the wall ideas, here's another one:  What if we created a boycott istock petition and got a massive amount of contributors to sign it.  The petition basically says that on July 4th, 2011, if Istock does not raise their royalties back up to the levels they were at when we signed up with them, then everybody on the list will pull their content.  We make a website with a big counter on it, counting down to "Independance Day."  As contributors, this alleviates some of the doubts that individually removing our content will accomplish anything and makes us a part of something bigger.  As I said before, I doubt this would ever get going... but its fun to dream right!