When I first saw the letter title I thought I was going to read something along the lines of:-
"We've been listening to your grievances and recognise we've made mistakes. We want to treat contributors more fairly and will be making changes........"
When I read the actual letter I was gobsmacked. How naive of me.

On the royalties page everything is blank and it says

"Royalties data will not be available until your first transaction has occurred. Please try again next month."

By transaction do they mean first payment and if you don't reach payout does that mean everything will remain blank for another month?
Although I have a very small port of around 200 images I haven't missed a payout in over a year but I have a bad feeling about this one.

Expect Sales to Plummet

I don't remember a time when there were so many problems with the search results, at least for my files but judging from the rants on the Getty forums I'm not alone.
More of my files with broken or missing thumbnails, obviously relevant keywords being removed, increasing number of files unsearchable by any of their keywords.
Could this be down to under investment in server capacity/infrastructure/bandwith? Instead of investing more to cope with the growing library size Getty instead cuts costs through the unification process meaning the only way the system can cope is to ration the search results.

The worst part is the loss of your own image linking when switching to classic view on an ADP,  giving your other same topic/style images a fighting chance to be seen and bought.
Now we're left with a joke of a similars carousel. Should be called Dissimilar Images.

It doesn't matter how much they spend on marketing when the site is so badly run.
Confusing user interface, bugs that take months if ever to fix, badly thought out and implemented search, uncontrolled spamming, constantly changing pricing plans.
A potential new customer visiting the site and finding such a mess won't bother coming back.

So where can we find out how much we're due from use of our images on Microsoft sites?
I bet any licensing deal between Getty and Microsoft will result in royalties so small you'd need a microscope to see them.

I was doing a reverse search on Google of my images and i've found this page with a picture of mine

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/lifestyle/horoscope/foods-to-eat-and-avoid-according-to-your-zodiac-sign/ss-BBlDhcA#image=16

mine is the 16/25...now this picture for what i see on my graphs has never been sold nor via credit, sub or pp...it was sold in august...getty august sales still must be updated?

Are you sure it hasn't been used under Getty's free use scheme

http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/resources/embed#

in which case I'm not sure if you'll get any money at all for it.

I've never known a slump like this in over five years. If this is the new norm then there's no point staying exclusive, I'll give it a couple months to see if things turn around.
With similar dismay over on the Shutterstock forums I wonder if all the buyers are going over to Fotolia/Adobe. Feels like the beginning of the end for the established sites.

Interesting thread, I said the same things about out of control spamming over on the iStock forums and posted these search results for certain keywords,

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19999283/iStock-spam.jpg

These are actual best match keyword searches, not taken from ports or from date ordered searches. Each batch can run several pages followed by another batch of spam from another contributor.
Being exclusive on iStock I don't usually look at what's going on at SS but having just had a quick browse I'd say standards have indeed dropped dramatically since I last looked a few months ago but I don't think the spamming is any where near as bad as on iStock, yet, at least for illustrations, haven't compared photos.

It seems the whole industry is shooting itself in the foot in the race to the bottom, which is not just about being cheapest but being able to boast about the largest collection. Any algorithm which is supposed to promote better images to the front of searches based on performance is fighting a losing battle, the cream can't rise to the top when it's buried under so much spam.

Getty is running out of money

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-25/carlyle-s-getty-images-said-to-run-tight-on-cash-as-profit-drops

so you can expect even more elaborate schemes to reduce our royalties and present them to us as great new opportunities.

Quote from: Holmes on August 01, 2015, 14:43

...what do you think of the current state of IS/getty and future prospects. it appears the futzing has stabilized for the moment. (did i really say that?)

I think that they have one big problem they haven't figured out. 3 credits versus 1 credit for essentially the same content -search for orange slice, woman gym, new home and you can't see any reason that one image is three times the price of another.

And they still have the should-have-been-rejected content that came from off site and flooded the collection with rubbish - two examples (no surprise they haven't sold since 2013):

http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/close-up-of-orange-slice-25406435
http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/juicy-green-apple-25406521

There are smaller problems - the site regularly not working well and some really odd choices with the "new" interface versus the "classic"; inspection standards that I hear let just about anything in (when they used to have some of the most exacting standards, at least for technical excellence); no inexpensive sizes for blog or web use any more.

Why would you shop at iStock if you were a buyer? You have so many other choices that are a whole lot easier to deal with.

You think that's bad, have you seen what's happening with illustration search results? Type in certain key words and you get results like these:-

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19999283/iStock-spam.jpg

Page after page dominated by a growing minority of contributors. You can have 2 to 3 pages, 100 per page, taken up almost entirely by one contributor. The same simple symbol uploaded several times with very minor changes, or the same set of icons rearranged into different shapes, or ten minute doodles. None of these would have been accepted a few years back. And to add insult to injury keyword spamming means half these images shouldn't even turn up in the searches.
Why is iStock allowing this to happen? Is this part of some clever master plan to bring in more buyers? When a buyer is presented with such results are they going to think "wow, iStock have really upped their game", or are they more likely to think "what the f.... is going on here?" and then leave to search another site?
This type of spamming seems to have exploded since a few months ago and what's worrying is that it's not just newbies but veterans who used to be identified as inspectors and admins on their profile so I'm wondering if iStock is actually encouraging this for whatever reason.
It's pointless spending extra time creating anything decent if it's going to end up buried under all this stuff in best match.
When, a little over five years ago, I first thought of joining stock image sites I spent a lot of time researching and reading reviews and forum posts. Back then iStock was by far the most respected site, held in the highest esteem with the most stringent acceptance standards and quality control. It was with great pride when I was accepted and would boast to my artist peers who were always impressed, some having tried and failed several times to get accepted. Now I never mention iStock by name, it's more of an embarrassment, increasingly being referred to as laughingstock.