Hi all, this is my first post here.

Let me use this post also as a brief presentation. IS exclusive contributor actively submitting since March 2008. My port is slightly above 1.3k files, only photos. I do micro part time in the little time my everyday job gives me a rest. Still enjoy photography .

Well, I wanted to share this experience as I think it is important to be known and can be dangerous if this kind of things begin to happen.

Let me say that the number of successful files that I have is, sadly  , limited,  and I track manually every DL, views, RC,  have ratios of all of them, do regular searches to see how their position on best match evolve, etc., etc.

I had these two files, subject  related, that were doing quite well. One was on page two of a relevant keyword and the other in page 3, 25 files per page. They were picking up lately, one in particular, and suddenly something happened. I was expecting that one to hit page one, it had 5 DLs since the last index update.

These files were 4-5 months old, had around 350 views and DLs were in the low 30s. They were close to that 1/10 DLs/views ratio so I assume they were pretty useful and successful for their market. One Monday I started noticing that the number of views begun growing at an incredible pace. Incredible pace for me means that Monday evening European time they had around 900 views. During that week views kept growing and today they have >1.800 views and >1.750 views. This happened the 23rd of February. They have dropped in best match significantly.

It could be that someone posted the images on a popular blog and that drove traffic to them. It could be that someone clicked on them like crazy. I don't know what happened and I have no way of knowing, I don't know if I have been sabotaged or it is only bad luck. I have seen at least another successful file from another contributor, same market, same age, that was on page 1 in one of those searches and no its way back and with more than 3.3k views. 

If gaming the system is as easy as posting a link on a blog, the message sent to the people doing it is very dangerous: you can keep doing it, it works!. If this was unintentional there is a flaw somewhere. How can it be that attracting traffic to istock can harm the files that get that traffic? If this was intentional how can it be that someone can hurt files so easily and in such a short period of time? So many questions.

No need to say that those two files could make a good difference in terms of income for a contributor like me and that the times you hit the jackpot with a file are less and less common these days.

Just wanted to share this with you.

I have no more information and I have, although I tried in several ways, no answers.