I have my buyer hat on this month and I've been running searches for illustrations and the Best Match is a complete disaster right now.  I get the most ridiculous results such as large numbers of new, low quality similars by the same contributor all in a row. Lower quaity work by newer artists is being pushed to the front when I'm expecting and hoping to see higher quality material from established contributors (which seems to have been shoved down some black hole).  From a buyer's perspective, wading through so much garbage is extremely frustrating and tonight I just gave up and went to another site and found what I was looking for.

I don't know if it's the same on the photo side, but on the illustration side I've never seen the search turn in such useless results.  That could account for some lost sales. Or all of the lost sales. 

Quote from: Colonel on August 04, 2014, 07:45

They don't need to do anything as specific as that.

The RC system keeps their contributor % payouts at a level that is manageable for them. Each year they can control how many are at each level - they don't care how many are at diamond level as long as the aggregate payout % of all contributors is within specified acceptable/sustainable boundaries, which they can control by raising and lowering the RC level tiers.

Adding to that: Ever since they introduced it, they never had to raise the limits. Actually they had decided to keep contributors at least on their older levels. Which shows that people on average are doing even worse than what they had calculated at the start. Funny enough "not raising the bar" is an indicator of the business running not as good as expected in this case, isn't it?