This is what I mean.
I like Canstock and 123 because they sell really well for me. Istock isn't all that good for me but mostly because I have chosen not to deal with them. FT is worthless and I really like GL.
Self hosted and a couple of sites that don't even earn a rating are my preferred uploads. But you seem to be genuinely interested so here is my upload priority list.

Self hosted - (5 sites)
Clipartof - (closed to new contributors)
Toonvectors - (70% commission on $20 vectors)
GLStock (52% on $14.00 vectors)
Pond 5 (I don't actually upload here yet but intend to when I start uploading to micros again)

Cutcaster
Stockfresh
Stockami
Featurepics
Yay
(I like the RPD even though the sales are slow- the way I look at it is if they are stealing sales from the sub sites great...I get paid better. These site combine for Christmas money at the end of the year)

Shutterstock
Canstock
123
Dreamstime
(I really, really dislike subs because I see them as killing my future sales. These sites now only get the images I have tracked as not great or non sellers on my preferred sites.It is also much more likely that my images will be stolen/shared on free sites because of the low price.)

Sites I probably won't upload to again
Bigstock (I liked these guys until they introduced the subs)
IS (Hundreds of reasons)
FT (Sales just never justified liking these guys)
DP (RPD is just to low for the volume)
Graphic River (Prices are too low-even though they do have decent volume)
Veer (Just a strange site with weird sales patterns)

Sites that will never get anymore of my images
Crestock (I can live without the four $.25 sales I get a month)
Vectorstock (Price is way to low)
Isignstock (No sales details and an arbitrary commission at the end of the month)

I want to be selling my images 20 years from now and my images take a while to produce. I will never have 10,000 images so I feel like I need to protect the ones I do have. I now look for a RPD of at least $7.00. I won't remove images that I have already uploaded but my new stuff goes to my preferred sites first. This is working for me because my income continues to rise and I don't lose sleep at night hoping that Shutterstock doesn't change their commission structure.
Note: I spend a lot of time doing things that most people would consider insane. It probably takes me around 10 minutes per image to prepare and upload an image to the first site and about 3 minutes for every site after that. I spend a massive amount of time on keywording, image naming, and content descriptions. Finally, I would guess that about 70% of my income comes directly from Google Image searches. I would argue that anyone who says that you can't sell images without a huge marketing budget is simply wrong. I'm tempted to start a co-op of illustrators based on what I've learned and the symbiostock foundation but I'm not sure enough people would be willing to invest the money and more importantly the time it would take to make it work.

Yes, it says that 4-6 years ago anyone who had a high performing portfolio was crazy not to be exclusive. After that it simply became too expensive to leave. If I had started in 2006 versus 2010 there is no doubt in my mind I would have been exclusive as well. The question is when I would have decided when to drop it. I honestly don't know what I would have done and I think about it a lot.

I think the flaw with the earnings poll is that the collection of the membership voting is disregarded and the agency is given the credit instead. I think you could argue that collective of contributors who are exclusive as a whole are a stronger performing group than the collective of contributors who are independent. If you were to take the same size group of exclusives and relate them to a corresponding group of independents. Same types/sizes and performing portfolios and did this on a one to one basis I would bet that the earning potentials are not all that different. In other words 100 exclusive contributors versus 100 independent contributors with comparable portfolios. The real issue here is that the voting groups are vastly different and that is skewing the results. This is what is causing the huge earnings discrepancy and not necessarily the agencies.

The other problem is where people have decided to spend their time. Exclusives have put all of their effort into Istock and that is where their results are showing. Independents have spread their results over multiple agencies. My guess is that whatever direction you choose to make a change you are likely to take a financial hit until you can rebuild at the new place. Finally, when you add up the total numbers for independents a number of very high performing sites are not represented in the polls because of voting minimums.

Illustrators absolutely must upload to Toonvectors! Sales are slowish (but regular and consistent monthly) but at a commission of $14 per sale and 70% you should support this site simply on principle. Upload is a bit unorthodox but once you get it is extremely easy. Toonvectors commissions for me are about 2 times DP and Fotolia and blow the other smaller sites out of the water. This site and Symbio are the two most promising prospects for illustrators in years.

One of my employees just handed me a sheet about this. Looks like I need to change passwords on Gmail, Facebook, Youtube and about a dozen more. Apparently you don't want to change passwords until the patch has been fixed but you do want to change after they have been fixed.

Some other major sites apparently aren't affected. Does anyone know which micros are affected by this and which ones aren't? MSG? Any others?

Thanks
Dennis

Hi all. PM from Leo.  "I will be putting out an update today or tomorrow. It is going to fix it by stripping out some necessary features and non-essential database use and get back the old performance. Plus a few other things. Also I'm hard at work on a new version of Symbiostock to replace the present one which was in planning since the release of our present one."

I suppose you could just scare the crap out of them and make it so scary that it isn't worth the $4.00. Send them a message like this.

"Hi, I noticed that you are illegally reselling stock images from one of the major stock agencies. This is illegal and against the terms of your agreement with these companies. I have instructed my lawyer to purchase via fiverr.com your gig and request that you download and resell one of the images I own the copyright to. He will do this at his convenience in the near future. Once he has established that you are indeed reselling copyrighted material that you do not own I have given him permission to sue you for as much money as he can extract. Have a nice day!"

Thank you, So about $160 then. I'll have to find out if generic WP sliders and plugins work with these themes. Also what happens with the support after 12 months is very important to me because I really don't know anything about coding. I'll spend some more time on their site.
I would hate to spend $160 and find out I wasn't savvy enough.

If I feel like I'm not wasting my time I will probably try this out. I am always looking for options other than sub sites. Break even would require around 1 sale a month. I assume you feel like this is possible for you to achieve.

Does anyone else have any feedback about these options?

FWIW- I think the Symbiostock network benefits aren't necessarily working as far as referring sales but I do absolutely think they help with my SEO. Also I really like that there is a community behind me if something goes awry.

Ok, I'm always looking into self hosting options. From what I can tell it's $79 a year for one theme and access to support ends after the first 12 months. If I want plugins it goes to $149 and if I want the whole package it is $399 (with this one I get live support). The themes look nice and that is considerably cheaper than what I paid for my custom site.

Cathy which program did you purchase? Also since I know zero coding and just a little bit of wordpress will I be able to do this on my own? What does access to support mean and how is that different from live support? Finally looks like I'm looking at another $99 to use the sell media plugin?

So for a website that I would consider functional for me I am looking at $498 for 1 year plus hosting and domain costs?

I'm all about information and $500 for a site is relatively cheap. I'm tempted to build one just to be able to compare sales between my custom site, Symbio, and this.

How are peoples sales using this program? Illustrators if you use this please let me know what you think.
I'm genuinely interested in answers to these questions.

Leaf is there a way to allow people to change their vote or update their votes? I thought there was but I can't find it.

Actually I think the negatives outnumber the positives about 10 to 1. Especially if you count the bug threads. That is a bit misleading though because the people who are happy tend to stay quiet. It is the people who need help or that are frustrated that tend to speak up. Nature of the beast I guess.

I'm not sure how many images you have right now but you are about due. Your original site might actually be working against you. That one has been around for a while and probably the gravity of that site is scooping up your organic search sales that would otherwise be coming to your Symbiostock site. Not many symbio site owners (probably none) have an existing site with 20K images already indexed. In my case symbio has equaled my custom site in sales. It took about 8 months but they are now about neck and neck. So in essence I have doubled my personal sales by adding a symbio site.