Not many people seem to have followed Fotolia's call, as expected. You can see on the "Ranking" page everyone who has recently reached a new canister level (from gold upwards). There are only two or three photographer's names that are new on that page, and I've been visiting that page quite frequently. Fotolia's "generous" gift of gold, emerald, or saphir icons to people who are successful but new to Fotolia couldn't ever be the main reason for anyone to give up their exclusivity at istock. People who are that successful know the business well enough to be aware of Fotolia's reputation in changing the rules over and over again.
 

Donding - if you haven't reached payout, couldn't you just buy images of your fellow contributors? FT will profit from that also, but at least you'd help someone else or a few people to reach payout. Maybe people who are going to leave there could help eachother in that way.

Yes, actually I did notice. But to be fair, he does come here often to face the music, and you never know, he might not be able to be here for some reason or other.

Oh, Lisa, so you are going exclusive now. Missed that! So you made it to the other side of the decision fence.
Well good luck to you, I hope it works well.

Quote from: stardust on February 02, 2010, 19:52

As the second person to vote I can see that I must have voted exactly the same as you!

Not exactly. I voted for status quo, you are Veer believer :-)

Yeah, thanks, I just had noticed that!

Big guns are few and they can be always "compensated" for being loyal :-)

But there might also be a few amongst the few bigguns who are simply decent people and won't be corrupted by "compensation".

Same here.   The only way I can afford to delete my portfolio is if I went exclusive with IS.  I am going to have to sit and do the math now that things have changed at IS as it seems that exclusives get a great deal there.

Quote from: crashoran on February 01, 2010, 22:53

Strange, FT is my top performer...

Exactly my thoughts, I'm just waiting for istock to become a better earner for me - I had been concentrating on fotolia last year and have a lot of exclusive stuff there because they were so strong for me. Now I'm trying to build a stronger portfolio at istock, and off to istock I will be! I've so had enough of that place!

In istock's introduction to the information about exclusivity it says: "We don't want to share you, and we'll take very good care of you." - that sounds so soothing and tempting to me!

Quote from: stardust on February 01, 2010, 14:13

Do wait for the money to come through, artemis, nothing is safe with them.

Thankies, will do

By the way, probably not what you want to hear right now, but it might be better not to have your account closed, but to delete all your images yourself. That way, you keep your cannister level. You never know, if they are sold some day or some kind of miracle happens you might want to go back. But do keep in mind, if you go and keep your account with an empty port, and one day you want to go exclusive elsewhere, you will have to check their partner sites before exclusivity. Seems to take ages before pixmac and co. delete images.

Well it isn't actually a rise in price if you sell credits for various prices. The way they've thought this up, the average credit price is still $1, ranging from 0,75 to 1,20.

You're absolutly right - yet again a change has taken place, and we are waiting to be informed. 

Of course they'll keep the little extra! 
Our credit value just says the same - 1 credit = 1 whatever currency.

going a bit OT, did anybody remember how much better dls were when we were able to see who bought our works in FT?
at that time, I couldn't help to notice all of my images were dl-ed by European companies.  And also, I had more regular dls too, even ext licenses as well.

Then when they stopped showing us the buyers, the dls slowlly decreased.
I am not sure if it was because they changed markets with the new CEO from IS or just a coincidence.
But I remember when the markets were Euro , I did get more dls.
And also, the types of images the Euro market picked were different from the ones with the other Big 6 where I got my dls.

Do any of you notice a shift in dls? that now the images downloaded with FT  seem to be the same as what I get from the other Big 6.

I find that an interesting observation from your point of view, perseus. FT has always been by far my best earner (how I wish it was rather IS!), last year, about  1 percent of my sales were from the US. Most sales seem to be from Germany. FT certainly rules in Europe! I'm not sure whether they concentrate on the European market anyway, or whether European buyers prefer their style (whatever it may be). But I'm quite sure that part of it is their awful translation tool. Quite a few of my images which I keyword in German because of FT's position here simply don't show up on the US-site because of the poor translation, and on the other hand I'm sure that European buyers are unable to find many of the American images. We've been moaning about that for years, and they've been promising to improve it for years...

They accept about 95 percent of my images (I shoot food). Someone said here that with FT, it might depend on your overall position there how many images you get accepted. That sounds plausible to me: I've been relatively successful with them, and I upload about 5 images a day, very regularly. I'm quite sure that plays a part. I don't think it would be difficult for me to get images of flowers accepted.

What if the agencies got rid of the affilliate programmes? Such search engines wouldn't have any earning potential then, and the agencies wouldn't have to compete with each other to achieve the lowest price. Also, they'd be saving the percentage they have to pay to their affilliates for each sale. Or are these affilliate programmes an absolutely necessary marketing tool?