Not at all. if the basket breaks, your eggs are still alive and can always upload them to other MS sites.
So in our case: All eggs + 1 basket = good business decision.

I'll grant, bad analogy but you see my point, there's a reason 'most' of the biggest earners are non-exclusive (even more so after the recent changes at is), but I guess that's a topic already been well covered on msg (and several times on my blog) so won't get into it here.

It's more work of course, but as the OP raised the point of how 'low paid' micro is I just wanted to highlight that money isn't the only driving factor, and for those whom it is, there are other options

Quote from: yuliang11 on January 27, 2011, 01:19

agencies are another form of bosses and annoying people. think about it, they cut your commission whenever they like

They can't tell you when to work, when you are allowed to take holidays, whether or not you are allowed to wear this or that, or what your targets are, they can't shout at you or threaten you, they can't push so much work on you that you have to do hours of overtime. They're not bosses, they are businesses that you have to deal with.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on January 27, 2011, 03:23

They can't tell you......what your targets are........

Well except for telling you that despite your sales numbers going up in order to get the same percentage of commission that you did last year you need to sell 500%+ more, now there's a target  

If you don't like it, you have the free choice not to work with them, and doing so does not require sacrificing your entire income as it would if your boss in a 'real' job was a four-letter-word.

Agencies ARE business partners, if you're not happy doing business with them, then don't, it's as simple as that. You are the market (or at least one side of it), and the market ultimately decides

Simply because microstock agencies make it impossible to do that: partly because they require images be keyworded before submission, but also because they are currently completely unwilling to collaborate with anyone who also make it easier for "their" contributors to submit anywhere else.

The addition of the meta-tagger to the picNiche toolbar (soon) will however make it feasible to audit or enhance your keywords for previously submitted images by using the picWorkflow service.

Noticed a very rare bug here (it's actually the fotolia website), it seems they occasionally output the balance as "#." ie. with the decimal point on the end but with no value after it. I'm guessing they have a wrong output specifier for a php sprintf call (or something similar). I'm guessing it's something to do with the small fractions of a cent sometimes earned by their referral programme.
Have updated the poller spec to account for it, and it shouldn't be a problem anymore

Understand that the storage and export of a for eg 450mb video file compared to a 5mb Photo file requires more work but I hope Video Footage isn't going to be treated secondary to work out whats needed to stills up-loaders as it will cost the footage up-loader more to store / export each file compared to the Stills up loader

Footage is definitely something I want to handle really really well as I know how much of a nightmare it can be (I dabbled in some for my portfolio a while back), I watch all the forums for feedback and ideas and have already had a lot of requests and suggestions sent by videographers. If there's anything specific you want to see, please email me on [email protected] and I'll add to the list too

Thanks for the best wishes too

FStock... I registered on your site today with a view to adding you guys to picWorkflow (my iSyndica replacement), but to be honest, there I soooo many problems with your site I don't even know where to begin.
If you're still alive & kicking drop me an email [email protected] and let me know if you want detailed feedback and I'll get back with some

Pixmac just made a pretty nice announcment about pay rises. They may not be iS or SS or whatever, but they way they're going it's a bright start

http://blog.picniche.com/microstock/pixmac-offers-a-new-deal-for-microstock-photographers/

A pretty thorough discussion of why this is a problem is here:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/picniche-toolbar/picniche-problems/#msg164792

Short version:
the 123rf site sucks and for lots of people simply does not work, there's nothing I can do about it and have been holding my breath hoping someone over there would fix their rubbish caching code (if they even have any).

In the next toolbar update (aiming for sometime late January) I'll try and find some way to work-around it, though for now it's stuck as it is sorry.

All seems good here so far and no other reports of this issue.
Did you cash out your balance by any chance?

i would prefer to see the stats tool is up.. something like a chart of sales..

i found that will bring more users..

Don't worry, I'm working on both Just my first priority is on making the service sustainable by attracting people who pay for stuff first. I also see keywording as having the largest possible time-saving for a single task. Stats save time for some people, but is 'really' only necessary before end of each fiscal year, whereas keywording can save a lot more time for a lot more people immediately

The current design is for payment to be in picWorkflow regular paid credits so the credits can be transferred out to paypal once the limit is reached.

There is a rating system of a sort, though there isn't much room to be paid more (picWorkflow will only keep 10% to start with so not a lot to give up after that). But I will be tracking keyworder performance and futher activites for more earnings will only be available to the best keyworders: captioning, review tasks and perhaps things like categorisation and keyword disambiguation will follow.

The cost will be lowered by making the interface for the keyworder as effective as possible for keywording many images at once. There will not be a critically high quality bar, but again, the best keyworders (every keywording task may be rated for quality by the purchasers) so a certain level of quality will be built into the system and moreso over time.

Just from my own tests here on the first-stage keywording platform, it's perfectly feasible for a keyworder to earn between $6-$12 per hour depending on the final payment structure, the keyworders proficiency and the level of demand for the service (corresponding to a cost to the keyword-purchaser of somewhere between 0.4-0.8 cents per keyword).

Interest either way?