Evidently the istock inspectors formed a union or started a boycott or something ... I seem to have a lot of files piled up in the queue.

Not sure but I think maybe this company did the business equivalent of shouting, "Hey watch me step on this rake!"

I plan to go exclusive in the next month or two, unless the customers disappear or the goal line is suddenly moved    I will keep uploading content and give them a chance.

While I'm not very happy about the reduction in commissions, I'm even more worried about the occasional message posted on this forum which says something like, "We don't buy very much at IS any more because of [price/web interface/selection/whatever]".

I don't care. I just hope they can make some adjustments to keep all their great and wonderful exclusives on board, so we don't have those competitors at the sites that really make money.  
I'm just a pissed off a bit I'll have to remove my referral links everywhere.
I won't cull my port for now. According to the guy with the bleeding heart at the IS forum, half from the sales are from September till December. Will catch those, of course.
After that, dear pet_chia, rest assured I won't clutter up your godly platinum disks any more with my snapshots.  I will be proud looking at myself in the mirror saying: iStock? Been there, done that. Sadly enough, they weren't up to my standards.  

If any business that just has to store other's peoples images can't be profitable with 80% overhead, they'd better size down the corporate jets and the bonuses of their Getty lowlife "managers".

I think you've mistaken me for someone else.  I have never seen your portfolio and I never meant to imply that it (or anyone else's portfolio) is not good enough.  I posted my suggestions above because I wish that IS would come up with a business plan that is more ... (like I said) ... business-like.  If they did so it would cool people's emotions and make microstock more profitable for everyone.

Possibly they are trying to turn on the charm for selected non-exclusives whom they wish would go exclusive (on the basis of the quality/volume of their shots).  The kind of contributor who does quite well at other sites but who has too many rejections at IS (and who points this out or hints at their frustration in scout/critique requests).  If they (a) charm the contributor and (b) give them a technical boost to get over their rejection issues then it could be a big plus for both parties.

I'm only at IS ... they recovered nicely in the last 2 weeks or so and I had BME ... if data from a tiny portfolio with miniscule earnings is any help ...  

Direct deposit paychecks are the norm if you work for a big company, where I come from.  But I'm not sure if it's actually a good idea.

In the early 1990s the place I was at introduced a controversial overtime plan, which was not well thought out.  All the employees understood the description of the plan to mean that if they came in to the office and worked between Christmas and New Years (on the three days that were normally designated freebie holidays every year) they would receive triple overtime, or something like that.  A number of people took advantage of this generosity (?) by working like demons during these three days, and put in claims for a lot of hours.  Evidently the HR or payroll people also interpreted the overtime scheme the way the employees did, because they started making out people's pay stubs and doing direct deposit of the claimed amounts into people's bank accounts.  Then a couple of days later, someone in finance or some VP or something hit the roof.  NO THAT'S NOT WHAT WE MEANT, they claimed it was a big mistake and they never promised triple overtime (or whatever it was).  They ordered the payroll people to WITHDRAW the money they had deposited in people's bank accounts, which the banks did for them.  Not only that, but I heard there were some people whose overtime money had NOT EVEN BEEN DEPOSITED YET in their account, but the company told the bank there had been a mistake in payroll and were allowed to withdraw the amount anyways.  Needless to say this could have caused havoc with people's finances, like overdrawing their accounts or making them miss an automatic loan repayment or bouncing checks because of insufficient funds.

It didn't happen to me, but I was so shocked that I phoned my bank to find out how this could be so.  They said, "We allow direct depositors to withdraw money if they tell us that they made a mistake.  If you want to block this then you have to come down to the bank and do all kinds of paperwork to prevent it." Or words to that effect.  I'm not sure but possibly they wouldn't let you do direct deposit unless you also allowed the depositors to yank money out of your account.

It's one thing to put up with this for a company you work for where you can walk right into HR or payroll and get it straightened out, but with a bunch of strangers you've never met, in a land far, far away?  Sounds dodgy to me.

Wasn't there a big die-off of photographers trying to capture the Mt. Saint Helens eruption?  At least one of them I remember ... National Geographic published the pictures he snapped out his car's back window of the enormous cloud of poisonous gas as he tried to outrun it.  Should have use a tripod to steady that "must have" shot!

... Or, then again, maybe it is just like any corporation: someone got lumbered with the job of catering to the boss's latest whim, couldn't be bothered to make much effort and just shoved in enough content to keep the powers that be happy. "Look, boss, I used lots of Vetta, it's the cream of our creative prowess!". It's hard to argue with your own slogans.

Yeah that could be true.  There might be an internal battle ... someone committed to Vetta big time, others don't like the idea for the reasons discussed here - too high priced for what you get.  Maybe the Vetta person (or faction) came up with the "seal of approval" lightboxes in an effort to spark Vetta sales and save their reputation.  If some of the "anti Vetta" people are tasked with creating the lightboxes they could sabotage them by doing a half@zzed job.  I speculate.

Since this company cannot (I assume) afford to mess around too much with their revenue stream, what with all the competition and buyers becoming more price sensitive, they'll probably fix it and get back to something like their previous winning formula.

Or maybe they think that micro is now too crowded and unprofitable, and they want to evolve toward midstock by cashing in on their reputation and Getty connection, and start highlighting what they consider to be "better content" and to heck with the rest.

Sorry for helping to derail this topic with extraneous chatter (see above).

I just wanted to say that right now, for the last week or so, at IS it seems like approval times (for non-exclusives), sales and even the # of views per day per image has become . . . r . e . a . l . . . s . l . o . w . . .

I don't fully understand the "Poll Results" on the right hand side of this web page, but I noticed that it's been almost entirely "red" (down arrows) lately.  Is this indicative of an across-the-board slowdown?

Yes there is.  This is off topic, but look into Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPs).  They guarantee a return above the core inflation rate, pay a nice little divdend, and they are almost as safe as a CD.  You can get a low cost, diversified TIPs fund from Vanguard.  Many other large mutual fund companies have them.  They aren't very tax efficient, but for someone who wants to avoid the stock market, TIPs are about as good as it gets.

Please remember, the official inflation figures from which the inflation "protection" is calculated are highly suspect.  They are discussed in detail at this website: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts.  To make a long story short, governments have a very strong motivation to under-report the rate of inflation.  The less they have to pay out to widows and orphans (as it were) and for indexed pensions and other expenditures which are supposed to keep up with the rate of inflation, the more money they have for themselves and for their cronies.  Throughout history, inflation (whose technical definition is an increase in the money supply) has been a racket used by governments to swindle workers and savers and benefit the powerful and well-connected.  It was true in the ancient world and it is true right now in Europe, America, Japan and China.

To make a feeble effort to bend this to the topic at hand, this is probably the real reason behind the slump.  Inflation has eroded really profitable businesses and individuals' personal wealth and diverted real wealth into the hands of those with power.  When there is a less fizzy economy then businesses suffer, advertising agencies suffer, and the poor schleps who provide stock materials to those agencies suffer.  More and more wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the government (virtually nationalizing housing, mortgage and banking industries, manufacturing, oil industry, etc.) and they simply don't need a diversity of visual materials to advertise their "services".  You have no choice but to accept government "services" so they have no real need for a lot of exciting and artistic images to sell what they do.  Their sales pitch is a simple "Do as we say - OR ELSE."

Sorry to be a downer!  But IMHO your best chance to survive and prosper is to first understand what you're up against so you can formulate a plan to based on facts and not on fantasies.

Did the sales slump (more) around the time of the web interface changeover?  I don't do a lot of searching on there, but I was checking for certain categories/combinations to see how saturated they were and I noticed that several times the search was broken.  It would say something like, "Your search returned 53 images" but underneath that, where the thumbnails should be, it was blank.

I also noticed irritating problems when I tried to change or adjust the search parameters, such as add/remove a keyword or change the sort criteria from "Age" to "Downloads".  Sometimes it wouldn't respond - or it would appear to respond but it would then show me the identical images in the identical order, or it would do something else strange and unexpected.  I'm an uploader and not a buyer so I would just say, "*&#$#" and go do something else ... but I wonder how many actual buyers have run into this and then gone off to another web site.

If the search interface doesn't respond well to tweaking the parameters and refreshing, then maybe this is a reason why so many buyers simply grab one of the first images that is presented to them by the best match.  Maybe they found that trying to fine-tune or change the order of the original results is FFFFed up, like I have found since the switchover, so they just grab anything which is (a) popular and (b) in their price range.  If the best match is showing them expensive images first, that could make them give up entirely and go elsewhere.

Maybe we should have a poll: I experienced an unusual slump this summer ...

only at IS
only at non-IS sites
at IS and elsewhere
no unusual slump this summer

And if a summer slump was experienced, my slump began in:

May
June
July
August

Is the consensus (such as it is) that istock should probably tweak their prices and/or best match algorithm to get rid of this recent and unwanted perception among buyers that they are a high-cost source of photos, and/or that their bargains are hard to find because they are buried under higher priced items on the store shelves? (as it were)

I would think that IS would be extremely sensitive to negative changes in revenue, they sell directly after all and they should know up to the minute if say, sales are down for a Monday in the second week of August compared to previous years.  If there is a problem, and they're either not aware of it or they're not moving yet to correct it, then I hope that their management will take prompt steps to overcome this organizational inertia.

I've noticed from working in large companies that once they reach a certain size, the individuals in the company lose true customer awareness and end up being mostly loyal to internal organizations - the accountants do what's best for the finance department, the QA people become obsessed with self-generated "standards" whether they make sense or not, and so on.  Istock is nowhere near that size, so maybe it's just a case of one or two key managers being on summer vacation and letting things slide a bit.

DISCLAIMER - all of this speculation could be horsefeathers.