It is not true. It is nonsense of course.
When you pay me 40 percent and keep 60, the biggest part is always yours.
When I make a 100 dollars for you, you can have 60, when I make you a 100.000, you can have 60.000 dollar.
And even when you should pay ALL your contributors 40 percent, you still keep the biggest part.
The more my sales increase: your part is still 60 percent and it is still the biggest part of the cake.
And when you get to struggle with an 'unsustainable business model', you should buy yourself a mirror.

It is only not enough when you want the whole cake for yourself.
But even then the problem with the 'unsustainable business model' will not be solved I am afraid...

What about the agencies that pay 50 or 60 percent to their contributors? They all must be in deep trouble...!

No, I am not thinking of StockXpert. They were not a new and they were not a small agency.
And no, I don't think that new agencies are in for a 'quick buck'.
As John Griffin from Cutcaster wrote a while ago: "I am working my butt off..."
Perhaps some of these agencies are going to make it, but it's not easy money. Not for us and not for them.

Yes, the risk that they close the doors after you've done a lot of work, like my experience was at Zymmetrical.
That's the reason why submitting only makes sense when it doesn't cost you a lot of time or when you are doing well at an agency.

But even the bigger agencies can fail when they choose the wrong course.
The bigger the ship, the difficulter (and time consuming) is the turn.

It is not necessary anymore to make partitions with Windows 7. Harddisk management is much better these days.

If you want to do it, use a partition manager like:
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/Disk_Maintenance_and_Repair_Utilities/EASEUS_Partition_Master_Home_Edition.html (freeware)
or:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Partition-Magic.shtml(trialversion)

There is no past you can learn from. This is a total different world, as the world was before 1985 and 1968 and 1945.

Fly a bit higher and look at history from a greater distance: people are acting the same today as they did in the past and therefore history will repeat itself.
The differences are not that big.

Microstock has a short history, that's true. But as you could see lately with the commotion around the Getty/Istock greed, there's in fact nothing different from what happened in the past. People want to become rich and when they are they want to be richer and when they become richer they want power. History in a nutshell is: "I" want to be King and you must do what I tell you.

But the discussion was started about what to do in Microstock. Only uploading to the Big Four (remember that it used to be more then four not so long ago!), or also to the "lower earners".
As seen in the light of history, what should be wiser?  

There is no easy way of searching for a particular image and see how much income that image has generated.
I'd also like to find out my top earners on the site without having to add up sales from different pages (25-a-day + On demand + EL)

The old info is still available when you click Download stats (under Stats, at the left site down under)

I like it too, but using a pop-up thumbnail of the download when hoovering over the map should be more handy. When having a lot of downloads in a relative small area of the world makes that all thumbnails lay over each other.

Won't say free software is much better. It is good and sometimes it wins the tests. The bussinessversion from Norton used to be good in the past and nowadays McAfee is not bad. No software can find all viruses. As far as I know there is no really bad anti-virussoftware.
Only the ones that pop up on your screen to tell you that you have to download and install them quickly to protect you from viruses. When you do, you will find out that this software is a virus itself...
Antivir from Avira is also very good free antivirus software.
Personally I think that the leaks in software and the backdoors that can go around firewalls and antivirus software are the biggest problem. Security updates for ALL software on the pc are crucial, but propably not enough sometimes.
I am always telling people who ask me about security to put on the firewall in their modem/router AND use a password to be able to enter it.
Also use a software firewall and an antivirus program. Have a backup of their data and a double backup stored elsewhere when the data is very important.
Humans are the biggest problem! 
And when some go wireless they go wild! The whole city can have access! The chain is not stronger then the weakest link is...

No, normally there will be no conflict when you can see more than one monitor installed. Same with a mouse, usb-stick or whatever.
A 500 watt powersupply should be enough for a computer that is already a few years old. It did work well in the past, did it?

But what is very, very dangerous to a computer is rust and corrosion. A computer needs to stay as dry as possible. Salt water in the air is the worst you can have.
This link: http://oldcomputers.net/corrosion.html, shows the effect of corrosion on a motherboard. The small lines get connected by rust and corrosion. A kind of short-circuiting. This image is about an old motherboard. On newer boards the lines are smaller and even closer to each other with even quicker damage as a result. The solution that is given will not work today with the newer motherboards.
When your motherboard looks like it is seen on your photo, it is most likely that there is corrosion on the battery too. Perhaps it is leaking. With more damage by the chemical fluid.
When there is corrosion on the connectors and the slots on your cards, your cards (videocard, soundcard) will not work properly for not having a good connection (contact) to the motherboard. Same with the connection of your harddisks.

If (of course I cannot say for sure) here lays the problem, you can try this solution: carefully disconnect every connection in the computer and connect it again. Do this a few times with every connector. It is temporary of course, there will be new corrosion. So you have to do this on a regular base.
Never shut down your computer by day or night, so it will stay as dry as possible by having all the time almost the same temperature.
Try to find a way to blow warm, dry air through your computer. Don't put your computer on the floor. The combination with dust in your computer that gets wet is even more dangerous.

About the mobo's videodriver:  Modern boards often have a videocard 'onboard'. Means that the chip is mounted on the board. You can see it if there is a connection for a monitor on the backside of your motherboard. Thereby there is also a slot to connect a videocard of your own choice if you want. The computer switches automatically to the one you use. If the drivers are installed of course. When installing the mobo videodrivers you can connect your monitor to the motherboard directly. The onboard chip is using a part of the memory (only when in use). If there is corrosion on the memory strips and/or their connection you can have troubles too. An unstable powersupply is also still an option.

Perhaps this solutions to avoid damage are not possible at all. Then the only solution is to buy a cheap computer and buy a new one when getting problems with the old one.
New computers are fast enough at least for the first one or two years. When it becomes too slow or damaged: buy a new cheap one.
Personally I have no 'environmental' problems, but this is the way I act too. I build the computer by myself, so the only things I need are a new motherboard, new memory and sometimes a new powersupply. All other things can be reused. At least one or two times. And except the need of reinstalling the software...

Sometimes you can have corrosion and for a while all seems to work well. It all depends on where the corrosion is. But sooner or later it will be over! And repairing is useless then.

Well, it has become a novel!  Perhaps there's something in the story that can be useful to you. Hope so! Good luck!

Is there a computershop in your neighbourhood where they can test the powersupply or powerpack (or how it is called in English) that's in your computer?
It seems to me that it has become unstable. I had that type of problems a few weeks ago too. A new powersupply is not very expensive, but an unstable one can ruin your whole computer.
If it comes out that you need a new one: don't buy the cheapest. They are mostly already bad when they are new. It is often overseen, but a good powersupply is very important.

I am not sure, but I thought subs are about E0,35 for normal sizes and websizes are cheaper.
But none the less: you are right about subprices. They call themselves midstock....
Nothing wrong with the prices for other sales btw.

Lightbulbs shaped like a brain, pigs that fly on a cloudy background...

Am I right when I suppose that you even refer to the blogs that John Lund published lately?
I don't think he is selling this work for microsoft prices...

Keywording makes everyone crazy, contributors too...

When you are new to this business, you are making lots of mistakes which mostly can't be corrected later. (At DT you can.)

When using double words (English has many!) like "Santa Claus", "Prairie dog", "mute swan". The agencies split it up in two words and sometimes even set the words alphabetically and remove the capitals. Also very nice when using scientific names. "Cygnus olor"= "Mute swan" becomes: cygnus, mute, olor, swan. In scientific names the first word has always a capital, the second has not. Nice results, huh? 
A Prairie dog becomes a dog. No way to avoid that when the main subject in the image is a prairie dog.
Then the search of buyers. When searching for a baby animal or a human baby, you have to use that in your search. When stockagencies let come up lots of human baby images when the search is "baby animal", then it seems to me that you have to blame the search engine. At least they ought not to be found at the first pages of the searchresults.

It would be nice if buyers would think also about the other side of things. Contributors are demanded to do this and to avoid that by stockagencies as well as buyers and when they indeed do all the hard work over and  over again, they get at last paid 25 or 50 cent for an XL image. How many buyers would even think about it to work for about one dollar an hour or sometimes less? But that's where every contributor has to start with these days.
When sending emails with an explanation of what happens to the keywording and asking if it is not possible to hold double words together in keywords, you will get no answer, or a friendly: yes, we see the problem, we are working on it. But nothing happens. Perhaps searchengines can not be made that good and we have to live with it...

All the differences between agencies makes it not easier either. Singular and plural for example. SS removes one of the two when using: child and children.
But buyers get not the same results when using the singular or the plural form. When submitting you have to change all this by hand (other agencies accept both forms together) and again to get 25 cent paid for it. At least when starting in the business. What would a buyer do himself when he had to choose to redo his work for such a low amount of dollars or move on and try to do  better in the future? Another problem is that contributors are not sure what happens to their images when re-keywording them. When I have an image that sells well, I don't dare to change anything! And when you are a newby, you don't know what to expect from your images. You only learn by time and experience...

Of course you are right that keyword spamming makes a mess of the searchresults and everyone should try to avoid doing this. But people will always make mistakes and the more people (and the more images), the more mistakes are coming up.

They say that keyword spamming do not pay off, but why will people do it then? When it hurts your business in the end, it's not a good idea to even start with doing this! I think that most of this happens by accident and that there is only a small group that do this structurally (and I think they also get mostly quickly a warning from the agencies)

Yes, I know it was a bit off-topic, but I asked explanation only for possible security reasons. Security is important for stockagencies too, especially this password thing.
Not sure what to think about this item, by the way. I mean: How high the risks are that passwords can become visible in FF.