Remember the old saying about how you can put a frog in a pot and if you raise the temperature slowly enough, there is never a point at which he decides to jump out - so he gets cooked?  That's how the microstocks got the price of a photo down to 25 cents, over a period of years.

Hey if these sites thought they could charge us to upload, they'd do it.

I once read an interesting article about retailing and malls.  Over the years the big clothing stores have ended up selling all the same stuff, and shoppers just got bored and quit going to the malls.  Same thing will happen here to some extent. 
 
Right now these microstocks are just DIY warehouses not adding any value to the product.  They make money by preventing buyers and sellers from communicating directly.   It will take time but things will change. 

Let me be devil's advocate for a moment and ask - why do they reject photos for "well covered" subjects anyway?  Don't they want new takes on old subjects?  Don't they advertise their vast number of images?  Do they want the old images to keep selling?  What are they afraid of?

Doesn't every subject become "well covered" eventually?  And then are they just going to stop accepting new photos and lay off the reviewers?

I would love to sell off my own site.  I'm still fairly new to stock, but I'm a software developer and could certainly create and manage my own sales site.  Like everyone, I'm frustrated by the way microstock has driven prices down to 25 cents, and I want to see a new model start countering that downhill slide. 

What we need I think is some sort of aggregator site that we'd work through.  It wouldn't sell files directly, just point buyers to sites maintained by individual photographers, each of whom could set their own prices.  The aggregate site could have searching, by keywords or maybe some better scheme yet to emerge.  It would have a "name" that could be marketed, and would establish a common understanding for rights management that all the participants would adhere to. 

I guess what I'm thinking of is a sort of coop model where photographers could combine their image archives for search purposes but cut out these parasitic microstock middlemen that add no value to the product and simply drive prices through the floor for short-term profits.   However, an aggregate site could still make money by selling memberships to photographers.

Being only a few months into this, I've had to learn how to manage the aggravation of rejections that I don't agree with.  I think you simply have to submit to several sites, which you want to do anyway if you hope to make more than bus fare. 

I remember a couple of weeks ago I submitted 3 photos (let's call them A, B, and C) to SS,DT and StockXpert at the same time.   SS accepted A and B,  rejected  C.   DT accepted C, rejected A and B.   StockXpert acccepted A and C but said B needed a property release.  I am not making this up. 

Once you realize it's all a bit crazy, it won't bother you as much.   If this were real life,  we'd be talking to actual people who would explain to us why they don't think they can sell a particular product we've made.  But in this Bizzarro-world of dot-com insanity we have disinterested reviewers, somewhere, with eyes glazing over as they click accept or reject on thousands upon thousands of photos submitted by unknown photographers who are never allowed to meet actual customers, but are supposed to keep guessing what the market actually wants.

I'd do that but I'm worried about ending up with duplicates.  If the files still don't show up tomorrow, I'll assume they're gone.

I think it's mostly a matter of labor costs.  If a micro really wants to improve the quality of their existing archives , they'd have to hire, train and supervise competent people to look at millions of images and make decisions. 

Microsotock started out as a get-rich-quick dot-com concept.  Set up a web site and a database, and submitters will climb over each other to give you plenty of product for nothing in advance.  Then sell it dirt-cheap. Conitnue until the market is saturated.  After that - um, well no plan I guess.  Other than search engines, they add no value to the product and as the effectiveness of their search engines declines, even that value is lost.

I don't want the microstocks to fail, I want them to re-invest some profits and make the business sustainable.

Interesting to speculate on where this leads.  At the rate images are being accepted by these sites, how long will it be until every distinguishable object on the face of the earth has been shot? At that point there will be nothing left to photograph but newly created things.  Stock photographers will be standing in line outside stores where new products are about to be put on the shelves.  We'll elbow past each other to buy them, race home to photograph and submit.

Somewhat more seriously, it is clear to me that the micros are trying to be more selective - rather suddenly, and in a big way.  They've taken in way,way too much junk and buyers are no longer impressed by 8 million vs. 5 million images.  If they want to compete on quality, that's fine but what should their strategy be to achieve that? Just dropping photos that haven't sold in 2 years while dialing up the standards for new photos  is too simple.  If you're rejecting new photos that are actually better than what you already have - and not deleting old photos that wouldn't meet the new criteria  - how fast are things really improving?  

It only bothers me when they reject photo that I know is good and has been selling elsewhere. 

I also got a couple of 5 cent backups out of the blue.  Of course, there's no way to know if ANY sales revenues are actually being reported. It's a weird business where there's no 'inventory' as such.  It's not like I could upload 10 copies of an image and be notified when they'd all been sold, and it was time to upload some more. 

I've tried the same files twice over a 5 day period. They never showed up.  I guess I'll try once more, then give up.