Roger said:
"Please remember that we still haven't added the bonus redeemed credits from the holiday Vetta sale. That's going to happen next week.

Also: for anyone who had downloads as part of the fraud we experienced right at the end of 2010. We will not be removing those redeemed credits. You get to keep them. Royalties may be a different story but the redeemed credits will stay.

(Edited on 2011-01-07 15:39:46 by rogermexico)"

Now, isn't that exactly the impossible scenario that some sceptics painted when they suggested the credit card fraud was just a scam to push up the credits of favoured individuals?

It's impossible for that possiblity not to raise its ugly head.

Thanks for the link.
Looks like I'll be going down to 17%, a 15% drop in earnings

But Kelly says that's "good news".

What is wrong about using a stck image for illustration?    I would be more concerned about copy&paste texts from the Internet.

I never encouraged any assignment which could be completed by copying and pasting either. Totally pointless.
Nothing wrong with using a stock image per se, but it is so against the tenets of Scottish education that it should cost anything other than the tax we all pay. Can't see why anyone should get credit just because they have better off parents (though of course that is usually going to happen indirectly).
I think it would take a major 'paradigm shift' to get my head round the concept of private education!

Ok, that's the point. Now I see the real difference between PU-Photoshelter and RF-micro: advertising, promotion... So the first should be cheaper than RF-micro, and RF-Photoshelter should be more expensive than RF+Extended in micro. And I can use all of them.

Thank you Sean, Madelaide (obrigado para ti) and Cascoly.

Do you find that lots of people pau to licence your images for personal use? There are so many sites where you can get good-to-excellent images free for non-commercial use, not just Flickr/CC I'd think your image would have to be incredibly 'unusual yet necessary' for people to pay for them.

As a new independent, my sales suck and I would guess are worse then they were this time last year.

You don't need to guess: it's easy to check! (in Stats)

Does anyone know if the buying limitations have been lifted yet that were put in place over XMAS when the theft occured? Those being:

1 - The ability to only buy small credit packs.

2 -  The abity to only download 1 file every 5 minutes.

There may be other buying limitations that were put in place too at that time, but those are the only 2 I am aware of.

Does anyone know if they have been lifted and/or when they will be if they haven't been lifted yet already?

As sales will hopefully be getting more on track again next week, it would be a shame if there are still buying constraints in place for the buyers.

Cheers...

Easy to check the first one. You can buy up to 2000 credit packs online as previously:
http://www.istockphoto.com/buy-stock-credits-pay-as-you-go.php
and probably, as previously, you can buy bigger, cheaper bundles via customer support.

It's not easy to check the 5-min rule, but I'm sure I saw on the forums that things are back to normal there too.

What irks me is that IS offers "I'm sorry" discounts and other promotional discounts and then contributors pay for those too. I think that should come out of their cut as a promotional expense, not be bourne by contributors.

I think it should come out of the pockets of those who made the blunders and/or the people that told them to do it and/or the alleged quality assurance people [1]. Yippers, we all love working here is all fine and dandy, but why should we pay for their mistakes?
[1] I can't think of any time since I joined iStock that they haven't been advertising for QA people in their 'careers' page.

I believe one of the broken things in search is terms with apostrophes. New Year's Day was broken over the holidays and those with Valentine's Day images were urging it be fixed in the bug thread. My guess is that this bug has busted your search term too.

Oh, what an eejit I am! It's in the Dollar Bin!
At least the mystery is solved. Sorry all!

New readers: the file is in the Dollar Bin. my brain has gone AWOL.

I was mulling with a member of my CN the balance of sticking with Alamy for editorial or trying iStock. I used the example of a file I've had on iStock since March 07, which has sold twice (in 2008) for a total of $1.13. I also have files on Alamy of the same building, taken a few years apart, and from different angles, from which I've had two downloads, to totally different markets, at $64.61 to me.
To be fair, I thought I should check my 'rivals' for that subject on iStock.
That's when the mystery started. I typed "People's Palace" and the search showed up no results.
I went into my own portfolio and typed Glasgow, and got 34 results, but that file wasn't one of them.
I had to fire up Deep Meta and type in People's Palace to find my file, then type in the number to iStock to confirm that I hadn't deactivated it for some reason. It's file #3066870. It's active. It has the keywords People's Palace and Glasgow, as the first two keywords which show on its page. People's Palace (Glasgow) is in the CV, and when you type People's Palace, the search system suggests completing it as People's Palace, but even clicking on that gives you zero results.
I have emailled Ducksandwich to see if he can find out what's going on. (I'm still banned from the forums, so can't post there).
I've tried searches for some of my other files, and they're still showing in search results.

The bottom line isn't really that that one file, which would never be a big seller, isn't being found, it's how many other files are totally lost to the search for no obvious reason - pissing off buyers and resulting in loss of earnings for us - and even more for iStock?

Added: I just searched 'Glasgow Green' another keyword on my file. My file didn't show up there either, but others did and have very few dls between them, sort-of confirming my original suspicion.

I see that TS still has the statement:
"Download up to 25 images a day with a subscription. And once you've used an image, you can keep using it - over and over - in future projects." (no time limitation mentioned)
on the front page, but in the licence information, which you have to dig deep to find, and I bet less than 1% of buyers see, it says:
"Thinkstock grants to Licensee a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, worldwide right to access the Thinkstock subscription and Reproduce the Licensed Material made available to Licensee through the subscription an unlimited number of times during the term of the Thinkstock subscription purchased as identified in the Invoice ("Term") in any and all media for all purposes other than those uses prohibited under Section 3 of this Agreement."
The latter is totally unenforceable, and even if someone did somehow manage to prove an image was still being used after a subscription had ceased, the buyer could still quote the statement from the front page.
Does no-one ever think things through?

Done.. I would like to see more breakdowns of earnings, like macro vs. micro - phots vs illustrations vs video etc.. Thanks for doing this survey Tyler..

Oooh, I only included my iStock earnings, not my Alamy earnings. Was I supposed to give the total? IIRC, the question said, 'earning from micro', but I could be wrong.

I imagine a lot of photographer who don't check the forums/messages often or at all have no clue about all the changes ...Neither would newbies!

And in fact, as of this minute (10.58 GMT) the "We want you" page that spells out the benefits of exclusivity still claims that your royalty rate changes with canister. In fact, this seems to be the case at this very moment, but of course won't be in the near future, so it's either laziness, forgetfulness (they 'forgot' to change the inducement page), disingenuity(it's technically still true as of now) or deceit(still trying to lure in the innocent with a deal which we all expect to end RSN), depending you how you look at it.