By the way, I do like Alamy. It's one of a few agencies that I still bother to upload some stuff to.

If I did my math correctly he's bringing home about $2,000/month-$24,000/year in royalties, which isn't terrible, but it sounds like he's the top of the top at Alamy. So there's no way you can make a living just submitting there. In fact, he goes on to say he has to make money doing other things because he doesn't make enough shooting stock. Depressing.

And he's a top-flight photojournalist, former chief photographer of a British daily paper noted in his day for its excellent photography.

$100k isn't really a very impressive bar to set. It could mean an income of as little as $375 a month over 10 years for the photographer (45% commission on 10k a year/12 months).
Now $100,000 a year would be impressive, as would $1m in total sales, but I suppose 100k sounds impressive to relative newbies.

I take it you mean dreamstime, not dreamtime. I think you will find you have a 100 image per week limit. It might be something else, though.

We work in micro the plants lose work, block us, can't make a search work, there's theft and fraud. But we keep trusting and sending them our work? I'm getting real tired of being insulted.

It's the digital era's version of the Tragedy of the Commons, Jim. And however you play it you end up undermining your own interests.

How enlightening. 

No doubt Ms Sanders would point out to you that he's the only POTUS you've got at the moment, therefore he must be your favourite one.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on November 25, 2017, 06:40

But why scrap all the effort you put in to uploading there in the first place? Maybe not bother uploading more stuff to those but I can't see any logic in closing accounts with them.

And let's not miss the fact that the sum total of the scores for the four you would abandon (18.7) exceeds the individual scores of 123, Alamy and Pond 5, and accounts for more than 10% of the total of all the scored sites. Between them they account for about 20% of my total stock earnings.

1) Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon described in 1973 in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors. You defend the people who take advantage of you for low pay and steal from all of us.

2) insecurity/low self-esteem, abuser is  the source of income, abused person is in denial. You support agents that don't deserve our work, because you wasted your time in your desperation for scraps, leftovers and bones, instead of the meat you deserve and earned.

3) The sum total of the wasted effort is less than if these thieves were gone and you make a steady percentage from agents that sold more and dealt with us more fairly than the tiny abusive blood * parasite agencies that drain the entire market into the sewers.

You want a drink of water and someone spits at you, so you defend them and wish the sum total of more spit, would help your thirst. Water is income. You would be better off going to the fountain and streams and avoiding the dribbles and rude mist.

People get angry about website changes, get angry about reviews and complain about slow or no support, then defend sites that pay us "spit" for our work and are abusive. I'll never understand that contradiction. Stop supporting the agencies that take advantage of us! That's more important. 50% of nothing is still nothing. An agency that pays 20 people $20 a month , and the rest of us nothing, is breaking the back of the market for everyone else.

Of course if this whole thing is about supporting 25 agencies that pay $10 a month and that's your way of working, feel free. But never complain again about low sales, partners, search, or anything, because you defend the abusive relationship that these agencies depend on to stay in business. You enable them.

Good god, what nonsense! I scarcely know where to start. Nobody's holding me hostage so the Stockholm syndrome jibe is nonsense; talk about agencies "not deserving our work" applies just as much to iStock and Shutterstock as it does to Deposit Photos, or Feature pics .... how do you determine that they're "deserving"? Istock used to send me 10 times per month what I get now, which hardly speaks of a caring personal relationship; there is no reason to suppose that if I remove all my pictures from agencies that deliver low returns I will get a single sale from anywhere else as a result, and if I do it might be a special 2c sale from IS rather than a 35c sale from DT, what a marvellous achievement that would be: none of the agencies (except Fotolia, who I  subsequently dropped) has ever done anything remotely like "spitting at me". Sure, the terms and conditions have deteriorated in some places, notably on iStock/Getty (which is ironically supposed to be a "good" agency according to the "dump those with less than 10 in the poll concept), but that's not a personal insult.
An agency that pays 20 people $20 a month is not affecting anybody's sales; unless, of course, it is selling 10 millon photos for every cent it pays out .... which is rather what iStock is doing.If it's paying 50c an image and paying out for 800 sales it isn't making the slightest dent in the richer end of the market.
If you're going to avoid being taken advantage of in microstock, then justs avoid microstock pure and simple, because EVERY agency is taking advantage. So if you're still in the micros, stop lecturing against agencies that you aren't in, because characterising low earners as dangerous to your income from the good guys really does sound like a Stockholm complex.

Quote from: JimP on November 23, 2017, 21:50

Too bad it's going to take that long. I would have been happy if the list on the right, anyplace below 10 should be gone already. I'm not supporting them. I'm still surprised that so many people do. That just hurts our own interests and the general market, mostly our earnings.

Why? Some of those are the best ones. Small agencies that actually cater to a smaller number of contributors. Some of them are down there because they don't get 50 votes (or whatever the minimum is).

And while the ranking order is more or less right, the returns from different site will vary from contributor to contributor. If you've spent a decade putting thousands of files on Dreamstime why close your account there, just because of a ranking list? If you're on the "bridge to bigstock" why close your account when you get files added to that site with no effort at all and pick up a few payouts a year from it?
Added to which, I'm not on Adobe because of the problems I had with Fotolia, I'm not increasing my portfolio on iStock because I don't like what they're doing and, in any case, new files there weren''t even getting seen, Pond 5 is for video, not stills, so I'm not on that, and my stuff on 123 doesn't sell as well as what I've got on Bigstock, probably because 123 rejected all my best-sellers as low commercial value because they didn't think the Middle East was a market.  So if I were to dump all the sub-10 sites I'd be left with SS, Alamy and nothing else.

...

it is working for me, in Arabia
Mind you, I'm logged in already.

Maybe they don't want any new submitters.