Thinkstock advertising is plastered all over The Huffington Post website, and the hypocrisy of this frustrates me to no end.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
The Huffington Post is a progressive, left-wing, anti-corporate news website, and yet they have Thinkstock, Getty's greedy substitute for StockExpert, plastered all over their site at regular intervals. To add insult to injury, they frequently use well labeled Thinkstock images as illustrations for their stories, providing yet another endorsement of the abomination known as Thinkstock.

I've been wanting to approach them about this, but I don't know how to go about it. Under 'contact us' they have an option where you can send in news tips, and I was thinking of sending them some info about how Getty shafted the istock contributors. But I'm not sure what links to send along them along with my 'news tip'; and I'm looking for suggestions - any links or ideas anyone?

I doubt the Huffingtonpost actually chooses each advertisement that shows on their website. They probably go through google adwords or one of the other advertising agencies that do all that stuff. Not really fair to bash them for doing something that almost all websites do.

Now if you want to be upset at iStock/Getty for advertising Thinkstock so much instead of iStock, well, I can agree with you there.

It has been speculated that these are just a test batch to see if he program works....

Look at the Agency Collection on gettyimages.com. It is for real. And it is ugly.

I am attending a local college and I can get an educational discount if I buy direct from Adobe. The CS5 Design Suite here in the US is $449. Here is a link:

http://www.adobe.com/education/purchasing/education_pricing.html

The educational version is EXACTLY the same as a regular commercial version, just discounted for students and teachers. So I don't think buying an educational version is any problem as far as how the software works.

I believe you can only use the software for education purposes, not commercial purposes.

It takes about an hour to download and install a pirated version of CS5. There are plenty of torrents available and they work like a charm, usually.

Well there certainly hasn't been any exodus yet. Search results have all grown since the announcement. Granted, most of the files approved now were probably uploaded before the announcement.

As much as I hate all these changes, I have to give them credit for allowing us to really hammer them on their forums. You would never see Fotolia or Dreamstime allow that.

Yea thats about the only positive thing I can say. 

My guess is they are just going to wait and see what effect these changes have on their bottom line as that is what matters most. That's what I'm doing at least. Most of the very top contributors don't seem to be dropping from the 40% commission level so it's not as big of a deal for them. I'm sure IS management designed it that way. The exclusives that carry the most weight are the ones that have the most to gain.

I'd say Lobo is the only admin actually reading any of our comments. And he probably doesn't have any authority over anything other than the forums. He should be promoted to CEO and the rest can get . out.  

What about a royalty structure based on the downloads of a single image, instead of the contributor as a whole. So the more downloads a image has the higher the commission for that image. It is similar to how Dreamstime has the single image tiers based off of downloads, except instead of effecting the image price it effects the commission.

I really have no idea if this would negatively or positively effect my income or anyone else's. I'm just thinking out load here.

Here are some numbers for exclusives that I pulled out of my ass:
1-20 downloads = 25% commission
21-200 downloads = 30% commission
201-1000 downloads = 35% commission
1001-5000 downloads = 40% commission
5001+ downloads = 45% commission

I think Non exclusives should continue to just get 20%. Anything below that is just pathetic. They say the reason for this change is the diminishing returns they get from contributors going up canisters, but that doesn't apply to non exclusives who are at 20% for life.

nothing will change soon.

the IS exclusives are too much "locked in" to make any quick move elsewhere.

if something wil happens it will take months to get noticed and despite the people ranting on IS forum
are very vocal they only represent no more than 10% of the exclusives there, the remaining 90% either
don't give a sh-it or are even happy to hear other competitors are leaving....

the rich are getting richer, and the slaves are fighting each other ... how sad !

I agree. I think a good 50% of contributors either don't give a s!@# or don't know any better. I was shocked at how many exclusive contributors didn't even know what their commission percentage was. Even diamond and gold exclusives were getting it wrong.

Quote from: Kngkyle on September 08, 2010, 18:54

What about exclusive maintaining 25, 30, 35, etc?

Exclusives can vote as well from 25% to 45%.

True but it says dropping to 25, 30, 35. Mine is staying the same.

Perhaps the worst part of this is that every year they will raise the redeemed credit amounts required for each level. So for 2011 it's 1,400,000 credits and then maybe 1,800,000 for 2012 and then maybe 2,200,000 for 2013. Just keep on raising it so hardly anyone goes up a level.

Complete garbage.

It's all so tedious and time-wasting.
First the subscription scheme, then the partner project and the Thinkstock fiasco.
Now this.
:-(

You missed the canister changes, that never ended up happening but still caused a controversy. I think we'd all rather have those canister changes and this load of crap.