In case one of those unaware contributors happens to read this thread... what would your recommendation be if somebody asked you to name a "good lesser-known company"?

Stockfresh.

This is a bit of a false dichotomy, no? It's not one thing or the other. You can email contributors about DPC and upload to sites that pay a higher percentage, if you wish.

The more photographers know about it, the more they might tell their friends to opt out as well.

Sure you can do both. I was commenting more on the idea of taking 5 minutes and doing something. I'd personally rather use 5 more minutes to do something to add to a good company than worry about taking something away from a bad company. Especially when taking images out of DPC clearly isn't working anymore. The image count is back over 21.8 million and rising.

My point is that we've done the "let's pull our images" thing for years at various agencies and it hasn't done much. And as hard as it is to get people to rally behind a good company I really wish we'd at least try. It can't be any less effective than what we're doing now.

I'm just tired of being negative about things and I'm looking at ways to make positive change. Focusing on the negative and the companies behaving badly isn't helping us. It's time for a new strategy.

It requires a united effort from united photographers. 5 minutes less time browsing this forum spent emailing one photographer with photos on DPC is effort well spent

I disagree. DPC numbers are going back up again. This effort is going nowhere.

I'd much rather see people spend 5 minutes doing something to help a good company. Upload some images to a small company that pays 50% or more. Post to fb or twitter about a good company you support and encourage people to check out. Instead of emailing contacting contributors to get them to opt out, maybe contact contributors and encourage them to upload to a lesser-known site that pays well.

I view things like this as equally (if not more more) important than trying to get DPC numbers down (which obviously isn't working anyway). Imagine if we rallied around a small company in the same way we tried to rally against DPC and added 7 million images to an up-and-comer. Fotolia doesn't care if we took away 7 million images from DPC. But maybe they'd take more notice if we took away 7 million images and then helped push one of their competitors a little further up in the tiers.

It's a good deal in some ways. I've heard some people have gotten in the neighborhood of $15,000 to allow Graphicstock to sell their work. For some people, they'd never make that much at most other sites over the course of several years, so it could be a good deal.

I was negotiating with them to sell my work but it fell through because I don't have a big enough portfolio. They thought I had over 1,000 vectors based on my Shutterstock portfolio, but I told them I really have about half that many because of the separate vector/jpg files at SS.

If the price was right, I might have done it. I don't see the harm in it. Sure if they get big enough you might be competing with yourself, having images at Graphicstock and still trying to sell the same images at other places. But that's not going to happen tomorrow. When you cut a deal with them they get your portfolio as it is at the time of the deal. Anything else after that is still exclusively yours. So even if they get big and start to be real competition for other companies, that will take time, maybe years. By then, all of the work you sold them is old stuff.