Excellent post HalfFull - I think this is exactly what's happening. "...there is a a cut off that slows sales down once a threshold is met" - that's what I see. Which brings me back to my original question - does SS decide how much to pay each of us and we're just getting a salary? It sure feels like that to me. What's the point of improving then and growing your portfolio? Motivation - down the toilet...
Time to move out of this business.
For the last seven months I have been within. 5% give or take of my monthly threshold. Amazing! having siad this I really don't mind being on a monthly salary as long as its a good salary. LOL. so I can't complain.
As far as improving, growing your port, uploading? well thats gone down the drain long time ago. What we are seeing now is exactly a carbo-copy of what happened with the traditional photo-agencies back in the mid 90s followed by a few years and then it all collapses. 
I don't think we are seeing the collapse of the business just a business finding the limitations of it's current ranking system. This system works great when the business is growing fast and the increase split over all it's contributors is increasing each month. Now, with the volume of contributors and the slowing growth (in terms of revenue coming in) and the still massive increase in terms of contributors / images they are having to cut the amount of earnings to some.
They are still working on the principle of trying to please everyone but not really pleasing anyone. The bigger earners will feel they are being held back, lower earners will be happy to begin with until throttling comes in. Lower earners who supply a lot will wonder why their earnings don't increase in line with the growth of their port etc etc.
The system they employ means people earn well from the beginning (sales come in quickly) rather than seeing very little for months until image and contributor ranking builds up based on sales (without promotion). This more traditional approach of rewarding increased rank based on image popularity only means there will be fewer individual contributors at the top, not as varied selection of images (but still plenty, 1000's contributors still) but the ones that don't cut it will fall quickly and ultimately stop supplying, while the successful ones will continue to supply, possibly in greater numbers. This of course speeds up the demise of the less successful contributors as images are pushed further down.
The type of growth curve from this type of ranking is a very shallow to begin with but will steepen quickly once images move up the ranking system faster. Like a rolling snowball it can gather pace quickly. There are a few agencies out there that work with this more traditional approach.
SS will have to decide if it wants to continue to please everyone (and fail) or reward those whose images climb up the ranking system without assistance (and reduce the variety of contributors). Continuing the way they are going now will ultimately result in them losing more contributors from the middle to top as they will be full time and looking for increased earnings from their increased portfolios.
I believe SS are at a crossroads and they'll have to revisit how they rank contributors as FT starts eating into their client base more and more, which will in turn will mean contributors at SS will notice this capping more and more.
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