Titles are hard to read with this lighter color font.  Higher contrast please.

No - if you are exclusive to some agency and your exclusivity contract with the agency prohibits RF distributions outside of the agency.  Many contests have rules which state the submissions will be used at will by the contest operators. By submitting to the contest you are giving copyright or at least unlimited rights of photo use.  This would be considered as an RF distribution outside of your exclusivity contract and would breach the contract.  If you are exclusive somewhere - be very careful with contests.

Your link doesn't work.  I suspect I read your story on your paid site yesterday.  Over the course of the last 2 full years my income and downloads are both cut in half.  So I don't doubt your analysis.  The price increases are in no way making up for the less downloads for me.

This whole episode reminded me of the iStockPhoto Predictions For 2012 thread from last year....

The same people that wrote the code are now fixing it.  The same people that are fixing it will write the next code.  So I can only see more and longer outages.  Eventually we will hit one where the accounting is so screwed up that iStock will have to admit it can't be fixed. Oh that will be a bad day - but I see it coming in the trends.

We are not quite there yet - no admission of failure.  ;-)

When shooting the gray card - shoot so the card fills 100% of the frame.  Then set the camera white balance to the custom setting using this shot (Sequence and instructions are different between Nikon, Canon, and others - read the manual).  Then all subsequent pictures in that light setup will have the correct color balance.

Because I have a color blindness problem, I then take at least one shot that includes a subject and the gray card and a white paper.  I can make fine adjustments later if needed.

I think there is a shift every day.  Just some times it has minimal effect on my sales if they adjust 2004 down and 2005 up since a big chunk of my sellable port is centered around those years.  

I agree, there has been a significant shift in the past few hours.  Big location change on a few of my good sellers.  Back to towards the top by pages.  Yea!

Sometimes I wonder if we are looking at this wrong.  Do they boost some segment of the library?  _or_ do they pull down some segments of the library and leave the rest float?  I keep meaning to look at the bottom pages of some of my searches and see if I can tell what happens down there - but I forget to watch every day.

I wonder if we could get a real "insider" review from him today. That is, if he is outside of any nondisclosure agreements.  

The average microstock sale is much higher than $0.20.  I have had more $28 extended license sales than I have had alamy sales this month.  Alamy commissions aren't always higher than microstock.  My one sale so far this month is for around $20 commission.

I do like alamy but it averages out at around $1 per image per year and some people can do better than that per month with all the microstock sites.  I'm using alamy because I don't want to rely too heavily on my microstock earnings, they accept photos that the microstock sites are no longer interested in and I like being able to photograph and sell whatever I want.  They have a great commission and seem to be a site that has a lot of respect for their contributors.

Nailed the answer!

Problem is that you need to upload just before Indies reach the top of the search so that you can get through the days of processing/review and then join the changes as the Indies peak.  We have to figure out the cycle of the routine M changes to decide when to submit.

BTW, Yesterday was my first day with no downloads, for a non-holiday Wednesday, in years.  So exclusives with older files were at the bottom apparently.

I wonder if that Kodak mentality is the same issue at Getty and consuming iStock?  Getty just can't do stock photos the iStock way and must convert iStock to the Getty way.  Fail.

Apparently the books by Rob (Sylvan) and Ellen Boughn are pretty good, though I haven't read them myself. A quick shuftie at Amazon shows there are some others too.

Yes they are good.  I suggest these to the people asking questions.  If they get through the books then they are serious enough that I wll give them more help.  Usually they don't get through the books due to lack of committment.  That is my answer #1.

Answer #2.  If this is just a conversation I wll talk for an hour or whatever.  It is interesting to see how far I've come since 2003 with my responses.  It's also interesting for me to have to formulate opinions that then should be applied back to my own experience.  I never am concerned about kick starting my own comptetitor as I find most people do not have the longevity needed to make Microstock work.

I gave a Microstock talk to the photo club of which I am a member. I had a couple of people come back for more discussion later.  But I have yet to learn of anyone who actually took a stab at Microstock after that session.  Maybe I told to many hard luck stories? ;-)

When looking at site visit stats, are the forum visits a part of the overall?  Certainly the iStock forums are a lot quieter than they were a few years ago.  Is it possible the sales accesses are still close but the differential is in the forum access?  Does anyone have a guess on what percentage of site access is related to sales and what percentage is related to forum activity?