They are probably afraid of you.

Which is even more worrying.
If this is a move towards regaining confidence and there is nothing to hide how do they even think about censoring someone elected by contributors.

How can it be that Jsnover has not been contacted?
She has been elected by a vast mayority!
One step forward and two steps backwards.

Asking for an audit , if agreed by istock, would normally drive to an agreement in which, if the audit goes all right and nothing is found to be wrong, the contributors would pay the expenses of it. Otherwise it should be istock to pay. They would probably also set a certain amount  of money to differentiate everyday business accounting  errors with �fraud�  . For example, silver sub sales are not payed correctly, we have raised tickets, they have told us they would address the problem and nothing has happened yet and I don't expect anything to happen, the amount is probably too low.

What could be done IMHO was to ask for legal proof of the fraud. I don't think they can pull off royalties without legally demonstrating that the illegal DL have taken place and the actions that are being carried away to i)prosecute fraudsters, ii)solve the problem, iii)protect our IP, iv)insure the company against future frauds, etc.

BTW: istock is a cash cow and its numbers have saved the crisis pretty well. It is a business that gets paid in advance (in cash) and pays suppliers with delay. It finances itself pretty well. I don't think merging it with other companies is the idea but a sell out or more likely IPO. The problem is getting a good price for it. Money is still very cautious and looking for bargains in the market. Credit doesn't flow with ease to the companies and many are still in distress. Mainly those are the companies being traded in the market right now. Difficult to believe that istock is in such problems when it is clearly short in manpower, don't think overheads can't be that high. The moment for big operations when everything is bought at any price is not here yet. Same for the IPO, you need consumer confidence to be higher, you need to sell shares to common people to achieve a successful IPO and we are not at that moment either.

In fact it seems to me that they are trying two things at the same time. What I said about istock and remaining in the sector with Thinkstock, etc. That could explain why they are driving base micro buyers to them. They know the business and have seen this company grow. At the beginning you need to offer content a low prices, and get loyal buyers. As the  content gets better they rise prices and also get more selected buyers, and the story repeats.

There is one saying in private equity. It is easier to sell two companies and double what you invested in each one than selling only one company and getting the same profit.

good luck. hope the views were legitimate.

Thanks.
I want to believe they were legitimate although I doubt it.
My best selling file, with over 600 dls now and keeps giving me >40 dls a month, started slower than these two, so it has hurted a lot seeing them loosing best match ranking so easily and the potential earnings i could have had. I will be close to the 40k RC mark this year. These two could have made the difference 

Hi all, this is my first post here.

Let me use this post also as a brief presentation. IS exclusive contributor actively submitting since March 2008. My port is slightly above 1.3k files, only photos. I do micro part time in the little time my everyday job gives me a rest. Still enjoy photography .

Well, I wanted to share this experience as I think it is important to be known and can be dangerous if this kind of things begin to happen.

Let me say that the number of successful files that I have is, sadly  , limited,  and I track manually every DL, views, RC,  have ratios of all of them, do regular searches to see how their position on best match evolve, etc., etc.

I had these two files, subject  related, that were doing quite well. One was on page two of a relevant keyword and the other in page 3, 25 files per page. They were picking up lately, one in particular, and suddenly something happened. I was expecting that one to hit page one, it had 5 DLs since the last index update.

These files were 4-5 months old, had around 350 views and DLs were in the low 30s. They were close to that 1/10 DLs/views ratio so I assume they were pretty useful and successful for their market. One Monday I started noticing that the number of views begun growing at an incredible pace. Incredible pace for me means that Monday evening European time they had around 900 views. During that week views kept growing and today they have >1.800 views and >1.750 views. This happened the 23rd of February. They have dropped in best match significantly.

It could be that someone posted the images on a popular blog and that drove traffic to them. It could be that someone clicked on them like crazy. I don't know what happened and I have no way of knowing, I don't know if I have been sabotaged or it is only bad luck. I have seen at least another successful file from another contributor, same market, same age, that was on page 1 in one of those searches and no its way back and with more than 3.3k views. 

If gaming the system is as easy as posting a link on a blog, the message sent to the people doing it is very dangerous: you can keep doing it, it works!. If this was unintentional there is a flaw somewhere. How can it be that attracting traffic to istock can harm the files that get that traffic? If this was intentional how can it be that someone can hurt files so easily and in such a short period of time? So many questions.

No need to say that those two files could make a good difference in terms of income for a contributor like me and that the times you hit the jackpot with a file are less and less common these days.

Just wanted to share this with you.

I have no more information and I have, although I tried in several ways, no answers.