Be aware of the keyloggers as well. If somebody infiltrated into your system with a keylogger, changing passwords won't do any good.

Around February 2007, somebody posted a video to YouTube to show how to use a security hole to steal pictures without the watermark. He was saying that he knew this hole since 8 months. IS banned him and fixed the hole. Maybe these pics were stolen back then. Or, at least, it perfectly demonstrates that our pictures can be "stolen".

The video is still on the YouTube:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izFtZzZaW4Y" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izFtZzZaW4Y</a>

As far as I see, on most of the sites, the potential buyers follow two main options: To search by popularity (ie. number of DLs), and by age. So we can safley say that both new and popular images are promoted. As a new contributor with limited portfolio, I should say I rely upon searches based on age because I still don't have many DLs.

On the other hand, I guess Shutterstock uses a combination of both, ie. when you use "Most Popular" criteria, the images comes in an order which reflects NOT the all-time popularity, but the popularity in the past few weeks. So, some images which sell good in the past few weeks comes first, although they are not the most downloaded images in my portfolio. (Of course, as far as I observed.) I guess that is the reason behind SS's success although they have the smallest comission percentages. I would like to see the same approach in other sites too. What do you think?

An exclusive photographer friend at IS told me the other day that one of the executives at Corbis was saying that the microstock market still counts only for 5% of the whole stock photography business. (Is there a market research on this?) This is a business which has the potential to go completely online than any other business. Much more than online music or movies. It means that we can expect many fluctuations including selling prices, new websites, disappearing ones, more stringent approval criteria, anything...

Although all seems positive for the contributing photographers, it may not be so for the individual ones, as big agencies discovered the potential of microstock. Look at iofoto.com. Now they have a portfolio of 10,000 photos on several microstock sites.

For now, some microstock sites still try to stay big by enlarging their number of images. Some seem to have more stringent criteria but still random, mostly influenced by the subjective opinions of the reviewers, the ratio of the number of reviewers to the number of uploaded images, unprofessionalism... These secondary factors still dictate the business. Even at IS, which seems the most professional of all, they changed the upload limits many times in a short period of time.

While the microstock sites, although some are already a subsidiary of a corporate business, are still struggling their way through technical problems, downtimes, staff shortages, they still rely upon uncontrolled costumer demand. I mean they do almost nothing to create additional demand. Direct mailing to existing stock photo buyers? I don't think so... While they started to implement better search mechanisms, lightboxes are not effectively used (as in the sense of stock CDs), nor the contributers are not effectively chanelled by the sites to take pictures/create images which have a higher demand potential. There is no business segmentation (for magazines of different sorts, advertisers, business sectors etc.). We are practically in the stone ages of microstock business.

IMHO, these will all change. But will those changes be to the good of individuals, I'm not sure. Some amateurs decided to be a contributor for a pocket money, then some even quitted their daytime job when they started to earn several thousands of dollars per month, but the introduction of photo agencies may change the picture.

Thanks a lot!