On my new $2,000+ Eizo monitor your images look, well, outstanding.

And to top it all off if you take letters in the 89th, 102nd, 135th, 187th, and 203rd positions, multiply by 666, the take the first five letters from the corresponding numerical positions you spell SATAN!!

Heaven help the poor customer of this site. I took a short tour (first 5 or 6 pages) under "recent" images. I saw 80% absolute garbage. Ever have to sit through a rank amateur's two hour slide show from his tour of Europe? Exactly. Besides really badly exposed shots and worse compositions the subjects were selected with no rhyme or reason that I could see.
I don't mean to demean any other shooters, but WOW.  Most of those contributers deserve to be put out of their misery. You wouldn't want your images to be surrounded by this dreck. A great example of accepting anything that comes slithering under the door. Maybe the reviewers we often complain about aren't so bad after all.

There was this horrible odor coming from the site. And when they forced opened the trunk...

SS has been very steadily growing for me without a lot of new uploads. It has nosed out iStock several times the last few months. IStock has been in steep decline for me for over a year starting with the disamb torture and probably even more because of the changes in the "best match" sorts. My best keywords on iStock are now ineffective in all but the "age" and "downloads" sorts. Somebody there seems to be stacking the deck against us independents in my opinion.

I too have had an increase in SS rejections. Some of the reasons were so strange and unfounded that I just shake my head. It's as if the reviewer had never seen an image shot in strong directional lighting in the desert. With a "bad white point" comment also when each shot was right-on with a WhiBal card.

Yet the next shot was accepted by SS even though it was a high key dramatic b&w silhouette shot: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=7295830

I would have bet that image would have been rejected for any number or reasons I would have agreed with. And it had a download the first day! Go figure.

Thank goodness I'm not exclusive to any one set of reviewers.

It's my guess that V2 irretrievably damaged the structure of existing images' keywords. Many of my recent images seem to be okay with multiple keywords.
I think the site is stonewalling its customers as to the seriousness of the keyword problem, hoping that the older images will be superseded with the new ones over time and that we'll forget about it. Just my theory at this point. The fact that the site owners won't fess up to the problem leads to all kinds of wild suppositions. The thought of re-keywording the hundreds of older images there is unthinkable.

I dis'ed all my 30-50 best sellers, then I dis'ed only the images that were sold. I've done about 200-300 so far.
The month all this Dis started, now over a year ago, my sales went WAY down and haven't recovered yet. IS went from number one to number two, now trailing SS by about 10%.

It's such a major pain I doubt  that I'll dis any more unless they show up on my recent sales list.

Although IS has the best sales analysis capability, the uploading still sucks. And don't get me started with the category requirement BS.

By the way, has anyone noticed that the searches at IS are very strange? My theory is that unless you're an exclusive the "Best Match" is a liability sort for us. It seems to favor all kinds of weird off-topic  results. For example one of my best keywords yields a number 1 position on the first page when sorted by Downloads, but page 7 on best match. Many other of the best matches are WAY OFF, almost spam-like.