Browsing through my "huge" portfolio (I deleted most because of the initial absence of a watermark) of 3 photos at SV, I noticed that the view count staid unchanged for 6 weeks (4,4,24). Not much going on?

Doing a search on "asian, man" I found (1) that my shot with those keywords doesn't turn up and (2) some real beauties that make me wonder about SV quality control.

Perfect isolation and absence of hard frontal flash shadow. Look how well the black gun stands out against the black suit:


Perfect isolation, perfect contrast, no blown-out highlights, great focus on the eyes, copyspace at the right side (his back of course):


Very sharp shot of a lady glued on a sunset. What a great idea, collect all your bloopers where the focus went wrong, and call them 'blurs'. May I suggest Gaussian blur 20px? A very noise-free image too, SS would love it. A real bargain for just 25$!


No further comments....

The search function is also defective. What the heck is going on with their tag separators? Looking for "soldier, man, jungle" or "soldier man jungle" or "soldier,man,jungle" gives me:
"You searched for: soldier, man, jungle - No images found."
"You searched for: soldier man jungle - No images found."
"You searched for: soldier,man,jungle - 36 images found."

One of them is this (where is the soldier, man, jungle? It's an underwater shot):


And of course, my shot with these tags (below) isn't included:
"elated,  laptop,  male,  military,  shirtless,  computer,  people,  tropical,  wireless,  young,  young man,  victorious,  victory,  reaching,  screen,  dress,  shout,  shouting,  sitting,  skin,  slim,  soldier,  stud,  success,  tanned,  teeth,  terrorism,  terrorist,  triumph,  triumphant,  muscular,  necklace,  notebook,  nude,  PC,  man,  manly,  masculine,  elation,  exotic,  expression,  fatigues,  guerrilla,  happy,  joy,  jungle,  keyboard,  arms,  army,  Asian,  beach,  camouflage,  cheer,  cheering,  chest,  communication"

(link to photo: http://www.snapvillage.com/PictureDetail.aspx?vcb6uh=NURJwh2QzWoouLkxOmVxnDLM%2beKAsktd7I%2buPl%2bcQ8%2fr4GZpafSnknfIVohYJzmK)

They are only doing what all the other agencies did when they started up - collecting as many images as possible to get the library going.  Once they've got a few hundred thousand in the library they'll start to tighten up.

There is a lot of junk on all of the sites but most of it gets buried and it adds to the size of the overall collection.  I know, because some of it is mine.  One of these days, I am going to do some pruning   Some of it sells though.  I am amazed what people will buy but perhaps they want some images that don't look technically perfect.  Looking through magazines, snapshots sell and some sell for lots of money.

Alamy has a VERY lax quality control system and their business seems to be working.

Yes, but Alamy has some sort of sophisticated (?) ranking system which looks at the number of times an image has appeared in a customer's search, the number of times it has been clicked on by the customer, and the number of times it has been bought.

No one quite knows how it works (there's been a lot of speculation, and parts of the algorithm are patented I believe) but the result is that if you have a lot of rubbish images in your collection you sink down to the bottom in any search. And with some searches throwing up 100+ pages there's not much chance of a customer seeing the rubbish.

One of the technically worst photos I ever submitted somewhere had been accepted by FT and to my surprise, keeps getting downloads, two just last week. 
 Rosta

That's right...the 'snappyness' thing takes into account views,reviews,downloads...so I suppose it'll take a while for the picture to get shuffled into any kind of order. There's a lot of filler,similars, and suchlike turning up in searches at the moment. 
I'm interested to know, though, how you balance posting decent images to microstock sites, with hesitating to post your 'best' work? Or do you not hesitate?