Had a look at Alexa this morning just to see what the trends look like.  Everything seems to be running at the lowest point of the year, and even lower than Easter in some cases (looking at page views).

I'm making a note to avoid July next year - it's like trying to push a car uphill against all the falling views, so I'll take a month off and tour France.

Not entirely unexpected, and of course it's important to continue uploading to reap the benefit of better times ahead.

Most disturbing are the figures for BigStock, where page views are way below even the low points of last summer.

Well the iStock thing seems to be a problem of their own making - all these small changes taking place when few of them seem to be any improvement.

Worst is the sudden removal of being able to refine a search - it is not possible to search by 'contributor' any more, so all of those buyers who habitually used to trun up day after day and search for 'lisegagne' or 'hidesy' have suddenly had that facility withdrawn without a word of explanation.  Appallingly bad management.

The Microstock industry is alive and well; there are millions of buyers out there; but it seems that with the excuse of 'progress' the agencies are destroying their own positions in the market; we've got the crass implementation at FT, a 'we are better than thou' poor management of change at IS, and even glitches in the buying process at DT over the weekend.

There is one thing to learn from all this:  NEVER put all of your eggs in one basket.....

Imagine if you are a diamond exclusive at IS with lots of customers turning up day after day used to just searching 'by contributor' and suddenly that facility is turned off........