You got it and that means a lot of us might need to go back to school and take the appropriate courses to learn all of this stuff from writing code to SEO and it's not something one can learn in a week.  I am in that boat myself, I am good at photography and video but lack in coding, web design and SEO skills and it sure became evident when I now need those skills.

I guess it sounds more like subsistence farming than back to school your total effectivity will surely suffer from all those studies and coding exercises. SEO is kind alive thing since Google and other search engines continue to perfect themselves forever, you just can't learn it in a week or month and then simply use. The solution seems to be a sort of small cooperation between several contributors with different skills. In fact this is a thing we are trying to do now.

2 SquirrelPower: yes middlemen were something useful to certain level. After they grew they treat their clients (here - contributors) as their victims. Costs of any serious project is grown crazy because of multiple levels of subcontracting, where companies and employees which do the job often paid nuts or even not paid at all. Situation in photo industry is the same. In the same time if you speak in person to such a middleman he will non stop demontrate his superiority to disgusting level.

Yep....so we all have to take web design, programming and SEO courses at college or university and learn a new skill or we are all going to be working for less than minimum wage soon, I am sure many are already.  And if we can't afford to learn or can't learn we need to cost out the price of having websites developed and hosting costs.  For those that can dump the middleman they might make it.

And what gets me is the lack of respect for the front line workers, us, who are having to buy and keep updated our gear, pay our own transportation costs, and much more and then I read in the forums here how some are getting 85% taken by the middleman and refunds clawed back 190 days after a sale?. 

We have a product to sell, so do many others, they are on the web selling their products and services and we can't figure this out?  There's got to be a way. I know I personally simply haven't tried hard enough. Other industries have said goodbye to agencies and middlemen and now it's this industries time.

Still fuming about the email I got from SS about how they want to enhance contributor experience and they introduced some sliding scale (of pay cuts?) and next month I got this enhanced contributor experience, $4.11 commissions on video sales down from $28?  The guys that run the agencies and do this must be laughing all the way to the bar after work each day.

I don't think everyone having their own site is a good solution.  Could be interesting if 100 or more of us got together and funded a site.  The costs would be less than us all paying for our own site.  It would have more of a chance because buyers wouldn't have to deal with lots of different sites.

Another option would be to buy a controlling share in one of the smaller sites.

not likely at all - cost is marginal but you won't get 100 people to agree on a site.  who would coordinate, do customer support, etc?  the bbarrier is not programming language or SEO - those solutions are available

as far as taking over a small site -- that's what you'd have - a SMALL site with no traffic & few sales

unless you can establish a niche, selling stock direct is not an option for most photographers

unless you can establish a niche, selling stock direct is not an option for most photographers
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I think this is key, niche and then good SEO.  I've done some Google searching and a few private sites came up on or near the front page of Google so some are doing it, not sure how many sales they are getting.