I am really grateful to Oxman for starting this thread.  Normally September is a nice jump after the slow summer months.  Somehow knowing that it isn't just me is a bit of a relief. 

Two of my top 10 images are in my top 10 due to sales at Istock. For years, they competed with DT for the #2 spot. Since January, every month has been worse than the month before descending to a total in August of about 10% of my BME. In September, I have sold exactly 3 images for a total of $3.86, which is worse than my 1st month there back in March of 2006.

They have become irrelevant to me.

This month SS is trouncing IS (SS is 45% more than IS - almost 1.5x even given one EL from IS). But the last two days at IS have been really good - good in comparison to terrible, not all time good.

I noticed there were old files in the mix - looking at my last 20 sales, I have every year from 2004 to 2012 represented in the sales. Perhaps people with only newer files are getting hit by some best match change?

August was terrible...so far September has only been approaching average.

This month SS is trouncing IS (SS is 45% more than IS - almost 1.5x even given one EL from IS). But the last two days at IS have been really good - good in comparison to terrible, not all time good.

I noticed there were old files in the mix - looking at my last 20 sales, I have every year from 2004 to 2012 represented in the sales. Perhaps people with only newer files are getting hit by some best match change?

The best match isn't uniformly the same and hasn't been for a while now.
Some BMs have at least the top two or three lines identical to 'new', and others have a strong bias towards high-sellers.
Hard to establish if there's any pattern which is which, compounded by the apparent 'geographical bias' of searches.

September is terrible, accross the board not only limited to Istock.
I started in 2007 with an even mix of submission across the years.

I'm having an unbelievably bad week at IS. .

Ditto. 

Sept. started out slow for me across the board, but the other sites are picking up nicely this week and Istock is getting worse and worse. 

Seeing as it seems to be happening to others too, I suspect it is still the fallout from the lingering IT problems.  If this isn't some secret plan to send buyers to TS, it is one royal F/up. 

Quote from: luissantos84 on September 20, 2012, 08:11

projected earnings for September:

SS (down 40%)
IS (down 5%)
FT (down 10%)
123RF (down 37%)
DT (down 38%)

looks like a terrible month, no ELs or big sales so far, August had 23 week days, September only 20

Do you add EL's when calculating months total? Excluding EL's in your earnings % might give a better picture. At least that's how I keep track of site performances. So far only IS is down for me.

I agree but I always have ELs/SODs, if I don�t think of them, SS will be 20% down

Sales are fine, but rejections are inexplicably and hugely increased at iStock.  The current pattern doesn't fit my usual experience at all, and I'm wondering if there's been a change in acceptance criteria.  Anyone else seeing this?

It's annoying that I can't see what's actually sold in a number of cases.  Presumably these are the new-fangled credit card sales.  Some nice numbers coming in, so it would be good to see what I'm being paid for.

Sorry to hear others are having a bad month.  For some reason I'm often out of kilter with everyone else... at times when most here are reporting a great month, I'm in a slump.  No idea why.

I doubt very much this has got anything to do with recession or the global financial troubles. Its not as if we are selling cars or houses but just pictures that anybody can afford.
Now is the time when corporate designers, advertising agencies, companies in general start planning for profiles, annuals and all sorts of promos.
Right now business should be booming, its not so something is wrong in our gebit.

From my experience, companies are planning budgets for marketing in early September and projects soon follow. I am hoping that is what is going on. Also, it appears IS is tweaking search these days. If we are all seeing low sales, they have to see it too. Hopefully things will get better soon.

September will probably be one of my worst months since I became exclusive in 2010.

I hope I'm just a little paranoid but I really get the feeling that iStock is in big BIG trouble... the site is slow, lots of bugs, many contributors complaining about sales decreasing. Many glitches and bugs take several months to fix. The PNG and logo projects were cancelled. They don't perform major site updates on weekends, which is pretty much standard procedure for any serious e-business.

To me it feels like a company with a very poor organization and/or lots of incompetent people. Or it could also be the signs of a company that is in the process of being shut down, but I find that hard to believe.

But the situation really reminds me of my time at an Ericsson cellphone factory many years ago. We were not informed that the factory was being shut down and that the production would move abroad. But you could tell that something was going on for several months before it actually closed. Machines were not fixed properly, organization was bad, the production rate was really low at times and nobody really seemed to care. But again, I don't see why Getty would close iStock.

I'm curious since a lot of people are saying IS is losing sooo many buyers and about to become irrelevant have your sales elsewhere gone up a lot?  People still need images even if they don't buy from IS so I would expect to see huge gains on other sites if that was true.