That Walmart story is dreadful...

It is, but it it really news to people? This has been happening in the UK for many years, and has been well aired in the media here, even in a broadcast I showed my classes in high school. (It was about battery farmed poultry. The exact quote was, "The supermarket goes to the supplier and says, 'the selling price will be xpence per pound' and it's up to them to keep their costs within this, no matter what it takes."
It's also well known that many small farmers, orchard keepers etc can't survive by supplying the supermarkets, hence the growth of Farmers Markets.

This came up in relation to that EL fiasco, but it's worth a new thread.
In that EL fiasco thread¹, a contributer got this in a reply from Contributer Support:

"Apparently what happened with our (at least my) really small EL download royalties is that they were purchased from a buyer who bought credits in huge bulk to the tune of 70�/credit. I wasn't aware that you were able to get credits that cheap as on the "Buy Stock" page it says credits as low as 95�/credit. I was told that this is a standard practice with huge corporate buyers. It's a little frustrating that we have been mislead about this. I also did not realize that subscription credits go as low as 24�/credit. Did Kelly make mistake when he wrote "we are adjusting the minimum value of the subscription credit from $0.95 to $0.65"? Did he mean to say "pay-as-you-go credits"? In which case it is already almost that low."
Clearly, that would mean that an XS image bought by one of these Huge Buyers would net a non-exclusive as much as 14c, and even a (Black) Diamond would earn 28p.

Surely that is totally unsustainable for contributers and iStock. No wonder they keep it a 'dirty little secret'.

¹ Reference: http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=269152&page=1, about half-way down page 2.

Istock exclusive.
October 2010 well down on October 2009, which was a huge drop down from 2008. Exactly 5/8 the $$$ I got in Oct 08.
Acceptances getting fewer and fewer _ I've gone from over 90% to below 50%.
Files accepted in the past two years are hardly moving. My sales are mostly from old images I wouldn't even dream of submitting now.
The theft of our EL money is the last straw.

Maybe the reason people are buying the Vettas and E+ files is that they appear higher up in the search, as we see best match is populated almost exclusively by Vetta and Agency these days? So people never see the cheaper priced images in the same series unless they really go looking for them. Dunno. As a really low budget buyer, though I look. Well, I used to look. I only have one credit left at iStock with no plans to buy more.

I've got a Vetta which has sold a few times, but is really low for its main keyword. I can't actually find it at the moment on that keyword, but at one point it was on the last page of a 2000+ image search. However, I did check out another of my Vettas and there are non-exclusive images with no sales ahead of it in a best match search. I found another Vetta with the same main keyword, which has sold >30 times, on the last page of that search.
Actually, I can't work out the current best match at all - except that new uploads drop like stones after about 24 hours (maybe even before that, but not much more after that first slump).
I don't believe all this stuff about buyers only looking at a page or two. On Alamy, I can see that buyers can easily search over 4000 files on the more popular search terms. I guess some Micro buyers might just buy the 'most popular', weird as that seems to me.
However, I do agree that the high prices being rammed to the front might scare off buyers, especially as so many of the brought-in Agency files in particular are 'very average'. (I'm glad I don't compete in the lifestyle sector.

Unfortunately, there's no way to find 'em.

The consipiracy theorists would say that's the whole point

It's easier when you've got very few ELs, but still time-consuming (I was only checking two ELs and it still took ages): certainly not 'easy'.

It's just silly to see one photo that is Vetta (or Agency for that matter) right next to another in the same series that is in the regular collection. So arbitrary and makes it look like a total rip off.

Interesting point of view. Here's my spin on the same phenomenon. My Vettas were almost all chosen by 'someone else'; I think only about two of those I nominated were accepted into Vetta. However, most of those I have have 'similars' in my port. The Vettas which sell (some don't!) sell better than the non-Vettas.
So that formed my strategies for Exc+. Where I had a series and one or two outsold the others, I made them Exc+, since history had shown that buyers preferred them. Buyers on a budget still have a choice of non Exc+ images from the series. Still, the Exc+ images outsell the non-Esc+, presumably proving that these particular ones, for reasons not always apparent to me, are more useful to buyers. Win-win.

Quote from: grp_photo on October 30, 2010, 15:42

Another possible reason why the lion is not anymore on FT,SS etc. It is very obviously a picture shot in a Zoo, and I highly doubt the photographer got a property-release for it. That could be result in big problems for Apple AND the photographer.

I don't really see anything that says zoo. It's a close-up of a lion's head. Oh but wait...I'll bet the lion has some distinguishing mark that allows the zoo/owner/whoever to completely say without a doubt that that lion is their lion and therefore no one has the rights to use it! Sounds preposterous, but I guarantee it's coming, if it's not here already. Yikes.

The dark 'spots' which their whiskers 'come out of' are distinctive, like fingerprints, so lions can be individualy identified.
However, Sean has posted a link to a site by some USian legal expert who says that zoo animals can be used in RF stock unless they are a particular animal which is a particular draw to that zoo. E.g. I noticed that Memphis Zoo said that its pandas (only) were trademarked (actually, it might only have been the names of the pandas. The wording was 'Ya Ya and Le Le are trademarks of Memphis Zoo".

Quote from: N.Exposure on October 30, 2010, 08:59

I think there was one professional model who at some stage did a shoot for a microstock photographer.

She was later rejected from a top modeling contact because someone had used the microstock image and 'ported' it to sell cheap adult entertainment on billboards.

Yeah, this is bad.  It's a good idea to warn your models about this sort of thing if they want to pursue a serious modeling career. 

Or even if they don't. How would your church friends/models feel about being used like that?

I'm pretty sure iStock doesn't care what buyers think either.

Unfortunately, it seems that way to me too. 

No doubt if the OP posts in the iStock forums that thread will be deleted almost immediately.

I didn't think it would be deleted, but I suspected it might be locked.
Either way, it would send out a clear message that iStock has heard of customers, but wants no truck with them, if that's the case.
[Kool-aid]Or they could surprise us and be regretful and helpful.[/Kool-aid] And take the comment as a kick up the janxie/ call to action.

Quote

I think if iStock believes everything they do is good, it's about time that buyers provide some feedback as well to them.

I understand that it's easier for a buyer to just switch to another agency without handing out some feedback.

But it appears that basic issues like the OP mentions should be brought to IS attention from the buyer side - since these people put the money into their unsustainable pockets.

I couldn't agree more.
Please, OP, if you are able to make the time, please post to support AND copy to the forums. Of course, 'we' can read what you said here, but it would be even better if you made your feelings known on and to iStock.
Sorry about your negative experience. Please know that a lot of iStock contributers are very concerned about the Agency ingestion.
Added: if you searched on 'colour', you would get any colour images, so most of the pics would be Agency.
You could consider searching (if it's not too late for your project) on colours, which maps to 'descriptive colour', it may be that these images would be nearer what you were looking for.
Also try 'bright color' > bright (luminosity) or 'bright color' (Vibrant colour)(colour intensity) or indeed 'pastel' (pastel colour) (colour intensity) or 'saturated colour' (colour intensity)

Has it ever been confirmed that all the Hulton Archive pics on iStock are properly model released? If you look at the Winter Wonderland lightbox featured on the front page (images rotate, you might have to wait) there's a photo of several people walking in snow. Looks about 1950s-ish. Of course, this image may well have been set up with models, but I can't help but wonder. And even if the image is fully MRed, are the MRs really of the current MR standards that we'd have to submit? We've been assured that these images are inspected to the same standards as the rest of us have to reach, but sometimes, it's really questionable.

The two problem areas I see in micro for buyers are people who falsify releases or don't follow proper practices, and the "image thief" type contributors.
In travel imagery, I'm starting to see a lot more model released indigenous shots - now its possible that the photographers get the document explained to people who can't read and that this is in their native language, track down the child's parents and do the same, as they're passing through - or its possible that they just get someone to sign a bit of paper for an extra dollar.

When this has been discussed in the iStock forums (many's the time and oft) there are always togs who claim either that they just pay money and get signatures that way; or that they just ask people to 'OK the paperwork' - I've been told more than once (on and off forum) that I shouldn't tell potential subjects 'worse case scenario', just vaguely say, as they claim to, that the pics will be used 'for adverts and such'.
In developing countries, I realise that just offering small amounts of money would guarantee signatures: in some, I can't imagine trying to explain, even if I knew the language, all the uses they could be used for to people who have never seen magazines, TV, internet or hoardings. I can also imagine how difficult it would be, for example, to establish that the adult eager to sign for a few dollars was actually the parent of a particular child.

^^ Thanks. I don't even know if you can 'register' them in the UK: they're copyright the moment you take them.
I did, however, read a series in Photoshop world a couple of years back which suggested - with real life examples - why it's very much worth your while registering them.
Ah, the Land of the Litigious.