HQ Update – April 23, 2012

It's been some time since our last major HQ update. We have quite a lot to cover, including a few major pieces of news.

Logos & PNGs
Many of you have been asking about the status of our Logo and PNG projects so we wanted to provide you with some definitive answers now:

Logos: Since being announced in September of 2009 the iStock Logo program has been repeatedly delayed by a number of business and technical considerations. At this point iStockphoto has stepped back to reevaluate the whole Logo initiative. After careful review and a lot of discussion, we've decided to cancel our plans for this program. We need to focus our time and effort on other initiatives that will have greater positive impact on the company's overall success.

This means all Logo Designers Supply Agreements will be terminated, effective 30 days from now, so you may repurpose your logo content as you see fit. We are waiving the clause in the Logo Designers Supply Agreement that stated you must wait 90 days after a file is deactivated prior to offering your logo designs for resale on a competing stock site (Section 12 e. Effect of Termination). For all Logo contributors, we are also waiving the $100 minimum account balance for requesting a payment of your earnings. Please contact artists@istockphoto.com to make this payout request.??Deactivated Logos may be immediately submitted to the Illustrations queue as long as they meet our standards for Illustration submissions. For more information, please refer to the Illustration Training Manual. If you wish to deactivate a logo or request a payment of earnings, please contact artists@istockphoto.com, stating the file number(s) of the logo design(s) that you wish to remove from your portfolio.

PNGs: While much of the front end work for this project was completed last summer, we found that methods in which assets are made available to the site were still not conducive to implementing PNGs in the way required by the business. In light of higher priority projects, the PNG project has been put on hold indefinitely.

We understand that those of you who were looking forward to these options will be disappointed and we apologize for the turnabout, however we think that we are taking the best course for mutual success and we look forward to moving ahead with full focus on the right priorities.

Zazzle & Cafe Press
Getty Images RF content is currently available for Zazzle and Cafe Press customers to select and use on items they purchase there. Initially there was Vetta content included at these sites which should not have been included in this offering. We are pulling these Vetta images from Zazzle and Cafe Press. Contributors will be paid for any sales that have already occurred.

Going forward though we want the Vetta content mirrored on GI.com to be exposed to this market segment. Partnerships with internet services such as Zazzle represent a new incremental revenue stream for your content. Rather than licensing images for use, images we provide to these services are selected by retail customers to customize a tangible item they are buying and we/you receive a share of the revenue derived from the sale of each item.

We will keep you informed when we do decide to expand these partnerships to include Vetta.


Microsoft Office
There have been problems with certain images available through partnerships we have with Microsoft, involving hi-res file availability and broken image links. We are working to isolate and correct the affected files.


Vetta & Agency at Getty Images
After a long delay and a lot of technical hurdles the process to move Vetta and Agency collection images from iStock to Getty Images is underway again. Files began moving through the connector last week and are slowly being indexed in search results at gettyimages.com.

Exclusive+ & Photo+
Both of the Plus collections continue to be big parts of our growth at iStock. Plus and Exclusive+ perform very well and our research shows a real demand for the kinds of great files that contributors are choosing to put into this price tier – so much so that we're finding ourselves short of material to meet it. When we look at the numbers we find that many contributors still have lots of available slots, so we encourage you to take full advantage of your full Plus allowance. There are a lot of great images at iStock that could be bumped up to the Plus collections that would sell very well. Using up those slots is a proactive step that contributors can take to maximize revenue.


What's happening with Best Match?
Understandably this question comes up frequently here. Search is one of the most important aspects of the site to contributors, customers, and HQ. We wanted to explain what's happening with Best Match in more detail to remove some of the mystery about what you're seeing and discussing.

How Best Match works has changed dramatically over the past 6-12 months, and continues to change on a weekly basis as we test and optimize with more focus on the specific person doing a search. Many pieces of information are combined, balanced, and re-balanced as part of this optimization process. Here are just a few examples of factors that may affect what you see in your search results:

- Where you are in the world
- How often you have visited iStock
- How often you have purchased at iStock
- What kind of content you have purchased at iStock
- What day of the week it is

We tailor search results to best suit specific customers based on what we know about them, and we're getting better and better at making these determinations using data from the testing that is constantly underway. The better we do this, the more content we license to each customer and the more they come back to iStock - these are the core objectives of our continual tweaking.

All of these factors also affect the searches that contributors are doing as well, making it difficult for you to assess what you're seeing or to understand how it might look from the perspective of a specific customer. So bear in mind when you look at a set of results that it won't be the same across different segments.

We understand that this creates a frustrating situation for you, but the objective is to tailor search at a customer level, and this is one unfortunate side effect of that approach. Overall though we are happy with the results and growth of this search personalization process.


Bug Update – Redeemed Credits & Retroactive Royalties
Late last week we pushed a fix for one of our outstanding bugs. The January 26-27 Redeemed Credit bug was fixed. Not all contributors were affected by this bug – if you were, your account will now have been credited with any missing amounts and an email was sent to you detailing the adjustments.

There is a chance that some contributors may see a final amount that is up or down by a small amount (generally in the $0.20 range) from their own calculations of the royalty amount. This is an accurate number - the variance is to do with the complexity of some royalty calculations on credit packs, as opposed to nominal dollars.

We continue to work on the January 1-4 Retroactive Royalty bug, which has required more time than we expected but will be resolved.


Creative Research for Exclusives
We have added a new section for Creative Research to the Exclusive Contributor section of the site. We will use this space to post creative briefs and articles geared specifically to Exclusive contributors. You'll be able to discuss and share examples as well. The first brief is posted now - we wont' get into it here but we encourage all Exclusives to check it out.


Contributor Relations & Telephone Support
We are removing telephone support as an option for Contributor Relations. Don't panic — we have a good reason. Our team is best able to respond to issues through the online ticket system and email. Our telephone traffic is comparatively small but is much more time and resource demanding: we spend a far greater amount of time responding to a much lower volume of tickets over the phone. Taking this step will help us shorten our overall turnaround time for issues. Phone support will wrap up May 4, 2012.

(Edited on 2012-04-23 10:42:33 by iStockHQ)

(Edited on 2012-04-23 14:39:53 by braddy)

"Both of the Plus collections continue to be big parts of our growth at iStock. Plus and Exclusive+ perform very well and our research shows a real demand for the kinds of great files that contributors are choosing to put into this price tier – so much so that we're finding ourselves short of material to meet it."

Give us a usable interface, and we might add more.

Thanks for the update. Glad to see logos and pngs gone, so we don't have to keep bringing it up.

Hmm, I'm not buying the royalty fix brush off - here's one of mine thats a whole $1 off:

0008334621 $05.70 $09.01 $03.31 1/27/2012

There's no way that can be a rounding error. All my other figures are off by varying amounts too. Just telling me to accept it and move on doesn't generate confidence in your accounting ability.

Luckily, you're removing my ability to call you and talk about it, so that helps.

Perhaps the tiny fractions of a royalty I'll get from Zazzle will make up for it.

any news about the PP Connector still broken ?


thanks for all info !

(Edited on 2012-04-23 11:35:53 by franckreporter)

Maybe allow higher % allocation for those who wish to add more to exclusive+ & photo+,. Could help with material shortfall problem?


Cheers.

(Edited on 2012-04-23 11:12:54 by Feverstockphoto)

Probably a dumb question, but can someone point me in the direction of the "Exclusive Contributor section of the site"?  Or do they just mean the Exclusive forum?


 


ETA: Nevermind, see it now.  I hadn't refreshed the forum page.

(Edited on 2012-04-23 11:11:12 by jentakespictures)

What about broken PP connector?


Thanks!

Thanks for the update.
Would love to add more files to E+ but have no idea which amongst my files are suitable for it. I'm my works worst judge .

(Edited on 2012-04-23 11:16:27 by Tempura)

Do we have the option to opt-out of the Microsoft image giveaway?

I was sorta hoping that we'd hear something more substantive. ^This^ really doesn't tell us much about the program. How do we opt-out?. Did it really take you weeks to put that response together?  Very disappointing.

Thanks for shedding light on the Best Match changes. Sounds really cool. Perhaps the knowledge that user-specific parameters go into tailoring the search results will cut down on contributor BM algorythm posts. Doubt it.

(Edited on 2012-04-23 11:21:43 by busypix)

I think it took us time to realize just how complex our relationship with Microsoft is. We've added a separate thread for a discussion on the image distribution side of things here:

Image Distribution - April 23/2012

I am very disappointed about this. There is a reason why phone support takes longer: it is interactive. How many emails (and days or even weeks) will it take to go back and forth to get a relatively simple answer from istock? How about boosting forum presence?


Give us better interface (as Sean mentioned) if Plus program is so successful.


Good move to scrap Logos and PNG.


Thanks for the update, hope you'll do this more often.

I missed this in the post. Contributors are your customers and deserve phone support for intensive or quick issues, just like buyers. This makes no sense.

What ever happened to live chat? Can we do away with the greyed out link now, as well?

PNG on-holding realy suck.
What exactly are priorities now? It looks like nothing is happening.
What about mirroring content (not Vetta and PP)?  

Agree.  Sometimes nothing but voice will do, even though it's been really hard lately to get through.  Tickets get lost or disappear or don't get updated (at least from the contributor end), and forum threads get locked or deleted.  It's gotten harder to get answers to anything.  Completely eliminating the phone support option will make it more difficult. 


(on a somewhat OT, but peripherally related note, a recent forum post from a buyer stated that when he called the international toll free number, it was no longer connected -- is this going away too, or was that a glitch?  If it is, it might be a good idea to make note of that in the website).  

Are you serious about the phone support for contributors?!?!? That's the only straight answer I've gotten from anyone at iStock in three years!!!


Ohhhhh . . . I get it.

I find it really hard to use as well, so I just don't bother.

I'm sure more news will come but most of this news is not great news for many contribuators and vague on areas like Microsoft not to mention Pintrest. The phone support was the only thing that worked for me as e-mail took ages. I don't care what you do with BM as long as sales are good. No mention of mirrored video content to Getty as that has stalled as well. No mention of any new iniatives only getting rid of Logos and PNG will soon follow. Doesn't feel like exciting times at iStock which is a concern as our market has a lot more competeion to deal with. 

I was just wondering about this BM - where you are in the world... Does that mean because I'm a contributer in Africa my files will mainly be seen by people living in Africa, because they are presumably looking for "African" pics... So I get screwed because Africa is probably the contenent with the least buyers and I don't have a lot of "African" photos?

Really disappointed about the phone support. Its was super helpful the two times used it. I think shows how much you value the contributors you work with.


As for pngs thats just embarrassing we did most of the work but its just to hard to implement. That's pretty weak and does not really answer the question from a technical or business point of view.