The massive collections growth at istock,  why?  Was there even one reason for it.    Has it had a benefit??  The massive black hole as it is known seems to have damaged istock,  both  for contributors and customers,, I wonder how it has been for istock profit.  It seems all of this could have been forseen by anyone, everyone.  It is however still occurring right,  why?

Not just iStock- what about the 47 million plus images on Alamy?

I took the question to be "Why is Getty ruining iStock by dumping files there". It's been talked about before, but I think they're trying to squeeze out revenue in the short term and they mistakenly think this will help

iStock's Alexa rank (and thus I assume traffic) is much better than Getty's. They're hoping to exploit it, but they're just smothering iStock

The massive collections growth at istock,  why?  Was there even one reason for it.    Has it had a benefit??  The massive black hole as it is known seems to have damaged istock,  both  for contributors and customers,, I wonder how it has been for istock profit.  It seems all of this could have been forseen by anyone, everyone.  It is however still occurring right,  why?

This move from quality to quantity is a part
Of their new plan how to compate against SS.
As Yuri said there will a big changes in upcoming months.
Others parts of this plan are
Adding chip subscription plans to iStock.
Closing Thinkstock and concentrating all the forces in one place.
Trying to keep exclusives by throwing 100% royalties day etc.

they tested price points too far and started losing sales and customer base. the heat came down from the top to fix it and they had to do something to report back that they were working on it by doing things like adding more content, making back room deals, customer research, tweaking search, adding subscriptions, messing with layout and probably other things we don't know about.

some changes were for the better and some were not. time will tell if they can fix it. but much of the damage is done and lasting or intended to last or remain unchanged indefinitely.

I think it was a combination of both. They lowered their standards and also changed their rules when they realized they were missing out on images that were selling well elsewhere (I still remember them saying "don't tell us how well an image sells elsewhere after we've rejected it").

An example of what I consider a myopic POV was their refusal, until recently, to accept any image with "type" in it...even if the "type" was hand-drawn. Meanwhile typography-based images were selling like hotcakes over on SS. Right now hand lettering is a huge trend in the advertising and design marketplace.

They had this strict set of rules they set for themselves at the beginning and realized years too late that they'd fallen way behind. Then to make up for lost time they started accepting almost everything.

^^ which conversely means that there will also be a lot more good quality images at Main prices on iStock, competing with their own images elsewhere. This of course was inevitable once buyers could filter out most exclusive content with the price slider.