By braddy

Over the past year, we've been providing information about needed content on a regular basis. This info comes from a culmination of sales data, customer feedback, market research and emerging trends in media. It's distilled by the the iStock and Getty Images Creative Research team and distributed through various channels listed below. Unfortunately, from what we can tell, the information is heavily under-utilized at the moment.

A great starting point for identifying content opportunities is the creative resources article. It is updated and maintained frequently as possible and is a hub for access to our training manuals, content articles, creative briefs as well as the contributor newsletter archive:
http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=1413

iStock Fuel - This contributor focused Blog is focused on promoting content that we feel is on-trend and worth promoting. If we are talking about it on Fuel, there's a good reason to take note.
http://fuel.istockphoto.com

Self promotion - For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, there's also an article with tips on how you can make it easier for customers to find and explore your content on the iStock site:
http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=1399

2012 Trends - This was originally aimed at customers, but is actually very relevant to contributors as well:
http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=1461

I'd also urge you to frequent the Getty Images Curve site - which is a fantastic resource for strategy, insights and visual trends.

For our exclusives contributors, we have now provided access to the Getty Images contributor community website.
The site features creative resources and guidance for photo and video, as well as a recently launched Client Needs section that holds a live feed of content requests coming from customers to our sales teams. This is industry leading and one of the benefits of having access to the the Getty Images knowledge base. If you are submitting content directly to Getty Images under your contract, be sure to use the reference code listed for the relevant upload. If you are only submitting content to iStockphoto, use the needs list as a guide to what customers are looking for - do not add the reference code as we do not support them at this time. We are however looking at ways to add this in the future.

If you are exclusive and need access to the GYI community site please email contributor relations ([email protected]) with the details as follows:

Subject: Getty Contributor Community Access Request
Full name (First and Last as it appears in the iStock system)
iStockphoto member name
valid email address

We will email your login credentials when the request has been processed.

Keeping on the subject of exclusives, despite some of the theories floating around the forums and the business obstacles that we have acknowledged and addressed in the other posts, we want to emphasize that we truly value our Exclusives. While we maintain and expand on on all of the above resources, we are also continuing our plans for new features and tools that will help you make smart business decisions and drive new customers to all the Getty Images sites.

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By braddy

A great starting point for identifying content opportunities is the creative resources article. It is updated and maintained frequently as possible and is a hub for access to our training manuals, content articles, creative briefs ...

I don't really see what's the point in focusing on what type of content people should be shooting and uploading to iStock and try to guide them on this now. I am not going to even bother with any of this nonsense they are touting. It is clear the problem is not the lack of the right pictures, but a bad best match mix and a declining number of buyers. Plus you got all this Getty content flooding the site now and dominating the best match whilst burying iStock contributor content even more. This is a joke. Nobody is sitting there thinking about what to shoot and upload anymore. People are thinking more about where else they can go possibly with their existing content to save their livelihood and what to do about the 50% drop in sales they experienced recently because the site is simply a mess. Nobody is thinking of fixing their huge drop in downloads by adding more content to the iStock site. Right now many people are contemplating more about giving up their crowns than investing in another shoot to upload to iStock.

The bottom line is that sales can't get better when iStock is stopping it from getting better. They can put things back to the way they were in the best match when sales were good for long time contributors, but they don't want to and they won't. They will continue to burry top selling iStock images and replace it with Agency and pictures with no views and downloads as they have been doing.

This is just another smoke and mirrors ploy to distract contributors into thinking they are not uploading the right stuff when in fact all the right stuff is there already. It is just that iStock has buried the right stuff 6 feet under and buyers can't find it, which means they are burying their contributors along with it.