Anyone having problems logging in today? I can't login to either getty or istock, both not recognising my details. Tried chrome and I.E.

When I first saw the letter title I thought I was going to read something along the lines of:-
"We've been listening to your grievances and recognise we've made mistakes. We want to treat contributors more fairly and will be making changes........"
When I read the actual letter I was gobsmacked. How naive of me.

^^^
No they don't have a problem with the date, they knew from March last year they were going to screw it up.

On the royalties page everything is blank and it says

"Royalties data will not be available until your first transaction has occurred. Please try again next month."

By transaction do they mean first payment and if you don't reach payout does that mean everything will remain blank for another month?
Although I have a very small port of around 200 images I haven't missed a payout in over a year but I have a bad feeling about this one.

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on February 08, 2017, 06:26
As others have said some us can't access the forum thanks to this mess and they don't seem to be replying to emails or message through their site. I don't understand the levels of incompetence over there. How does anyone still have their job?

They don't all have their jobs, they've all been fired to save money except for the toilet cleaner who is now in sole charge of the IT department.

Expect Sales to Plummet

Quote from: Tyson Anderson on January 17, 2017, 22:05
It looks like iStock and Getty get hated on pretty hard here... but doesn't anyone think this might be a change for the better?  A one month inconvenience and transition to ESP and they might just be creating a more user friendly interface.  Maybe I'm just hoping here...

There shouldn't be a month of inconvenience (do you honestly believe this will be sorted in a month?).
What should happen, and what most major corporations do, is develop and thoroughly test a new system on a parallel virtual website and network and only when it's running smoothly with no bugs do you go live on the real website.
Getty's strategy is more a case of constantly throwing crap at the fan on the actual site to see what sticks.

As for deepmeta, if it's actually working for balance totals then I'm in deep trouble because it's been stuck on zero since December and I can't remember going this long without a credit sale.

I don't remember a time when there were so many problems with the search results, at least for my files but judging from the rants on the Getty forums I'm not alone.
More of my files with broken or missing thumbnails, obviously relevant keywords being removed, increasing number of files unsearchable by any of their keywords.
Could this be down to under investment in server capacity/infrastructure/bandwith? Instead of investing more to cope with the growing library size Getty instead cuts costs through the unification process meaning the only way the system can cope is to ration the search results.

Many have complained about this in the Getty forums, but nothing is ever done.
It's very demoralising to search for one of your new uploads under best match only to find thousands of very simple and irrelevant (because of wrong keywords) images from a handful of serial spammers who are dominating and ruining the search results.
A few months back I complained about this to contributor relations only to be told that some of the names I put forward were already under investigation because other's had already reported them. And yet, several months on nothing has been done about it, the offending spam images are still up and running and the spammers are still uploading the same rubbish.
Remember some years back when some contributors were identified as inspectors by a special icon under their avatar? Well some of those inspectors, the same ones who used to give critique advice in the forums about rejected images being too simple, are now themselves spammers.
Something very dodgy going on.

The worst part is the loss of your own image linking when switching to classic view on an ADP,  giving your other same topic/style images a fighting chance to be seen and bought.
Now we're left with a joke of a similars carousel. Should be called Dissimilar Images.

Quote from: VB inc on December 03, 2015, 19:40


Lets say this is happening. Then others start to think ok, this person is doing it. I'm gonna start doing it in order to compete so we are both abusing. Then lots of others are abusing the system. Then so much junk gets in that any viable new files get so buried in the new rubbish uploads they never even have a chance to compete in the first place. I feel like thats whats been happening recently in shutterstock so i have stopped uploading here as i know my files are very commercial yet some of them don't get seen.

Exactly my thoughts.
I'm exclusive on IS, mostly icon sets, and this is exactly what is happening over there. I was thinking of giving up exclusivity and uploading to SS instead as everything over there is now dominated by a few spammers but if it's just as bad on SS then there's no point.
I guess it's a case of either join in the spamming or become a photo contributor instead.
Are there any sites left which puts quality over quantity?

BTW, there is a contributor on IS called crispyicon but that's not me. 

It doesn't matter how much they spend on marketing when the site is so badly run.
Confusing user interface, bugs that take months if ever to fix, badly thought out and implemented search, uncontrolled spamming, constantly changing pricing plans.
A potential new customer visiting the site and finding such a mess won't bother coming back.

Quote from: Karen on October 07, 2015, 07:04

Quote from: YadaYadaYada on October 07, 2015, 01:29
Now we have the answer to what will the new CEO do for us.

It's not her - Dawn Airey to the role of Chief Executive Officer, with effect from October 12, 2015.
http://press.gettyimages.com/getty-images-appoints-dawn-airey-as-chief-executive-officer/

Can it get any worse?

Of course it can. Eventually iStock will be charging us to host our ports and paying customers to use our images.

So where can we find out how much we're due from use of our images on Microsoft sites?
I bet any licensing deal between Getty and Microsoft will result in royalties so small you'd need a microscope to see them.

I thought the images could be incorporated into slide shows

http://www.cio.com/article/2907373/microsoft-getty-settle-copyright-dispute.html

or at least as far as Microsoft were concerned they could.

Quote from: mojaric on September 22, 2015, 15:34
I was doing a reverse search on Google of my images and i've found this page with a picture of mine

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/lifestyle/horoscope/foods-to-eat-and-avoid-according-to-your-zodiac-sign/ss-BBlDhcA#image=16

mine is the 16/25...now this picture for what i see on my graphs has never been sold nor via credit, sub or pp...it was sold in august...getty august sales still must be updated?

Are you sure it hasn't been used under Getty's free use scheme

http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/resources/embed#

in which case I'm not sure if you'll get any money at all for it.

Quote from: heywoody on September 20, 2015, 11:22
Does nobody else have a problem with folks pillorying someone who can't answer back while, at the same time, boasting that their own (invisible) material is so much better?

Don't have a problem at all because the real target of the rants is SS, not the contributor.
They must be well aware of these forums and are perfectly free to send a representative here to explain why they are allowing this amount of spamming to happen.

I've never known a slump like this in over five years. If this is the new norm then there's no point staying exclusive, I'll give it a couple months to see if things turn around.
With similar dismay over on the Shutterstock forums I wonder if all the buyers are going over to Fotolia/Adobe. Feels like the beginning of the end for the established sites.

^^^
I didn't say it was about keyword spamming, but that these are the kind image spamming search results that you get, lets say for certain topics, rather than keywords, if it will make you happier.
If you type in a couple of keywords and get 3 pages of very basic similar images from one contributor, how would you describe it?

Interesting thread, I said the same things about out of control spamming over on the iStock forums and posted these search results for certain keywords,

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19999283/iStock-spam.jpg

These are actual best match keyword searches, not taken from ports or from date ordered searches. Each batch can run several pages followed by another batch of spam from another contributor.
Being exclusive on iStock I don't usually look at what's going on at SS but having just had a quick browse I'd say standards have indeed dropped dramatically since I last looked a few months ago but I don't think the spamming is any where near as bad as on iStock, yet, at least for illustrations, haven't compared photos.

It seems the whole industry is shooting itself in the foot in the race to the bottom, which is not just about being cheapest but being able to boast about the largest collection. Any algorithm which is supposed to promote better images to the front of searches based on performance is fighting a losing battle, the cream can't rise to the top when it's buried under so much spam.

Quote from: tickstock on August 24, 2015, 00:46
That's not exactly what's happening.

That is exactly what is happening, at least to my files. If it's not happening to your files then good for you but I and many others have complained about this in the iStock forums and we just get stone walled, being told it doesn't happen and everything is rosy in the garden and working as it should.
I got so fed up with this a while back that I raised a support ticket and was told that the popularity of keywords can affect the display order, which is absolutely crazy because you can put your four least relevant keywords last and have them immediately sent to the front because they happen to be popular in the searches, ruining the similars and best match relevancy.
The whole keywording system is so fundamentally flawed it's as if iStock are deliberately trying to lose sales.

Getty is running out of money

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-25/carlyle-s-getty-images-said-to-run-tight-on-cash-as-profit-drops

so you can expect even more elaborate schemes to reduce our royalties and present them to us as great new opportunities.

Quote from: Noedelhap on August 11, 2015, 16:42
Oh wow, that's some horrible search. No wonder sales are down the drain.
I too notice lots of new contributors (signed up this July) with bucketloads of simple icons (created in 5 minutes) that indeed would never have been accepted 5 years ago. Worse thing is, these newbies are getting sales. It's feeding the beast all over again, quantity over quality. Or I must be doing something horribly wrong.

They're certainly not getting sales, at least not on these kind of designs.
I left the file details out to spare the contributors' blushes but if I had left them in all you would have seen is a whole load of zero downloads.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on August 01, 2015, 21:27

Quote from: Holmes on August 01, 2015, 20:43
...what do you think of the current state of IS/getty and future prospects. it appears the futzing has stabilized for the moment. (did i really say that?)

I think that they have one big problem they haven't figured out. 3 credits versus 1 credit for essentially the same content -search for orange slice, woman gym, new home and you can't see any reason that one image is three times the price of another.

And they still have the should-have-been-rejected content that came from off site and flooded the collection with rubbish - two examples (no surprise they haven't sold since 2013):

http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/close-up-of-orange-slice-25406435
http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/juicy-green-apple-25406521

There are smaller problems - the site regularly not working well and some really odd choices with the "new" interface versus the "classic"; inspection standards that I hear let just about anything in (when they used to have some of the most exacting standards, at least for technical excellence); no inexpensive sizes for blog or web use any more.

Why would you shop at iStock if you were a buyer? You have so many other choices that are a whole lot easier to deal with.

You think that's bad, have you seen what's happening with illustration search results? Type in certain key words and you get results like these:-

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19999283/iStock-spam.jpg

Page after page dominated by a growing minority of contributors. You can have 2 to 3 pages, 100 per page, taken up almost entirely by one contributor. The same simple symbol uploaded several times with very minor changes, or the same set of icons rearranged into different shapes, or ten minute doodles. None of these would have been accepted a few years back. And to add insult to injury keyword spamming means half these images shouldn't even turn up in the searches.
Why is iStock allowing this to happen? Is this part of some clever master plan to bring in more buyers? When a buyer is presented with such results are they going to think "wow, iStock have really upped their game", or are they more likely to think "what the f.... is going on here?" and then leave to search another site?
This type of spamming seems to have exploded since a few months ago and what's worrying is that it's not just newbies but veterans who used to be identified as inspectors and admins on their profile so I'm wondering if iStock is actually encouraging this for whatever reason.
It's pointless spending extra time creating anything decent if it's going to end up buried under all this stuff in best match.
When, a little over five years ago, I first thought of joining stock image sites I spent a lot of time researching and reading reviews and forum posts. Back then iStock was by far the most respected site, held in the highest esteem with the most stringent acceptance standards and quality control. It was with great pride when I was accepted and would boast to my artist peers who were always impressed, some having tried and failed several times to get accepted. Now I never mention iStock by name, it's more of an embarrassment, increasingly being referred to as laughingstock.

So I'm missing out on the party then, but the change/trend I'm referring to is quite recent so we'll have to see how sales are affected over the next few months.
I guess I'll have to drop exclusivity and join the spammers uploading thousands of quick doodles each month to get any exposure.
If you can't beat  'em join 'em.