The new asset detail pages now contain no descriptions at all. No more ability to link light boxes or anything either to your images. I realize this was coming for a while, but in this case what was the point of that whole recent campaign of trying to get all contributors to go back and write longer descriptions on all their thousands of old files in order to get better Google image search results? A big waste of everyone's time it seems in having everyone do that for nothing? What a big circle wank!

In addition, they are now offering huge closeup images of 1,235 pixels on the longest side. Pretty soon people wanting a small or medium sized download will simply download the closeup images only and for free and then run either Inpaint Pro (https://www.theinpaint.com/), Remove Watermark Pro (http://remove-watermark-pro.en.softonic.com/), or one of the myriad of other programs out there that work in a content-aware way to automatically remove unwanted watermarks from photos.

I'll bet we can expect to see our sales ratchet down another big percentage here very soon.

I don't quite see how it will really be possible to spin off any of the Getty "assets" to try and save Getty, which I just consider links now to the main Getty site anyway. With all this pulling in of other sites under the Getty umbrella that has been going on, and trying to in essence remove the iStock brand in a way and convert it to a Getty brand, what would a buyer really be buying? Maybe just a decent domain name at this point? I may be exaggerating a bit on the weak value of iStock as an asset, but all the Getty collections are incestuous now. iStock content is all over the Getty site and even more Getty content is on the iStock site. So perhaps a part of what keeps iStock buyers there for all we know is the access to the Getty site content at lower iStock prices and vice versa. If you unhook the sites then you stand to lose buyers at both sites because you no longer can offer the buyers in each of the stores the same access to all the same collective content. So from an investor standpoint why would you want to buy iStock knowing you will lose a lot of the content available through iStock as soon as it is decoupled from Getty? Had they not married the sites together then an investor could more easily asses the future potential of the site. Now, who knows if iStock is simply a link to funnel traffic into the Getty site or if the Getty site is a way to sell their buyers cheaper iStock content from an investors standpoint and maybe investors don't want to take the risk of buying into that unknown. Either way, even if revenue for contributors doesn't drop if they decouple the sites I can see it not looking attractive to an investor for the reasons I just mentioned. But the truth is iStock contributors would lose any sales they are making from Getty if the two site are decoupled which could be another considerable hit to contributor revenue for some iStock contributors who get a decent Getty bump every month.

It will soon stabilize .... on zero ;]

Good for those people who like round numbers I guess.

I think this thread sums it up:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/is-is-dead-now/

Quote from: B8 on October 30, 2014, 01:57

It all seems like an exercise in desperate futility as with almost all of their changes ever since they pressed the self destruct button the first time in September 2012.

+1

Except I think the first press of that self-destruct button was in September 2010, when they created the RC system, reneging on the "Grandfathering" contract many signed, and creating ill-will among many exclusives and indies alike. When the History of iStock's Rise and Fall is written, I believe that will mark the beginning of the end.

The reason I said September 2012 was when iStock pressed the self destruct button was because from that day forward I saw my monthly income and monthly downloads on iStock start to drop steadily every month to a level where my total monthly downloads now are less than 1/10th of what they were before.

Since then, no matter how many more new pictures I add, no matter how well I optimize my keywords, etc, my income just keeps declining.

I don't think any of the previous changes leading up to that date, including the creation of RC system, or any other changes they instituted before September 2010 had any measurable negative effect on my iStock income the same way that September 2012 changes did.

September 2012 was when they more of less crashed the site at the very start of the peak selling season month for stock photo sales. They introduced cash prices which scared many buyers away, they took away the zoom tool for a period of time while they made some poorly implemented site upgrades, they opened up the flood gates to unlimited amounts of uploads from contributors, they removed the quality inspection standards to where they pretty much accept anything now, and the site slowed down to almost unusable levels for nearly 3 months while they attempted to fix everything they broke on September 1. At the same time they started flooding the site with low quality/overpriced Getty content, and the Best Match search became almost unusable for nearly 3 months until around December 2012 once the 3-month peak selling season came to an end.

That was also the same time when they changed the system to only start registering views on pictures viewed by photo buyers logged into the site. After that basically all new pictures stopped registering enough views, which causes most new pictures uploaded now to more or less disappear into the abyss shortly after being uploaded. All of that was enough to drive away a fortitude of long standing quality iStock buyers. Now we are finally at the point of desperation, perhaps you can even call it capitulation where they are now trying last-ditch tactics like trying to drive people searching for free photos to the iStock site from Google Images.

But lastly, let's not forget they also did Self Destruct again this year in September 2014 when they changed the whole pricing system and basically cut everyone's income in half again by reducing the prices to almost 1/3 of what they were before on XXL and XXXL files and putting the prices up so high on small sized image to where web-use photo buyers no longer find the prices affordable. Not to mention the big pay cut earlier in 2014 we all took when they started offering all of our pictures at subscription prices as well.

Bottom line, this tells you that things are really breaking down and they don't have enough direct image buyer traffic when they are trying to turn people searching for free images on Google into photo buyers when they are not. If they think Google Image search is going to drive worthwhile buyer sales to the site then they seem to be grasping at straws.

People often use Google Images to locate stuff in lo-res that they can perhaps use on a blog for free. If they are a real stock photo buyer they normally go directly to a stock photo site and not to Google Images.

Even if they do click through from an iStock image in Google Images to the iStock site, they are bound to click off when they realize what it will cost them for a low-res image on iStock. 

It all seems like an exercise in desperate futility as with almost all of their changes ever since they pressed the self destruct button the first time in September 2012.

I don't understand why Shutterstock has a login captcha. It seems like a waste of time. Captcha's are usually used for example when signing up as a new user on a web site or posting a comment on a blog to ensure the user is not a bot. But when you have already put in your login details to login to a site that already confirms you are not a bot if you have a username and password already. How could one be a bot if they are a member of a site already? It makes no sense. Shutterstock should remove the captcha from their login dialogue box. No other stock site has this either.

I think the bigger question will be if exclusives will be permitted to take this content and sell it elsewhere once it has been deactivated. If not, then it could leave some people in a very bad situation who have already invested a lot of time and money to create these shots.

Dear IS,
I don't really care how many tweets you twitter, or new logos you roll out, or even how many matches you "freshen" up.  The fact remains that you have the stingiest royalty structure in the business and you will never get any more uploads from me until that changes.
Sincerely,
An X-Contributor

Spot on. Great post. The bigger problem though is the fact that in the past contributors were able to tolerate all the hindrances and road blocks iStock would throw up because people were still making good money and could partially turn another cheek to all the blasphemy. Back then the mantra of "Shoot, Upload, Repeat" would often help one overcome short term drops in income from continuing site crashes, huge charge-backs on fraud, price increases, royalty decreases, bad search results, a mish mash of collections, the failure to mirror images on Getty, etc.

Nowadays, shoot, upload, repeat only means dashed expectations and a waste of time and money to create quality imagery that never sells or even gets looked at before it just disappears into the iStock abyss. As you said, they can tweak the heck out of the site now and introduce all these great new features they are touting but they have already thrown out the baby with the bathwater. And with so many buyers having gone for good it doesn't matter what you do to try and win them back. As the old saying goes, "you can't polish a tu*d". 

I just saw this on the iStock site:



The line through the 4 just makes it still look like a 4 and the line through the 7 makes it look like a confirmed 7. They should have uses "X" instead to avoid any confusion.

Does anyone happen to know which is the largest and most successful food stock selling site? I am not asking just about micro or midstock, but the largest of all types of food stock sites in general? Cheers.

Hopefully iStock has a crash recovery site with a real time mirroring server running in another city at least 100 miles away from their main server site which is standard protocol for large companies who depend directly on the internet for their total revenue. This way, if their main servers were to be flooded or ever go down in Calgary, they could at least be up and running again from the crash recovery site in minutes with the flip of a switch.

But then again iStock can't even get their Connector program working correctly to mirror images from iStock onto the Getty servers in New York. They have been working on that for a year or two and it still doesn't work right, if even at all most of the time.

On second thought forget the possibility of an iStock crash recovery site operating elsewhere. Even if one exists, its probably never been tested, and if it has been tested they are still working the bugs out of it I am sure.

Perhaps we should all prepare ourselves for something like this: http://www.istockphoto.com/503