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Contributor News — April 23, 2012
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 this site to contributors, to customers and to iStock HQ. We wanted to explain in more detail what’s happening in Best Match to remove some of the mystery behind what you’re seeing and commenting on.
You can read more about the current direction of Best Match in the new HQ Update post here.
Some of the questions about Best Match come in the form of support tickets to Contributor Relations. Please remember that Contributor Relations isn't able to provide insight into how Best Match works, and in order to best manage resources, support tickets on Best Match related topics may not be responded to.
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 won't 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.
