Last year we embarked on a challenging journey: to create a new model and marketplace helping creators reclaim control, transparency, and revenue over their work. From day one, we received a wave of enthusiastic support, and after months of building our strategy with our all-star team of advisors, we’re thrilled to announce our new roadmap for content review and onboarding photographers.
Content review — the challenge
Launching our marketplace opens up a range of challenges related to content and curation scalability, and our new strategy sparks a very optimistic path. There’s a lot of information here, but bear with us — when you get through this update you’ll share our sense of resolve.
For more than a decade, stock photography agencies have built their collections, often based on quantity over quality, many exceeding hundreds of millions of images.
Their collections are now so big, they have become difficult for customers to navigate, and photographers find their content buried among lackluster, outdated images.
This presents a challenge and opportunity for Wemark. How can we develop a leaner, more agile model for reviewing content — one that will allow us to build a substantial, diverse collection without sacrificing quality?
When we opened submissions for photographers earlier this year, we were surprised by the high volume and steady stream of outstanding work. It’s our mission to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to be considered for Wemark’s marketplace, but we’ve learned that we need to find efficient ways to prioritize the highest quality creators. In our search for the perfect review and onboarding process, we realized that many of the most experienced photographers have been waiting to join the platform alongside hobbyist photographers who have little industry experience, and have never licensed an image on traditional platforms.
Along with smaller challenges like filtering relevant keywords for every image and validating model and property releases — we decided that it was important to develop an entirely new content onboarding strategy from the ground up.
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Our objectives for the new strategy
Hit the ground running with the best possible content by giving priority to experienced photographers.
Accelerate the process of submitting large collections and getting them reviewed.
Allow anyone to participate while slashing the time it takes our editors to review each of the images.
Onboard 10X content, without sacrificing our quality standards
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Behold: Wemark’s new strategy
To shift our initial focus to experienced photographers, we’re implementing a few important changes to the onboarding process. We’re launching two different tracks for photographers: The Experienced Track, and The Standard Track.
- The Experienced Track
This is for photographers who have extensive experience licensing their images and have likely had their work widely published in a variety of marketing and advertising campaigns. This might sound obvious, but they come to us with large portfolios that are properly keyworded and ready to go. They’re often curated into specific client and category-focused collections targeted to what will sell best. It’s a priority for us to single out these photographers and give them the tools and flexibility they need to use Wemark as one of the main hubs for licensing their work.
We recognize their talents and expertise and it’s important for us to keep their content at the top of the queue. Photographers must apply to this track specifically or get invited by one of Wemark’s editors.
Photographers on the Experienced Track will enjoy the following perks:
Fully-automated content upload by FTP, which will allow them to upload their entire portfolios at ease, and add new content instantly with no volume limitations.
Full access to submit content that requires model/property releases.
Prioritized image reviews.
We’re starting with experienced photographers who are already part of our platform but have been waiting patiently and will continue to bring in new talent, beginning today.
Along with our existing partnerships with large-scale content producers, galleries and agencies, our experienced track will help give us an accelerated leg up on traditional platforms that control today’s stock image industry.
- The Standard Track
Our goal isn’t to create two classes of photographers, but to establish one of the strongest collections of stock content and help photographers of all levels improve and get to a point where they can be making professional work. With that in mind, we’ve established the Standard Track. Think of it as a gateway to the next tier, with a few parameters in place to keep submissions efficient, review time low, and — most importantly — quality on the up and up.
Here’s how it works:
New photographers will have a limit of up to 150 pending-approval images. As time progresses review priority will be given to photographers with a higher rate of acceptance. Please note: if you already submitted more than 150 images, all of them will be reviewed regularly. Once the number of pending images for your account will get below 150, you’ll be able to upload additional images.
For the time being, Standard Track photographers will not be allowed to submit content that requires model or property releases to be licensed commercially. This is a temporary restriction, but an important one, as we build our review team. If you have commercial content with appropriate model and property releases and think your work is up to snuff, we encourage you to apply to the Experienced Track!
New photographers will now be required to complete an initial step before getting their profile approved. At first signup, photographers will be asked to upload exactly 10 images for review. If 6 or more of their images are approved — they’ll automatically be added to the marketplace as part of the Standard Track.
These changes will take effect starting next week.
Timeline:
The first group of photographers has already received an invitation to join the Experienced Track. We expect their first images to hit the marketplace throughout the next two weeks.
Additionally, we have reviewed the majority of IDs that have been submitted so far.
As we kick off our new strategy and apply the many updates, we expect the review process for all images to speed-up dramatically. We recently extended our review team and brought more people to work on this.
Our reviewers are currently going over submitted portfolios and sending invites to photographers who fit the Experienced Track. If you want to accelerate this, you’re welcome to fill the application form and let us know you already created your Wemark account.
This announcement marks the completion of months of planning and research to determine the best content review strategy.
We’re happy with the results and excited to share these details and get feedback from our supportive community. If you have any suggestions on how we can make things better, please send us an email or join the discussion at our Telegram community. We’d love to hear what you have to say!
Thanks again for your patience! As we kick our new strategy into high gear, we’re confident the wait was worth it.
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