Dear Shutterstock Contributors,

My name is Scott Braut and I was recently appointed Shutterstock’s new Vice President, Content.

I’ve been with Shutterstock since 2009, and I managed the relaunches of our Bigstock and Shutterstock Footage brands. I’ve also worked for major content brands including the Associated Press, Scholastic, ABC News, and Corbis. Just as importantly, I’m also a photographer, and have a lifelong passion for photography and video.

I oversee our Content Operations team, which handles our review and submission processes, and our Contributor Relations team, which communicates with our contributors. I also work to source great new content from image and footage contributors, and partner with the Shutterstock tech team to improve the submit.shutterstock.com site.

Our teams are looking forward to strengthening our relationships with you, providing more educational materials for artists, and creating new ways to share your images and footage with our customers. We’ll be listening carefully to your feedback.

Thanks for being a part of the Shutterstock community. Keep creating great content and sending us suggestions.

Best regards,

Scott Braut
Shutterstock Vice President, Content

Don’t let a soon-to-expire exclusivity agreement with another stock image agency hold you back from uploading images or footage clips to Shutterstock. Shutterstock’s “Opt Out” feature lets you upload your images or footage clips whenever it’s most convenient for you, and still respect your exclusivity obligations to other agencies. Put your exclusive images or footage clips on hold until your exclusivity contract runs out, at which point you’re free to distribute your content on Shutterstock without missing a day of sales.

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Shutterstock footage is growing and so is the demand for stock footage content! That’s why we’re looking for new talented artists to join our team of footage contributors. We’re looking for talented fresh faces as well as experienced videographers to join that team and we want to make it easier than ever to do so.

Shutterstock footage can offer several benefits:

• Access to a large pool of buyers.
• Competitive royalties for your accepted submissions.
• A reputation for fairness and transparency with our contributors.
• Powerful marketing tools that will help you sell your submissions.
• Up to $15 per sold clip.

If you are already a successful image contributor for Shutterstock, we invite you to give footage a try. You can earn larger average payouts and you’ll be part of a young but growing business. With so many high-quality DSLR cameras available these days, it would be easier for many photographers to seamlessly shift from photographing stills to recording video and you can find some tips and tricks on how to do so by reading this recent Shutterbuzz post.

On the other hand, if you are an existing videographer with a large collection of clips that you’re ready to upload for review, we want to simplify that process for you. If you plan to upload 500 or more clips, email us at 500clips@shutterstock.com and let us know how many clips you have and what type of content it is (business, lifestyle, animation, etc.). If you have a link to your work online, please provide it.  Based on the nature of your request, we may be able to provide some submission assistance.

Please note that all submissions will still be held to our video review submission guidelines. We look forward to reviewing your creative clips.

Sort. Share. Promote.

We’re happy to introduce a new tool for Shutterstock contributors that includes some of your most-requested features. It’s called the Catalog Manager, and it makes it easier to organize, track, and share your Shutterstock portfolio. It’s easy:

• Sort your images into sets.
• Share sets with anyone—and earn referral fees from new customers.
• Track your statistics from each of your sets.

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We’re pleased to tell you about a new single-image product we created in response to customer demand, that we think will help Shutterstock contributors earn more money. We are currently testing this product.

Here’s what you need to know:
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If you’re a footage producer or shooter, you probably know that a clip should be properly lit, composed, and in focus. When it comes to sales of your clips, these are all important.

But do you also know how to capture scenes that customers will be most likely to choose? Many of our popular clips share some things in common that generally appeal to customers. Here are some tips to help you differentiate your footage clips and achieve higher sales. We link to several examples in this post. Use them for inspiration, but be creative and do not copy them.
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© Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock

Shutterstock serves customers all over the world, and we need creative images with global appeal. We have a demand for stock images that show text—such as signs and forms—in all major languages.

This poses a challenge, since we can only approve images containing text if we know what the words say.

Recently, we instructed our reviewers to begin approving more images with international text, as long as the contributor has included a note explaining all non-English text depicted in an image.

What this means for you:

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Today we’re introducing a tool to help our contributors discover keywords with high customer demand.

Our new Keyword Trends tool shows you what customers search for on Shutterstock, and how some words rise and fall with the seasons. You can enter up to five words and see a graph of the words’ popularity over time.

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When we ask our customers what they want from Shutterstock, they say they want better tools to find the right images. Challenge accepted!

This week we’re phasing in a new feature of Shutterstock’s search engine. We’re introducing a new sort order called Relevant.

This search has only one goal, to help customers find the most accurate images based on your keywords. And it gets smarter every day!

When customers perform searches, they will see four buttons to filter their search results: New, Popular, Relevant and Random.

Here are some common questions and answers about how the new sort order will affect contributors.
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To our contributors,

We plan to conduct maintenance on the Shutterstock uploading servers on Thursday, June 16 between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. EDT (17 June 00:00 to 02:00 GMT).

If you try to upload files to Shutterstock during that time and encounter an error, please wait a short time and try your upload again.

Thank you for your patience while we do this necessary work.

— Your Shutterstock Team