I don’t normally go in search of news but when I heard about Bigstock and Shutterstock’s new “Bridge to Bigstock” initiative, I took some of my own and went and found answers to the questions I’m wondering (and hoped you would be wondering them too!)

The program itself is very straightforward:

Beginning this week, we are inviting select Shutterstock contributors to automatically copy all of their approved Shutterstock images—including current and future images—to Bigstock as well.

The Shutterstock and Bigstock collections will remain separate. We have no plans to mirror their full libraries.

Participation in the Bridge to Bigstock is by invitation only. We are inviting Shutterstock contributors with high performing portfolios. They will receive an e-mail giving them the choice to opt in to the program.

For contributors who participate, all of their images that are accepted by Shutterstock will now automatically be accepted by and uploaded to Bigstock. The artists will earn payouts at standard Bigstock rates. For participants who already upload to both sites, we will filter for duplicates as we move Shutterstock images to Bigstock.

Of course I wanted to know a few things so I went and got some answers from Bigstock.  I hope these questions address some of yours as well.

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1) Are the invites (and future invites) going to be mostly people who don’t have their collection already on both sites?

Invited contributors may have some, most, or none of their images at Bigstock and there are different benefits for each group. Those contributors either have high-performing portfolios, high submission volume, or content that fills specific needs at Bigstock. Most often, invited contributors have a combination of the above.

2) What are the realistic timelines for an “above average” but not Yuri-like submitter to get moved over?

Once invited, it will take approximately 48 hours to a week for a contributor’s existing portfolio to be moved over, based on collection size, queue size, processing time, etc. The Bridge queue is separate from the normal upload queue and will not affect it.

3) Do you have an actual # of invitees? It would help people to know “50 people” are going (ie. Yuri, Andres, Bobby, not me) or if you say “we’re starting with 300″ at least some of the moderate levels have a chance someday or if it’s really not that open.

There is no exact line of participation or number of invites. The program is initially targeted at a
relatively small number of contributors with the highest sales and submission volume, who would
therefore benefit the most from a single submission process and some submission support. We may also approach a few contributors with high-performing content that fills a specific content gap or need at Bigstock.

4) The people this affects the most are likely never going to get into the program. It seems like big news but it’s really not, right? Let’s say you have 250 images on SS and never submitted anywhere else. Getting those 250 to Bigstock would improve your earnings by say 20%+. For someone like me, my collection is almost completely mirrored already anyways. Moving over would increase me maybe 1%. It would seem to me that in both SS’s world and the contribs, those smaller contributors who aren’t mirrored would make both parties the most money long term. Any idea  how that will be handled?

Low-volume contributors (such as those with a few hundred images) can always upload their images through the normal submission path, and we made a number of batch submission improvements at both sites last year. This program will most benefit contributors with large, high-performing collections who would have a harder time moving their images manually.

Some of Bigstock’s batch submission tools are covered here: http://www.bigstockphoto.com/blog/theupload/2010/03/new-uploading-process/

5) Are there plans to ever go the other way? Bridge from BS back to SS? If not, what would be the main reasons against it? BSP reviews have sometimes been drastically different than SS for me and many contributors. A BSP bridge back to SS would make *more* sense for my sales to increase.

Since Shutterstock has a substantially larger collection than Bigstock (almost 14 million images at this time), there are no current plans to offer a submission process to Shutterstock via Bigstock. The goal of the Bridge program isn’t to duplicate the collections. The goal is to provide Bigstock’s growing customer base with a wider variety of suitable choices in content, based on their needs.

As of 2010, Shutterstock and Bigstock have begun integrating their content review teams and we’ve adopted shared review standards and training. If you’ve experienced differences in the past, those should go down with time.

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I want to thank Bigstock for taking the time to answer my most pressing questions about the Bridge to Bigstock program!  If you have questions you can leave them in the comments and I’ll try to get them answered or maybe a representative will answer them for us.

* See the full press release on Bridge to Bigstock.