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they have become difficult for customers to navigate, and photographers find their content buried among lackluster, outdated images.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.