The VideoHive stock footage review queue has been steadily growing over the last year as more and more authors upload content. This is clearly an exciting category with a ton of growth both in authors and submissions.
The problem is we can’t sustainably keep up. Despite hiring new reviewers we’ve got an ever-growing backlog of submissions and authors currently have to wait 155 days before a first review is completed. Obviously, this is not the kind of experience we’d hope that our community has in submitting content.
So, we’re going to try something different.
To begin, we’re going to more strictly apply our existing content requirements. Back when the Stock Footage category was spinning up, we allowed for more leniency in the way we applied our requirements. Now that the library has a large number of files available, and a massive backlog of files to be reviewed, we’ve decided to tighten the reigns and only accept files that are completely in-line with our current standards.
The other big change we’re making is to put more emphasis on your approval ratio. As our reviewers evaluate submissions they will be keeping track of the total number of approved submissions and the total number of rejected submissions. If an author’s approval ratio remains at our threshold or above, we’ll continue to review their items. If however, the approval ratio falls below our threshold, we’ll reject the rest of their queued submissions.
Here’s an example of how this plays out:
An author has 1000 items in the review queue. Our team will review a sample of 100 items and approves 80 items (an approval ratio of 80%), our team then continues reviewing the rest of the items.
Our team reviews another author with 1000 items in the queue and after 100 randomly-selected items are reviewed, only 40 are approved (an approval ratio of 40%). The approved items are available on VideoHive but the rest of the items (960) are rejected.
Note: These numbers are just for this example, the actual approval ratio threshold and evaluation point may vary based upon an author’s history and the number of items submitted for review.
This is a big change to the “one item one review” policy we’ve had. It won’t solve all of our problems and it will likely create some new ones, but the current system is broken and it’s time for us to take action - we know we must reduce the queue, so authors aren’t waiting months on end for their items to be reviewed.
We also have to find a way to ensure fresh content is being added to Market on a regular basis, while reducing the amount of review effort spent on items that don’t meet our guidelines.
We’re not yet sure if this is an approach we’ll adopt for all submissions going forward. As we work through the existing queue in this way, we’ll be paying close attention to the data and feedback from our reviewers and authors. We’ll be constantly looking for opportunities to improve the process and will continue to update you here as things evolve.
What happens to ‘batch’ rejected items?
We encourage you to go through any rejected submissions, pick out items you believe meet our content requirements and re-submit those only.
For future submissions, it’s important to self-curate first.
Until now, many authors have submitted everything, without worrying about the content requirements, expecting that some of their items will likely get through even if many items do not. This approach won’t work going forward.
Even if we don’t continue sampling in this way, overall adherence to content requirements and approval ratios are likely going to play an increasingly important role in future review decisions. For example, we’re currently looking at ways to limit submissions from authors who are consistently submitting items that don’t meet our content requirements, including hard rejecting items that have been soft-rejected multiple times.
From today, submitting and reviewing becomes a shared responsibility for both Envato and authors. It’s really important that authors be selective, take onboard the feedback provided by our reviewers and ensure they only upload content that meets our requirements to avoid unnecessary rejections.
Upload your best and leave the rest.
Next steps
Beginning next week, we’ll start conducting these sample reviews and sending results to authors. Remember, this is new for us as well so expect there to be some tweaking of the process over time.
We’ll be monitoring this thread for the next week and providing answers in batches to questions that haven’t been covered here. Please remember to follow our community guidelines when you post.
Thanks and happy uploading!
