The beloved National Geographic Your Shot website and community is about to come to an end. When visiting the Your Shot website, users are met with a pop-up message saying that the site will be “discontinued” on October 31st, 2019. But not all is lost. NatGeo will be moving “all engagements, assignments, and promotion of photos” to the official Your Shot Instagram.
NatGeo Your Shot Community & Website: Is This Goodbye?
The recent announcement from NatGeo came as a surprise to many. In fact, many speculate that the decision to shut down Your Shot is a consequence of their recent acquisition by Disney. In a recent report by Variety, Disney plans to lay off up to 80 employees from the popular photography magazine in order to “more fully combine the companies it purchased with its existing business.” The layoffs are said to involve NatGeo’s publishing, live-event, and travel operations.
Existing users have been informed that the Your Shot community will be shutting down, but the plan is to move everything over to an official @natgeoyourshot Instagram account.
Check out the full message in its entirety below:
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What the message fails to provide are key details on how the entire process will work. Will there still be expert feedback? How will we even submit? Does this mark the end of Your Shot assignments? Though, one thing that the message does convey clearly is NatGeo’s right to use old Your Shot images as promotional materials. Needless to say, the message has rubbed some users the wrong way.
Still, the response has been a mixed bag. “Instead of getting [photographers’] work showcased on a proper website at decent resolutions, all of the work is going to be shoved into a platform that natively wants square photos,” one Reddit user said in response to the announcement. But there are others in favor of the move. “132 likes vs 22,000 likes? I’ll take it,” said another user.
One group of Your Shot users have even started a petition “respectfully requesting” that Disney “reconsider this decision and maintain National Geographic’s Your Shot community, thus retaining the loyalty of its members to the National Geographic brand.”
Will the petition change Disney’s mind? We don’t know. What we do know is that on October 31st, the Your Shot website is scheduled to go offline for good. If users have submitted images to Your Shot, NatGeo is going to allow them to download those uploaded photos in the coming weeks.
Check out the Your Shot website or the Your Shot Instagram to learn more. And are photographers making this out to be a bigger issue than it needs to be? Let us know down in the comments below.