MicrostockGroup

Now tell me, is the age of FREE IMAGES finally arrived?

From Crestock:


Introducing the Crestock WordPress Plugin
Hi Steven,

We're incredibly excited to let you know that we're only one week away from launching our biggest, most powerful marketing initiative to date, and this is a special invite for you to join and to receive an additional 5% commission on all credits purchases.

If you've been around at Crestock for a while, you know that we've been running some hugely popular Photoshop design contests every year around summer time. The idea has been to provide one of the most dominant demographics among potential buyers, the designers, a chance to get to know Crestock – and to actually try the products.

These contests have been shaped as viral campaigns and have, without failure, spread like wildfire in the design community; through blogs and forums, through social media and have even been featured on the Apple and MTVs websites.

Throughout the years, these contests have generated incredible exposure, millions of visitors and tens of thousands of paying customers. However, though viral and social marketing is one of the things we're exceptionally good at (we've actually won awards for them), we've realized that all these successful campaigns, by nature of a contest, had one big flaw – they all had an end date.


In our opinion, the Ultimate Campaign has the following treats:

No end date
Virtually unlimited scalability
Massive distribution to users
Massive exposure of individual portfolios
Massive direct and indirect sales
So what's in it for you?
The brilliance of the new WordPress plugin is that it will just keep rolling and getting more and more users as time goes by, and the whole point of the WordPress plugin is to promote each individual portfolio on a scale never seen before in the business of microstock.

I know some of you will scream bloody murder in a minute, but please stay with me on this one, because it's exceptionally important that you appreciate the enormous reach and impact of this campaign; After all, there's a reason why big names such as Yuri Arcurs, Ron Chapple (iofoto), Kirsty Pargeter, Lev Dolgachov and Andres Rodriguez (only to name a few) has already signed up for it.


This WordPress plugin will allow bloggers access to search for, and add, any Crestock image to their blog - free of charge.

There – I said it. The "F" word. Free.

But we're not going to just give away your art for free. That would be a spectacularly bad business plan doomed to fail.

For Crestock as a corporation, selling your images is what's making us the money. Incidentally this also ties in with your bottom line, so to be brutally honest, we both have at least one common interest, and that is to make you as much money as possible.

But some times you have to give some in order to get a lot in return, so please stay with me for a bit longer, and it'll all become clear:

The Freemium Business Model
The freemium business model was articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson (co-founder of Union Square Ventures, with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as Twitter, del.icio.us and FeedBurner) on 23 March 2006:

"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

What we'll give away are images with a maximum resolution of 400px width – perfect for blogs, but totally useless for anything else.


Here's how it works, and here's how you'll make money:
For starters, WordPress is the most popular blog platform on the planet, with over 3 million downloads of their latest release alone, and over 3.1 million active blogs on their own site.

Secondly, the Top 10 Plugins on WordPress has been downloaded a total of 4.42 million times – that's an average of 740,000 times for each plugin in the Top 6.

When a blogger use your images, the WordPress plugin will insert a clearly watermarked image as well as a caption with links embedded pointing to the corresponding image page on Crestock.

This is extremely important.

At this point, the different search engines accounts for roughly 40% of the total traffic on Crestock. It's so high because we've been very focused on what's called Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), which is the process of improving web sites so that it ranks higher in search engines for targeted keywords.

Incoming links to a web site is one of the most important ranking criteria in any search algorithm, and simply put, you can think of a link as a vote for another website, with the link text as a description of the website you're linking to.

If you link to Crestock with the link text "Crestock stock photos" , you're telling the search engines you vote for this site, and the site is about stock photos. This will make us rank better for that phrase.

The WordPress plugin solves one of our biggest challenges SEO wise: building deep links with highly relevant link text to each of your images: The deep links to each of your images will give them a great boost in the search engine rankings, and it will naturally also drive traffic directly into the page with your image on it - Where people can buy it.

So let's summarize:
Massive distribution to millions of bloggers
Plugin will actively promote paid, high resolution versions of your images
Images will be clearly watermarked with your name and copyright sign - ©

The automatically embedded image caption will contain a link to the image page:
Links will rank your images higher in Google
Links will drive click-though visitors directly to your images
But Wait – There's More!
(And it's not just rubbish being thrown at you)

Aside from the incredible boost in highly converting search engine traffic and referral traffic the links will provide you, we're also using the actual plugin interface to offer the bloggers to upgrade to a paid service. This is the Premium content.

Since we have control of the content we deliver in the plugin search interface, we'll use tracking software to monitor and calculate which offers and which approaches generates the highest possible revenue in order to exploit the potential that lies in the WordPress plugin to the fullest.

Finally, we're offering an additional 5% commission on every single credit sale you make when you join the WordPress project.

To put the awesome power of the WordPress plugin to work for you, simply activate below:

What we'll give away are images with a maximum resolution of 400px width – perfect for blogs, but totally useless for anything else.

Is this a typo?

To paying Customers and the artist gets commission, what is free in that?

The problem with providing images for blogs is not that bloggers are so tight and will not pay-per-download, the problem is the credit packages, subscriptions and delivery method.

Modify the plug-in with, 'non site registration', PayPal IPN, limited use licence, and browser downloads without visiting the website, and you will get good paying customers $1-$4 a pop, and all the other SEO benefits.




David  

Your are right, micropayment agencies seem to have forgotten about micropayment.

The way I see it, is that Crestock is asking permission to turn the blog of people who are using this plugin into a free advertising portal for them. As the difference between $0,25 per download and nothing, squat, zilch is physically not that big (but mathematically, infinite) I might as well have my site scream "CRESTOCK", let every other blog use my images for free, allowing their site to scream the same message, and get a handful of $0,25 sub-sales a month more due to the "boost in traffic", If I'm lucky.

Hmmm. Think I'll pass. As Crestock seems incapable of paying within a reasonable time, I don't hold my breath waiting to see if anything good comes out of this.

Can only agree with the above suggestions, I see such a tool working.

"When a blogger use your images, the WordPress plugin will insert a clearly watermarked image as well as a caption with links embedded pointing to the corresponding image page on Crestock."
I am also a blogger and I don't like the idea of using a watermarked image... It's different but I prefer to use something similar to Microstock Photo Plugin for Wordpress http://www.mystockphoto.org/microstock-fotolia-photo-wordpress-plugin/ : I can buy a blog size photo and use it where I want on the blog and without watermark (with caption with credit to the photographer).
Cheers,
          roberto

If I have understood this correctly, the free images have a watermark.  If that is correct, I might be interested but crestock need to do more to get me uploading there again.  The 5% increase is for credit sales, I don't get enough of them, I would prefer to see the subs commission raised from 25 cents.  Until they do that, I would prefer buyers go to the sites that pay me more.

Enlightenment is on its way:

1. Images are watermarked - the same way like all of our images are watermarked at every agency we sell our images.
   These watermarked images are free to anyone anyways. What's the big fuzz?

2. Copyright references are attached to the image and are linked to Crestock making it easy to the buyer to get a high-res version. BTW the blogger of course might not want a high-res version of your image but the point is to address READERS of the blog who might have a need for the posted images...

3. I've never heard that a commission increase is a problem. In any given job people would be happy to get a raise.

4. This is a new marketing strategy which COULD reach a lot of potential buyers. If you never try, you'll never know.

5. If you complain that 5% increase is only worth for the big guys (although they still "only" get 5% more which is the same %5 like you would get...) then work your shutter finger and become a "big guy" so you can profit from this as well...

I don't work for Crestock. I'm not making a killing at Crestock. I do sell some images there on a regular basis and I think that since this is a new strategy it should be tried out. If this had been already tested out by others and failed I would understand the widespread rejection of that idea but hey not everyone has to like it.

I just don't understand why people are happy with 25 cents for subs.  This is holding back the other subs sites, why should they raise our commissions if we put up with just 25 cents from crestock?  Istock reduced photos.com commissions for non-exclusives from 30 cents to 25 cents and I wont opt in to that either.  PPD prices have gone up a lot and cheap subs will hold them back too.  More buyers will switch to subs if the difference in price increases.  Crestock are raising our commission on PPD sales but most of my sales there will still make me just 25 cents.  Sorry, that doesn't interest me at all.

Hello Leaf,

its already here, http://www.microstockplugin.com.
Seamless search and purchase of images through Wordpress, add copyright notice automaticaly, enable the Affiliate program and get automatic backlinks with your Affiliate ID on every purchased pictures,  automatic SEO optimization with your own keywords, available in 4 languages and many many more.

You can view a short in-use video here http://www.screencast.com/t/xFOE4yAM0

PS: No watermarks of course!

Points you are missing:
I do not want to pay for ten credits if I need just two Images to complete a post, 'non site registration' and if I go to a microstock website spend 1 credit I purchased for $1 or £1 I can use it in my blog without the link back to artist or the website I purchased it from if I am promoting a service I want special rates, I blog and would not use it as it needs to plug in to blog editing tools like Live Writer and Microsoft Word where I compose and publist to my blogs, I never blog via the website.

David 

On another thread, I read we can not opt out of this WP deal, is it true?

I agree - how is this not just using our images for FREE to improve its SEO and traffic?

The 5% boost in commission would be handy, but I suspect for most its 5% of nothing. 5% boost on IStock and I'd sign up now.

Obviously the big contributors listed have had an opportunity to discuss this arrangement in advance, or their name wouldn't appear on the press release - this doesn't mean what's good for them is good for smaller contributors, or that they're even getting the same deal as us. Maybe someone at Crestock can clarify?

Re the other plugin: I don't use wordpress so can't really comment on how useful it will be to those that do, but it looks like a way of making it easier to use images that we get paid for. Can't argue with that!