MicrostockGroup

I took a quick peek - is 20 pounds the standard price for anything - all sizes? What is your minimum file size? 300 dpi is sort of meaningless w/o some other dimensions listed.

Having seen many new sites come and go many here (myself included) are somewhat jaded about new sites and want some assurances that we won't be spending a lot of effort only to see the site fold or worse morph into something unacceptable like a free image site.

In any case, good luck - experience suggests you will need it or some very deep pockets.

Another babe in the woods. I'll check back in a couple of years.

There is this company called iStockphoto that did that with vectors and it seemed to have been working pretty well. 

As others said, there are a few little issues. I would like to know the size and details of a file before I buy it. That and I noticed that the thumbnails have icons for both raster and vector, but it looked like they were all photos.

It looks like a decent start though. Just needs to be polished a bit more. Best of luck!

I can't speak from the agencies' perspective because I have no idea what their individual costs are, but from my perspective, I don't think what most agencies do for us is worth much more than 50% of the revenue. They do bring in a lot of customers, but when you start carving up those profits too thin, all those bulk sales are negated pretty quickly. 50% seems to be around the sweet spot, although I wouldn't mind getting a bill for what my share of what the advertising, reviewing and storage costs actually are. Running my own site has really opened my eyes to how little money most of these agencies actually deserve. People forget that just by uploading an image they are automatically becoming a searchable Google entry. All that tagging is pretty search engine friendly. It's basically free advertising for a variety of keywords. So if you want to see an agency produce more sales then upload more to it. Grow its catalog and search engine indexed content.

Good question. I know 80/20 was a common Illustrator/Agent split (I haven't talked to an agent in a while though), but you also had to pay half of book advertising. So, I definitely think it's a conversation worth having about what you should give or how you should pay back your agent for the work they do. Especially if you're a known commodity like yourself (maybe even a lesser commodity like me too). At what point are you more popular than the agency itself? How many loyal buyers do you have vs buyers loyal to just the agency?

The 'business' section shows farm animals. I know it's still currently a test site, but that can be tested by the owner before going public with it. It's a nice looking site, but at this stage it seems evident that there isn't so much knowledge of the stock industry. Most guys here are contributors, but their knowledge is quite in-depth, I think often more than many of those who work for the agencies.

The images on the site at the moment generally aren't as good as present day microstock images and if you want microstock images on your site, why would a buyer pay 20 quid for it when they can buy microstock. There will always be people who happen to come across your site and not know about ss, dt etc, but most serious buyers are pretty savvy these days.

Hello one and all.

Thank you all for your comments, some very valid and thought provoking points there that I will take back to the team. I wasn't expecting a response at all, so I do appreciate the time you have taken to post. All I can say at this point is watch this space as we continue to grow and develop. Better to try and fail than not try at all I think! We are still really in the building up stages of the project and hence looking for contributors, people willing to take a chance to start with, even with a few images to get established. 

Just to clarify if I may. This isn't just a money making scheme from our point of view. The team behind TPP are professional creatives, owners of other businesses, (torchbox.com)(onthelevel.co), and part of a wider network, who are the very real, current, customers to many of these other providers, and simply put we would all be using TPP in terms of product and process. Quick and simple basically put. We are used to experiencing the frustrations of many providers and this was the reason for setting up this project. The photographers we have consulted with aren't microstock specialists as such I guess, but nevertheless their input has been very valuable in the early stages. Many of them are pro or semi pro and viewed this as another opportunity to add a smaller revenue stream to their full time commissions. Currently on board are http://www.oacphotography.com/, http://www.melaniejamesphotography.com/, and similar.

Please do keep comments coming. We want this to be a good resource for both contributors and customers alike and we can only improve and develop into something with carefully considered feedback for us to build on. So simply put, my question to you all is what would you like to see on the PIcture Pod as we go forwards? What would encourage you to contribute? (I can see a couple of points already on the thread) We are flexible and I'm looking forward to hearing your specific thoughts.

Many thanks again.

Tim

"Just to clarify if I may. This isn't just a money making scheme from our point of view."

So it's -also- a money making scheme?  Seriously you find it easier to create an agency from scratch with all it's legal implications including pursuing license violations and having a customer relations staff plus doing the marketing needed, than putting up with a couple of issues at existing sites that already have huge collections?