Fine Art America - sales increasing nicely since September

[oxman]

We can discuss all the shortcomings of FAA until we're blue, and it's just a waste of time.  All the problems with search have been brought up on the FAA forum many times and the response is always "it's not going to change".

McDunn apparently has no interest in updating the site, it's just a cash cow.  Obviously his attention is elsewhere (a week ago  there was a joyous announcement of the McDunns' new baby) and he's the only technical guy behind the site - it's a one man show.

It is what it is. It works, sort of - I make an occasional sale - but it's frustrating because it could be so much better. I don't mean to beat up on Sean McDunn, he's done an amazing thing with FAA.  It's just a shame we've all ended up depending on a company that doesn't have the motivation to move forward.  All we can do is hope for some meaningful competition to emerge.

Good to know. In mid-may I ULed 262 photos. No sales. I have a series of a woman playing tennis. So I searched "woman, tennis". None of my images in there. AND what did show up was mostly NOT woman playing tennis. Blown away. FAA is a joke.

I sent an email to support about it today. If not hear back with a great explanation, all images are coming down on friday...

[ShadySue]

They'll no doubt say you should be doing your own promotion.

In any case, why not leave the images there, at least until your next $30 is due?

[oxman]

They'll no doubt say you should be doing your own promotion.

In any case, why not leave the images there, at least until your next $30 is due?

true. been reading the forums there about that. not really what i had in mind when submitting. don't like having large unwatermarked images available... and not even showing up in search. the more i read on the forums the more i dislike FAA. it may work well for mike savvad and a few others but just seems an ineffective way to sell work now that it is so loaded with junk images and no site promotion.

[ShadySue]

You can watermark your images - though depending on the pic, it might not show up that well, or be easily removed. (You can bulk add the watermark via default settings 'behind the scenes.)
Of course, you've got to do what you think best.

Wait a minute - did you say you've uploaded 262 pics around six weeks ago and you're disappointed you've had no sales? I think you had inflated expectations. It's not SS.

FWIW, I persuaded a friend to join several months ago, and he's been mentioning the 'wasted $30' for a while, until this very week he got a big print sale netting him $170. (Ha, if someone had bought one of my images at that size, I'd have made $55, and I think that's a huge price by UK standards, not to mention matting, framing and shipping.)

[oxman]

You can watermark your images - though depending on the pic, it might not show up that well, or be easily removed. (You can bulk add the watermark via default settings 'behind the scenes.)
Of course, you've got to do what you think best.

Wait a minute - did you say you've uploaded 262 pics around six weeks ago and you're disappointed you've had no sales? I think you had inflated expectations. It's not SS.

FWIW, I persuaded a friend to join several months ago, and he's been mentioning the 'wasted $30' for a while, until this very week he got a big print sale netting him $170. (Ha, if someone had bought one of my images at that size, I'd have made $55, and I think that's a huge price by UK standards, not to mention matting, framing and shipping.)

Nope I am not expecting sales now... just mentioned in passing
my concern is the search issues... you may have talked me into letting then ride longer.
thanks

[Dave]

Steve
Thanks for the info about FAA, I am just starting to upload images as another way of getting my images seen and hopefully create some extra revenue.
I was most interested in the link to your blog and the discussion about how you price your images on FAA and I thought I would look you up on FAA, to see the sort of images you sell etc. I also looked at your pricing and got the site to show a breakdown of the costs and I could not find any realtionship to the prices you say you sell your images for and what they are selling for on FAA, have you done this on purpose or and do you price your images individually.
I'm a little confused, can you please clarify?

Tahnks

David May

[wordplanet]

I remember the last time I sold a photo of a particular lighthouse on Cape Cod (certainly a well covered subject on FAA), I decided to see where I came up in the search. I found pages filled with pix by an artist who had many photos of the same lighthouse, followed by many other photos without the lighthouse in them at all. I finally got tired of looking and hadn't found the image I sold or the few others of that lighthouse I have on the site. Nor did I find other images of lighthouses and nautical subjects from Cape Cod that I'd sold in the past few months before that, which surprised me.

Meantime, when I search the lighthouse name on SS it seems well placed and even searching Google with the name of the lighthouse, one (and sometimes more) of mine show up on page one (and I have less than 10 photos of it in total anywhere online), so I have no clue how FAA's search works. I have seen my FAA images show up well placed in Google searches but rarely have the patience to go through the pages required to fined them on FAA.

I haven't uploaded there or even been on the site in over a month. When I was active on the forums and all the voting and commenting there I averaged slightly more than one sale a month. While my sales more than cover my site fee for quite a few years, they didn't seem commensurate with the effort I was making. (I was also tweeting and retweeting my FAA stuff and that of other FAA folks, posting on pinterest, FB and G+ and probably boring people to death).

Aside from a couple of card sales to acquaintances, everything I've sold (canvas, metal, framed and matted prints), have been through random searches as far as I can tell-and at least one was via google, not via FAA's search engine. My first sale was to someone who contacted me through my Photoshelter website to buy a photo she'd found via a google search as a Christmas gift for her husband. I sent her to FAA since I had recently joined the site and didn't have a cost-effective way to get a framed print to Virginia.

I did a bunch of those canvas discount photos for a while but only sold one, my lowest profit other than on cards - and have no idea if that was someone searching the site or who found it via my then daily posts of my FAA deals on twitter.

[Valo]

When Google decides to change their algorithm, FAA could be in for trouble as they are heavily relying on their good placement with Google. The owner of the site is very much promoting the fact he has good Google placement. When they lose that placement, they could get into difficult times.

[ShadySue]

When Google decides to change their algorithm, FAA could be in for trouble as they are heavily relying on their good placement with Google. The owner of the site is very much promoting the fact he has good Google placement. When they lose that placement, they could get into difficult times.

A few weeks back, I noticed a page on FAA which claimed they have #1 Google positioning for certain very popular keywords. I checked it out, and it wasn't #1 for any of them (after paid ads), though usually in the top 10. I can't actually find that page just now. Maybe it was that thing whereby Google takes your previous browsing history into account which made the keywords 1 there. Still, even #10 is impressive for these particular keywords.

[stockastic]

There have been several recent threads on the FAA forum regarding problems with the search, for example what wordplanet noted: first few pages stuffed with one (presumably) 'big selling' artist, and lots of unrelated junk.  The search is mostly weighted by previous sales for a contributor, and it gets totally out of hand.  Add in the fact that the search is cut off after about 25 pages, and the situation becomes hopeless.

The only response from FAA's increasingly rude and defensive moderator has been "that's the way it is".   

[steheap]

Steve
Thanks for the info about FAA, I am just starting to upload images as another way of getting my images seen and hopefully create some extra revenue.
I was most interested in the link to your blog and the discussion about how you price your images on FAA and I thought I would look you up on FAA, to see the sort of images you sell etc. I also looked at your pricing and got the site to show a breakdown of the costs and I could not find any realtionship to the prices you say you sell your images for and what they are selling for on FAA, have you done this on purpose or and do you price your images individually.
I'm a little confused, can you please clarify?

Tahnks

David May

Sorry I missed this question. I went back to my default pricing and it is the same as I originally showed on my blog post http://www.backyardsilver.com/2013/12/fine-art-america-increasing-sales-photo-prints/.

However, when I look at the site for a standard print, I see the price is higher. Although I haven't spent much time on FAA recently, I think the approach was that I was setting the mark-up over and above the price of the printing itself. So for a 14inch print, I set the markup at 45.00. The site show that same size print as $57.00 - $50 for the print and $7.00 for the type of paper. However, there is no cheaper paper option than this $7 one. I suppose they are saying that the print costs $12.00 for glossy or luster at that size.

Is that the discrepancy you are seeing?

I would have to dig some more to come up with a better answer.

This is one I uploaded most recently and it seems to have followed the same pricing logic as my earlier ones, so nothing seems to have changed. I tried to make this one more painterly to attract the FAA audience, but no luck so far!
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/beautiful-early-morning-jefferson-memorial-steve-heap.html

I did get one sale earlier this month from FAA - so although my best period was December/January, I still get occasional sales.

Steve

[Anyka]

ShadySue, I tried your sponsoring tip, and at first it seemed to work :  my photos appeared on the 3rd row when I searched for the exact word.  A few hours later however I tested it again, only this time I was not logged in ... NOTHING!   Have you tested your sponsoring results logged out ?
The placing of links on your own website is a great way to get super-high SEO results on Google, but if no one but me can see the results, why would I help FAA?

[Ariene]

I don't really understand what should I do to sponsor images? Can anyone tell in short words please?

[ShadySue]

ShadySue, I tried your sponsoring tip, and at first it seemed to work :  my photos appeared on the 3rd row when I searched for the exact word.  A few hours later however I tested it again, only this time I was not logged in ... NOTHING!   Have you tested your sponsoring results logged out ?
The placing of links on your own website is a great way to get super-high SEO results on Google, but if no one but me can see the results, why would I help FAA?

The sponsoring thing is essentially a way to help FAA. The 'three available sponsor places' are just a means of persuading us to do it. It all depends how many people are sponsoring your chosen keywords. With a popularly-sponsored keyword, you might have to refresh thirty, fifty ... times before your image comes up. With a keyword which hasn't been 'sponsored' often, you might actually have all three available slots - I can see that on some of the keywords I tested.

They do actually admit to this one on the sponsorship page:
"There are only three featured positions available per page.   If multiple artists have posted links to the windows art page, then the three featured positions will be randomly filled with images from those artists.   The images in the featured positions will change each time that the page is refreshed or visited by a new visitor."

Added: seems to me to be four positions: ##9-12.

[ShadySue]

I don't really understand what should I do to sponsor images? Can anyone tell in short words please?

When you are signed in, do a search on one of your keywords.
Scroll down a few lines (depending on your window size) and you'll see a message 'Sponsor this page'. Click on that link, and it'll give you instructions. Essentially, they provide you with a cut-and-pastable link to put on your webstite/blog and when the link is 'live', you go into the rotation of images in three slots on the first page for that keyword. As has been said already, without a CV, this is a long, drawn-out process, as there is a separate 'sponsoring slot' for alternate spellings, plurals, word order, language ...

It's tedious and best kept for 'free time'. My theory was to use the time I otherwise waste on CandyCrush (!), but it's so tedious, I have to reward myself for each page (20 links) by having a game ... (butterfly mind  )

[Daniela White images]

Hi ,

I am also with FAA , thank you for your price list. I was selling mine for far too low, I might now update it.

Regards Dani

[Anyka]

The sponsoring thing is essentially a way to help FAA. The 'three available sponsor places' are just a means of persuading us to do it. It all depends how many people are sponsoring your chosen keywords. With a popularly-sponsored keyword, you might have to refresh thirty, fifty ... times before your image comes up. With a keyword which hasn't been 'sponsored' often, you might actually have all three available slots - I can see that on some of the keywords I tested.

OK, got it, thanks!  I tested it and yes, after 5 refreshments one of my images popped up on row 3.   Better only sponsor keywords for which I have lots of photos on FAA then.

[Mantis]

I don't really understand what should I do to sponsor images? Can anyone tell in short words please?

When you are signed in, do a search on one of your keywords.
Scroll down a few lines (depending on your window size) and you'll see a message 'Sponsor this page'. Click on that link, and it'll give you instructions. Essentially, they provide you with a cut-and-pastable link to put on your webstite/blog and when the link is 'live', you go into the rotation of images in three slots on the first page for that keyword. As has been said already, without a CV, this is a long, drawn-out process, as there is a separate 'sponsoring slot' for alternate spellings, plurals, word order, language ...

It's tedious and best kept for 'free time'. My theory was to use the time I otherwise waste on CandyCrush (!), but it's so tedious, I have to reward myself for each page (20 links) by having a game ... (butterfly mind  )

The problem with this is that not all of us are tech savvy. We don't have blogs or websites and couldn't begin to figure this out. All FAA is doing is trying to force the contributor to do their marketing, so in essence you have to be more than an artist to be successful there. Pitiful place.

[DF_Studios]

Someone asked - "how am I promoting?"  How am I not promoting is the answer - blogs, social networking, Tumbler - I spend hours per week on it.

The reason agencies get a commission is because they do all of the promotional work and bring buyers to you.  FAA is the opposite.  Its just a fulfillment house for your art business.  Don't expect anything else except for the occasional random sale.

When has an artist not have to be a promoter?  Andy Warhol was just as good as PT Barnum.

[landbysea]

As regards watermarks, once you upload you can't always change your mind and just go do an edit and check the watermark box. You have to change out the image, because it is in that process that the watermark is added. As for the smaller thumbnails, they might not get the watermark even if you re-upload. Tech support will add the watermarks for you if you have uploaded without checking the watermark box.

[pkphotos]

FAA is a big con, there are more contributors than customers. We are just making the owners rich through subs. I've sold hundreds of mobile phone cases on zazzle and none via FAA. And I've sold hundreds of prints via other POD agencies but just a few via FAA. I won't be renewing my sub once its up for renewal.

[fivedmarkthree]

FAA is a big con, there are more contributors than customers. We are just making the owners rich through subs. I've sold hundreds of mobile phone cases on zazzle and none via FAA. And I've sold hundreds of prints via other POD agencies but just a few via FAA. I won't be renewing my sub once its up for renewal.

I have been thinking the same thing and am strongly considering not renewing as well

[Mantis]

FAA is a big con, there are more contributors than customers. We are just making the owners rich through subs. I've sold hundreds of mobile phone cases on zazzle and none via FAA. And I've sold hundreds of prints via other POD agencies but just a few via FAA. I won't be renewing my sub once its up for renewal.

I have been thinking the same thing and am strongly considering not renewing as well

It is a giant con. I am not renewing in a month or so. Really a joke.

[ShadySue]

I'll renew, only if it's a positive transaction for me. This year it is, though I had 0 in August. One good sale in July more than paid for the sub, and a few smaller sales add to the total.

[stockastic]

FAA just desperately needs competition.  They do some things well, but other things badly, and they're frozen in time, going nowhere.  It's time for a new POD site with clean, modern design, that isn't loaded with repetitious junk. 

But don't even get me started on Crated.  They are definitely not going to be the one.