MicrostockGroup

yes, if they ever review them.  Review time has gone from rather quickly to slower than a snail's pace.  I would rather they not give me the tokens and review the images in a timely manner so they can be available for sales.  KWIM?

KWIM     Know What I Mean?
http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?String=exact&Acronym=KWIM

I was going to post the same thing. No reviews, no sales. They need to stop talking about the marketing they are going to do and actually do some. A bucketful of worthless tokesn isn't going to keep me around. After galastock, usphotos, totallyphotos, microstockphots and others, I'm out of patience with startups. I thought the fact that they had good financial backing would be a plus, but I guess it just means they can coast longer without making money.

Howdy gang...just thought I would pipe in to give you a tad more details on our growth plans.  We've received a huge amount of images the last three weeks- more than our staff can now handle.  We've been working on putting together our bouncer review program for the last two months (which includes training, interviews, program materials, and technology infrastructure) Things have slowed down a bit on review times- but this should improve soon.

We want to get this right.  Review times will suffer a bit now, but hopefully all our hard work will insure that photographers will receive the same amount of attention from our review team as we grow.  We want to avoid giving photographers reviews that don't make any sense. We also want to insure buyers get high quality images.

We've also started some of our marketing activities- we're taking a long term approach- so expect gradual results. While you might see spikes in activity, our plans are to insure long term viability- a problem that most new sites are going to struggle with in this market. I'll continue to share more as things become public.

I appreciate all the effort and time photographers put into LuckyOliver.

No, I should have taken the time to write the words. I'm sorry.

Bryan:

Thanks for all of your hard work and for keeping everyone apprised of your plans.

May I ask what type of marketing you are currently doing?  Magazines?  Mailings?  Conferences?

And what are the future plans for marketing?

Yep, I hope everyone understands. While I'd love to be as transparent as possible, I'm also not going to publish our plans before we've had a chance to learn and execute. If you stay focused on the blog you'll continue to learn more as the pieces come together.

So, by that logic, we should hope that SS and IS and all the other biggies that pay less than SX or DT would fail too eh?

I don't think there's any evidence that there isn't room in the vast market for many players in the microstock world. There will be some falling out along the way sure... that is already happening with some vendors going away. However, as in any free market, new players come along all the time and try to make their spot. There's a vast market out there and I'd rather play with more vendors and possibly gain more volumen that way than to keep all my eggs in one basket.

Oh, and one more thing... it is very obvious to me that different photos sell differently in each site. I have some that have sold a ton over on SS but yet on IS they languish at the bottom of my sales. And those are two of the biggest fish in the sea. If i were exclusive to one site, then i'd be missing out on a whole different bunch of buyers. So again, i'm preferring to go after more buyers.

Check out featurepics.com!!!! They are also in a start-up position but offer an 80% commission. Can you imagine if a site like that had the sales of IStock? In my opinion for a startup like Lucky Oliver with nearly no sales to pay a measly 30% commission is a joke. Just because you like uploading to every site out there, doesn't mean we all do. In any case, to each his own I guess.

Go, go featurepics!!!! Now that's a startup I could feel good about recommending

I agree completely, 50% is a fair amount and I'm happy with that. 80% is very high, but if they're willing to pay it than hey, all the power to them and I can only hope for their success (although like you, it's hard for me to believe they can pull it off)

But for a new player to enter this market with 30%??? Just starts to make me fee this site is going nowhere and fast. It will attract the photographers that upload to every site regardless, but it will never attract the numbers they need to make a dent. They are already way behind, and that is no way to catch up.

Maunger and Leaf, I'm with you. You're absolutely correct that a company that works to promote itself will bring in the sales. And 40 sales at 30 cents versus 5 at 50 cents is preferable. And, different sites have different audiences. My best selling image on SS was rejected by DT. And all submissions to IS have been rejected.

LO has accepted 95% of what I've sent them, and to date (2 months in the game with small portfolio hovering around 200 images), they are my second best selling site. I can personally attest to the fact that there are actual "for money" sales coming in. I have 19 sales, all in the large size. I have faith that LO is on the correct track--even though we don't know their marketing plans yet. At least they plan to market.

In comparison, I have 4 sales from Featurepics, and even though the % payout is larger on Feturepics, those 4 images amount to 1/4 the $$$ amount from the LO sales.

Go LO!!

Pat

But, if the designers don't know you exist, or even if they do know you exist but you have no "reputation," will your site be one that they will visit when looking for that elusive image? I doubt it. And if, as a designer, you work for a company you have to go through the company to register with the site in order to download. If you don't know about the site, or if the site has no reputation, you aren't going to push the company to register. Marketing is key.

I know this because I am a photo researcher for a small educational publishing company. Until I got into this microstock game as a contributer, the only sites we knew about were IS and DT.

Pat