MicrostockGroup

What is the deal with Luckyoliver.  From memory you only got paid from per picture sales, not subscription sales.

Are y ou getting any sales??

Luckyoliver is a waste of time in my opinion.  I haven't gotten one sale and I have given up.  There are few proven microstocks that provide good money, but I have no idea where these other ones come from or how they stay in business.

I've made the same amount on SS this month as I have on DT in 2, and SS makes up almost 40 percent of my all-time earnings.

My bad - unless exclusive you get 30% of $1 sales.  I was getting you confused with another new site.

Amy - if you are still there, my questions are:

- do you have ftp upload
- any daily limit on upload
- does IPTC data get read therefore saving time on keywording.
- do buyers pay different prices for different sizes.

As a new player, sales may come (I agree with your chicken and egg analogy).  I will keep an eye on it.

A 30% royalty is extremely low for a new (unproven) microsite without any real business (as of yet).

Most of us put up with a 20% royalty from IS and a 0.25/image payout from SS because they are the "big dogs" in the neighborhood.  But as has been mentioned, almost every other new microsite offers significantly more.

Good questions. 

CJPhotos, to answer yours first:

--Yep, we have FTP capabilities.  Once your first three photos are accepted (and you're dubbed a 'Carny' in the LO system) the FTP option shows up on the submit page.
--Nope, there's no daily upload limit.
--IPTC data?  Not yet, but it is on the list.  Higher on the list is improving our keywording feature and making it easy for you to copy/paste keywords.
--Yep, buyers pay different prices for different sizes.  Here's the scoop on that: http://www.luckyoliver.com/guide/buying_images

Striker77, to answer your questions (and you may want to get a cup of coffee 'cause this is kinda long...sorry)

We realize that we're entering a pretty crowded field, but we think it's a field where there's plenty of room for improvement and innovation.  That said, we also recognize that we're building our company and our product with right in front of you guys…and that we can tell you, 'hey, we're going to be doing some cool stuff down the road--a buy-it-out option, a 'tweaked photos' option that'll let production folks tweak your images for designers (with alpha channels and such) and earn you additional royalties…but that for right now, it's only telling you what we're going to do--we're still in the process of actually doing it. 

And we recognize that not everyone is going to feel comfortable investing the time in submitting photos to our site before we've started generating tons of traffic and revenue--that's completely understandable.  But we've gotta start somewhere, and offering that initially higher royalty we think may be enough to get us out of the gate, getting excellent photographers and images in the door and giving designers and buyers something of real value when we start hardcore efforts to get them to the site.

So here's what it comes down to.  I can tell you now what will make us different, but dangit, that's just talk.  I'd rather show you…and we will.  If you want to jump on board now and ride through this exciting yet admittedly somewhat rocky startup phase with us, we welcome you--and we've been fortunate that quite a few photographers have decided to do that.  If it makes more sense for you to hang back and see a bit more of how we're going to be different, we completely understand.

Thanks for the excellent discussion, everyone!  I can't promise that I'll have all the answers, but I can tell you that if I don't have 'em, I'll get 'em.

Amy thanks for the reply.  I was actually expecting a longer reply. I don't mind jumping on the bandwagon and investing time into a new site if I like their business model.  One example would be featurepics.  They allow photags to price their own photos they offer extremely high royalties to photags and they are extremely responsive to suggestions on their site.  Make a good suggestion and within a couple of weeks the changes are up and going. I felt they were somewhat unique so I gave them a go.  I hope they succeed.  You are offering royalties on the lower side and are probably the lowest of all new sites your pricing per picture is similar to other sites (there is nothing wrong with that) and you will allow production to tweak our images.  I guess I'm still skeptical and don't see how you stand out from anyone else.  But maybe you will, I feel the more competition the better.

Mark

YOu should move this up your list of priorities.  We have spent a lot of time doing our key words into IPTC and to have to copy and paste is a waste of time when you have 100's of photos.  I will upload a few shots to see how they get on but probably wont do the rest until you have this feature.

How many keywords do you allow?  Only 10??

I agree

I will not be inclined to upload until there's IPTC capabilities.  Then I will upload my 250 some photos and growing.

IPTC reading is a must, I did try to upload some images but I did quit, also, there is no way to upload model releases.

Chepe

Thanks for your reply.  I have submitted my first three and will probably put up a few more to test the water.However I will probably wait on uploading the bulk of them until IPTC so keep us informed.

Good luck - lets hope your site is anotehr winner.

Signed up and was accepted yesterday and have been trying to FTP today with FileZilla

ftp.luckyoliver.com
user name
password

user name accepted
password - 530 authenification error

anyone had success with the FTP option?

I tried the 5 files at a time uploader and another 530 error.

Uploaded one and it worked.

So i thought I would upload 5 more while I was keywording

Then I noticed "add keyword" 

Not having IPTC facility is one thing but making us enter keywords individually is quite another. 

So please LO team let us know when you can enter a string of keywords separated by commas

IPTC reading should be top of the list if you want to build a portfolio quickly