Hello Microstockgrouper's 

I thought I'd stop in and report on how PhotoDune is going. I wrote up some stuff for our own PD forums and thought MSG might like to see it too!

In previous threads there has been a lot of questions raised over our pricing and rates, and as I've mentioned we're planning to re-evaluate both after a few months of being live. In the meantime, here's how PhotoDune is going!

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Things Going Well

• Sales are climbing, our first month out of private beta saw sales increase more than double, from 1700 sales to 4200 sales for the month. Small still, but a good trajectory!
• We've passed 150 authors with approved items on the site, you can see the list ordered by sales here on our Top Authors page - Yuri is still dominating, that guy is a machine! And MSG's Leaf is up at #7 
• The library has been growing by about 750 a day which in the wider world of microstock is not much, but for us just starting is lots!
• We had some performance problems in the upload queue, but after a lot of hard work, we seem to have solved them making uploads much smoother
• We hit 750,000 pageviews last month, almost double the prior month!
• Search traffic is zooming upwards with 2000 visits a day flowing in already

• Interestingly extended license sales are super tiny, despite the low pricing. This is interesting because the main driver of the low pricing is higher sales, so as I mentioned above this will go into our retro discussions when we hit the first quarter mark
• We're learning fast about how fast items pile up for review :-) Right now our review queue sits at about 5000 with 2000 being processed per day, meaning an average of about 2.5 working days to get a file approved. This is pretty so-so and we're working to improve this!
• We have a bunch of search and interface improvements that are still slowly rolling out. Of course this is something that will continue to the end of time really :-)

Hey, I'm 17th!  And only two spots behind Lisa!  Granted, she started after me and passed me in her first month.  But I can live with that.

Quote from: lisafx on September 01, 2011, 22:26

I have to say that of all the new sites I have tried, PhotoDune is BY FAR the best selling.  I am really impressed with the way you guys run the site, and with the sales!  

Hey Lisa, I'm really thrilled to hear that! We were really excited to have you on board so early on!

Meanwhiles, I've been meaning to write to tell you this, but one of your photos became a sort of cult hit here in our melbourne HQ office. It's the one called Romancing the Toes. I'm not sure how it began, but one of the designers found it and printed a copy to frame it and put it on his desk, then the team decided that it should be the top seller for the week and all started depositing money to buy it, then we had an office pool competition and the framed picture became a part of the trophy .. you can actually see a photo of the pool comp winner James holding the trophy and framed picture. And finally, the framed picture is now the first thing people see when they arrive at our offices out of the elevators in the foyer.

Its all (very) strange, but (very) true! Our office has a very quirky sense of humor If you ever visit Melbourne, Australia you have to come and visit, and I will introduce you as the photographer behind Romancing the Toes  

Anyhow I thought you might be wondering why one photo had such a big run on sales numbers vs the normal sales pattern of a couple of sales per item per month!!

OMG!!!  Absolutely hilarious!!  Congrats to the LUCKY winner! ROFL!

I had wondered why that photo was the top seller for a time.  My husband (the model) and I had speculated that maybe PhotoDune was the stock site of choice for foot fetishists.  

I can see my stuff will fit right in there at Envato.  I will certainly look you guys up if I ever get to Australia, and I will be sure to bring my famous hubby and my celebrated toes.   I have a strange, quirky sense of humor too, in case you hadn't noticed...

Hope we didn't ruin your dinner, LOL!

Ok, i see people are uploading to site giving 25% of 3$ (not €!) for large download and with the cheapest extended license of the market, including 5$ for extra small!!
Ok, ok, then SS can lowering commission now, fotolia and istock can cut again in half...go on ...go on...

Quote from: microstockphoto.co.uk on September 02, 2011, 09:47

I don't usually complain about specific rejections on a public forum but since PhotoDune is very new and I am just starting to submit to this site, this is more a general question than a complaint: what is your official position towards exterior architectural pictures of old buildings taken from publicly accessible space?

The rejection says "Please check if there is a Property Release required": should I just resubmit with a note that it's not required? even in that case, it's a lot of work; or should I mark all as editorial? (even if it's not usually the case)

See sample rejected picture below.
My port is 70% architecture, if you don't accept it I'd better stop uploading completely.

Hi there! Good questions, I have to admit I don't know the answer myself, so I'll ask Jarel our review manager if he can stop in to the forums and answer, shouldn't be too long. Thanks for your patience!