MicrostockGroup

Well Hatman, I've just gone the opposite direction, having just joined up recently.

Will see how it goes.
I do agree with you about the name of the site. I too would welcome a much classier name than this.
If they are going to change it, it should be now, before the present one sinks in too much.
Also, the site is horribly slow and this can only get better.

I agree with your way of thinking Sharpshot.
No harm in being there and as you say it's still in Beta.

I am with you Sharp. I know they have a business plan and they know what they are doing. I would much rather wait then sell my work for a buck. I mean somebody selling a photo for such a low price is slave labor and a disservice to the industry.

Snap will prevail among the others and soon there will be a contributor queue to upload to them. The cheap photo agency feast have their days counted, a hard working photographer needs to pay their bills.

Snap is willing to recognise this, so I will keep uploading.

No professional designer, magazine or newspaper in the entire world will even be tempted to look at something called snapvillage.  These are professional people and they don't buy snaps.  And they certainly wouldn't want the risk of any of their customers finding out that they'd bought an image from a snap village.

In my view Corbis have attempted to degrade the microstock market by deliberately called it 'snaps'; trying to give the impression that all microstock contributors snap away with a mobile phone.

As they continue to lose large buying customers from their mainstream business to microstock (and microstock develops into midstock as we are seeing with the large price increases) they risk losing those customers NOT to snapvillage but to iStock and others.

Over the last year the registered customer base at iStock has increased from 1.5 million to over 2.7million and none of those are going to even pay a snap village a glancing visit.

If they were serious they would have come to microstock with a bang in order to create a 'sit up and pay attention' impression.  In fact they've come with a web site that is the slowest and lacks any development, and within their first three months were being laughed at as a joke.  They didn't understand the need for IPTC, and they only added a watermark after pressure from contributors.  That is NOT what you do if you want to be a success.

And the Bill Gates thing is just a red herring.  He is a multi billionaire currently involved in a $50 billion bid for Yahoo.  Surely you don't think he's in the slightest bit interested in a two bit photo agency?  He probably doesn't even know it exists.

Good luck to those who decide to stay there, but I will NOT have my work associated with Snapvillage.

I don't agree.  Corbis is a huge site and a lot of their customers will look at SV.  Most of the magazines and newspapers I look at are full of snap shots.  If they buy them from istock, they will buy them from SV.


Bill Gates must be interested because he owns Corbis and I have read that he wants to sell lower cost images.  If he wasn't interested, SV wouldn't exist.

The $50 bid for yahoo could be positive for SV, there is a lot of yahoo services that might be used to buy cheap images.

istock took years to get to where they are today.  I expect SV will take a couple of years to get going.  There is a huge market for cheap images and a company owned by Bill Gates should have good opportunities to grab some market share in the future.

That is if he doesn't just decide to buy istock

I just have one image there, and it was really hard to get it through their uploading process, with a lot of its sisters gone God knows where. Not really interested in uploading more at the moment, but I'll keep it there (if it's as difficult to erase it as it was getting it there, I fear I'll be dead before it happens !). The idea is that it doesn't cost me anything but I think when Mr Gates understand (or gets interested by) what he launched, there could be a huge potential. So, wait and see for me.

For $50 that is a pretty good deal, maybe I will call up Yahoo tomorrow and ask if I can buy them. Perhaps if this deal goes through Snapvillage will change its name to Yahoo Stock Images or something. I think that is a better sounding name anyway.

hatman, I read on the istock forum that you are going exclusive there, so it isn't just SV you are leaving is it? 

If you were not going exclusive, would you wait for SV to spend money marketing the site and see if they are a success before leaving?  That seems like the sensible option to me.

I think you could have said all those things about istock when they were less than a year old.  I still feel it is far too early to judge SV.  They need to build a collection and then start marketing.  Sites used to be able to start quickly but now their competitors already have millions of images.  I will give them at least a year to get their act together.

I am also a little confused at the keyword changes, I have a few images of human icons which are definitely people related and they have had the words "nobody"and "no people"added, does anyone know why they do this?

Hatman where exactly is that delete set button, because I can not find it.

Thanks

It sounds to me like keywording is being outsourced to some english as a second language workers. This should be a definite point of concern. No one knows your images better than you do, especially for narrow sector subject matter.