Microstock Photography Forum - General > Symbiostock
Symzio is now LIVE
Symbiostock Official:
The ultimate partner to the Symbiostock project has now been launched - though still in beta, it is fully functional, aggregating all the images across the Symbiostock network.
The Symzio system has been organized for maximum revenue and growth:
1) Firstly, and most importantly, it serves as a one-stop solution for all purchases. Customers do not have to leave the Symzio interface to complete their purchases, making the likelihood of conversion much more likely.
2) Contributors retain 70% of all sales revenue on Symzio - affiliates earn 10%. This gives the engine a small but consistent source of revenue with which to grow through promotions and advertising while passing to contributors a large majority of the earnings (as it should be).
3) Contributors set the price for all their full-sized royalty-free media. All medium sized images are standardized to $1.99 to maximize digital sales, and to attract bloggers who would otherwise pirate images or use freebies.
4) Your contributor profile is the key portal to everything: your Symzio images, your social media, and your independent site. Customers can even contact you through it.
5) With regards to the backend, we've implemented a cutting edge system whereby contributor media is spidered often, changes implemented, and most importantly, all media is sourced directly from your independent site in real-time. Symzio caches very little. If you update a title, or keywords, or a thumbnail for your independent site, Symzio will catch on soon enough. However, on the front end, the search provides results that appear seamless, much like other traditional agencies.
6) No more stress with unreliable reviewers! Once you're approved as a Symzio contributor, you control all your media. Add, delete, or revise it at your leisure.
7) Videographer heaven - no more 1 minute limits. As long as your server can handle it, all videographers can expand their portfolios with longer clips, in any format. Symzio is fully compatible with video: http://www.symzio.com/stock-video-footage/juvenile-grey-butcherbird-sitting-tree-another-young-butcher-bird-lands-branch
8 ) SEO heaven - Symzio has been intricately optimized for maximum search engine stickiness. We've littered the site with algorithms that take your content and dynamically create unique descriptors so that as much of your stuff holds its own in the search results.
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Just imagine the future workflow of the average contributor: create a beautiful set of images. Come home, process them. Upload them once to Symbiostock. They go live on your independent site and soon go live on Symzio automatically. No secondary submissions, no fear of them being rejected. And when you get a $5 sale, you keep $3.50.
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Symzio, along with Symbiostock, provides contributors a complete independent solution: you can host and sell all your media on your own site, and syndicate it with everyone else in Symzio. Best of all, this is all 100% free. Symbiostock costs nothing, and Symzio costs nothing.
You can expand on the base functionality of Symbiostock if you need Video or agency Submissions with optional plugins. But for most of you, the core plugin will work a treat.
This is a fantastic opportunity, and has been developed to give us the chance, as a community, to truly carve a portion of the industry for independents and reduce our dependence on third parties. Here's one of our more traditional stock contributors talking about it: http://picturebreeze.com/symzio-com-a-new-stock-media-agency-idea/
I truly believe that we have been unable to break out from under the yoke of third parties because the proper infrastructure was not in place to provide both contributors and customers a competitive edge - with Symzio and Symbiostock, a wide array of contributor sites, all supporting one another is now within our grasp. All we have to do is step forward and take it.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to throw them my way, and thanks for reading. As we are still in beta, we're always open to improving the system - so if you have suggestions on how we can make it better, let us know!
I leave you with some random samples from Symzio to give you an idea how how it looks:
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photos/bird.html
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/detail-japanese-cherry-blossom-flowers-2
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/tourists-los-arcos-caves
Microstockphoto:
approved as contributor?
Microstockphoto:
how is paying 20% considered 100% free?
Symbiostock Official:
Received a private question from a contributor - yes, both Symbiostock and Symzio fully support editorial content.
The important thing to remember with editorial content is you must mark it as such in your control panel. As we don't screen your media, you have increased responsibilities when it comes to releases and editorial stuff.
This is how an editorial image is marked on Symzio:
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/entrance-golden-nugget-hotel-and-casino-fremont-street-las-vegas
Jo Ann Snover:
Potential contributors to Symzio should note a few key terms
1. Content is licensed under Symzio's license - contributors do not get to set their own license terms (see Business Practices/your contract)
http://www.symzio.com/support
And the license
http://www.symzio.com/licensing
2. The contributor terms allow Symzio to close accounts for any or no reason. This is standard for stock agencies, but seems odd considering the tag line on Symzio's home page "Welcome to Symzio, the first completely contributor controlled stock photo, vector and video licensing agency"
http://www.symzio.com/terms
There are other references to closure for violation contributor guidelines, but also the following:
"Symzio may, at its own discretion, for any reason whatsoever, close a Contributor's account without notice. If the Contributor's account is closed for a breach of any of our terms, any outstanding royalties will be forfeited.
Symzio may, at its own discretion, reinstate Contributor accounts. In this case, Symzio may charge Contributors $250 for reinstatement."
They close the account and then charge $250 to allow it to be opened again? Really?
3. The contributor FAQ talks about the importance of accurate tagging and ensuring editorial content is tagged as such - absolutely reasonable. But it then follows up with a rather vaguely worded condition that you'll have to cough up $250 to get your account back if some audit determines you've made mistakes too often:
"Our team regularly peruses the Symzio engine and if an image that appears to be editorial is found to be missing the tag, we will flag it. If your images are found to be missing editorial tags more than once, your contributor account will be temporarily disabled and you will have to pay the re-inclusion fee for reinstatement."
And who gets to decide if the editorial tag should be there? If there are to be such draconian penalties, there need to be detailed guidelines as to what the Symzio agency's standards are for requiring an editorial tag. Vague handwaving about "appears to be editorial" just doesn't cut it.
Using "contributor controlled" as a marketing gimmick and having terms like most agencies that leave the contributor largely powerless seems to me to be contradictory.
Read the agreements very carefully to be sure you can live with them before participating.
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