MicrostockGroup

Hi gang, I just wanted to report that I have had my first sale at Zymmetrical:  selling price $21, royalty paid to me was $14.70 (I may be a few cents off).   I have very few photos on their site, perhaps 4 dozen.  I really like the way they are doing things - and am willing to invest in this new site.  (Had already intended to update my port before such a nice sale).   

P.S.  It's my last time at a computer till next week if there's any comments to this post.

Congrats on the sale.  I have 186 there and no downloads.  I have had 2 downloads with cutcaster when I had less images uploaded and for less time.  Looks like cutcaster will get my portfolio before zymmetrical.  I would be more motivated to upload there if I had a few sales.

I still can only change the price on one image at a time and have to wait 8 days to do the next one.  I am not uploading any more until that is changed.

Wow, a week later and another sale on Zymmetrical this morning.  Normally I wouldn't be so excited about 2 sales on a new site; but, these are pretty significant sales when you compare them to what the micros are paying.  Sales of $56 have earned me $39.20. 

Sidenote:  If that was Istock, and they sold $56 I would have received $11.20. 

This leads my next connundrum.  Pricing.  I preferred it when Zymmetrical applied the price, but now we set our own and I am not always confident what it should be.   I guess I'll stick with the 15-35 range are as it doesn't seem to deter the buyers.

I really like the way this site is progressing (even without the sales, but that makes me like it more!).  And they are still in beta.  Who are their buyers? 

Hehe - I thought of that too... but they can use our photos as they like in promos can't they, why would they pay?  The only one I thought I was ever paid for promos from was LO.

  So for once it has paid for me to be a blababoosh. Keep giving me sells, I'll keep blabbin!     

Kidding aside, the payout is $10 so I'll even be able to cash out this month.   This will be the next test!

Moori, yes actually I wanted to point that out because Pixart seemed to misinterpret it - you (at this point least) only have to have the minimum 10 tags for it to accept the submission onto a Pending status.     Category and Price are optional.    If you don't pick them, our Reviewers will.

Lorraine, here is perhaps a clue: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=buy+stock+photos&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2. Of course we can't elaborate on what we do to get buyers on this board in particular.            

Thanks for your fast reply Keith!  Time to push a couple more pictures through then =)

Hi Lorraine,

Sorry we do know it's not so slick with the Paypal payout request method currently. I will leave it at: we have something much, much better being inked at this moment. As for the taxation, all I know is we pay Victoria our dues and further than that I would not want to advise, not knowing the specifics of the rules outside BC with great clarity. Your accountant should be able to advise best.

Splash page placements are not compensated directly, other than that they get 10 gazillion times more views then sub-pages thus (as it seems) result in some impulse buys. This time around we let each of the reviewers pick their single favorite for the homepage slideshow, so it should be a hot selection from the people who 'see it all' and know what buyers want.

btw. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22buy+stock+photos%22&btnG=Search & http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22sell+stock+photos%22&btnG=Search
.. a little progress.

Keith if you are out there, I noticed $ in my account yesterday, but the sales manager button leads to or sticks on my account page and in the past it led to a list of recent sales.  (Hopefully it's a real sale and a broken sales manager )

I've had some problems recently and this morning with searches.  Many critical errors or 0 results.  Now I tried again 10 minutes later and it worked perfectly so that tells me it is only intermittent.  I just report this because it's enough to turn me off and come back later - except I will always come back and a new buyer may not.  I use Explorer if that helps.

Many (not all) of my photos have just script and x boxes when I click through.  I noticed that a couple weeks ago when the canola photo was first featured on the splash page - but  I checked again and today it is still just script.  I could swear there was a post here on MSG about this subject but I can't find the answer, maybe I'm supposed to send a ticket with file #s?: 

Thanks!

They are still in Beta my friend.  I don't support many new sites, but I'll be sticking with them.

Hi Lorraine,

Thanks for pointing that out. I know the precise reason why that page output problem was occurring and it should be fixed now. It was a little tweak designed to decrease the pageload time, but the pages were clearly getting ahead of themselves. We are working hard on an entirely new photo page design with and that type of rendering problem will not be an issue in the system, due next week.

For the intermittent problem you experienced, we are adding and changing things daily so once in a while there will be hiccups. They all get logged and prioritized in our bug tracker, and then fixed - but thanks for pointing this out. It may better if you report incidents like this in our own Site Suggestions forum on Zymm, where it is centralized and read by everyone in the firm.

thanks

Ah yes sorry - we had a pesky bug that would go through and remove the "-" dashes from the URLs of some page names, whenever some routine updates were made.   The URL in the top part of the page has "sales-manager" whereas the current URL is http://www.zymmetrical.com/account/salesmanager/. If you hit that link you should be in.

p.s. The forum has been spiffed up this week: http://www.zymmetrical.com/info.  Lots of improvements, including the way notifications are handled - which would I guess why you're questions there may have been missed.

It is good to see some sales happening, I hope it continues.  One day a new site is going to make it big and kill off all those posts about avoiding new sites