MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Featurepics.com => Topic started by: takestock on June 15, 2008, 17:21
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It's been a long four months since my last sale at Featurepics.
I haven't been uploading there and the way it's going, not looking like I will.
Will bide my time for payout - that's it!
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Same here, I had a payout in Feb, and since then my balance remained $0.00
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April was great with 10 sales, then May had only 2 and now in June other 2 so far.
Regards,
Adelaide
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Never sold a pic on FP. 8)=tom
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zip for me too :'(
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I have not sold a single picture there since April 15th! Unless they sell anything by the end of this month, I shall stop uploading. It is not worth.
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I canceled my account after it took two plus years to reach a payout with over 1000 photos.
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don't feel so bad now.
i have been with fotolia for 4 months too, and zippo for sales.
submitted like over 100 images, in the first 3 weeks, got thrashed
rejected by the mass murderer.
the other reviewer was good, and took what was left, and what this reviewer rejected, there was a good reason given.
so maybe that mass murderer reviewer who mass rejected the other 90 odd images took away some potential business for fotolia.
as for featurepics, i like them, they accept everything. but zippo on sales either.
i think featurepics is good, they are communicative, and do not employ a freako reviewer like fotolia. (thank goodness )...
but perharps they (featurepics) are lacking in sales promotion.
can 't say much about fotolia either, but i think already others have said just about all there is to know about them.
i guess we'll just have to try somewhere else !!! 8)
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I left them months ago after having no sales on 300-400 images.
I was considering rejoining FP to use them as a backbone for a personal website. Is anyone selling through their own website using FP? I'd like to look at some examples of what can be done design wise.
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I was considering rejoining FP to use them as a backbone for a personal website. Is anyone selling through their own website using FP? I'd like to look at some examples of what can be done design wise.
This is probably the best way to use FP.
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I do not understand... Are we SUPPOSED to design our own pages to promote FeaturePics? Too bad... I would not know how to do it.
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FP for me is not a worst. I have over 1000 images and had 4 payouts, fifth is going to finish. They are a bit different and I like them. Just thought that I will upload my next couple thousands and then can expect a payout every month.
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I do not want to be a wet blanket but are we speaking about FeaturePics or Fotolia here?
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It's up and down for me, as with any other agency, although slower than most. I'm still comfortable with them. It's where I send customers who want to buy my photos, since they generate much more profit per sale than others.
I'm much more worried about places like Crestock and Snapvillage, where I have a similar sales volume, but just a fraction of the profit.
I had my latest sale there 2 days ago, so they are absolutely alive :)
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I do not want to be a wet blanket but are we speaking about FeaturePics or Fotolia here?
yeah, sorry, I wrote FT instead of FP. Now I edited. I'm speaking about FeaturePics.
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When I was on FP, even my views seemed to stop dead. So in March I think I dumped this dog.
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This has been discussed before. I happen to have a reasonable result in FP. Nothing outstanding, but good. In total, I've made more there than in 123RF, and never had to see an image sold as subscription. This month I made more there than in StockXpert, which is unusually slow for me so far.
They said there will be some site upgrades tonight, but I have no idea what that will be.
Regards,
Adelaide
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steadily increasing sales all year, nothing amazing but good steady growth. Payout now about every 4-5 weeks and with new uploads in bulk and 100% acceptance rate they are one I'm sticking with.
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I'm giving Featurepics another chance. I've already accepted that they don't advertise enough for me to expect sales. This time however, I am using them as the backbone to my own stock site. So it will be up to me to produce enough quality images, and promote my own site. I've never done anything like this before, so I am flying blind.
It probably won't make much of a difference in overall earnings. My goal is to get enough exposure that my earnings through Featurepics at my site equal my earnings at my lowest earner of the Big 7 (usually about 3-4% of earnings).
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Good luck Dan let us know how it goes !
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Feature pics perform quite well, I get a payout most months. Its odd how some sites perform good for some people and not so well for others.
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Good move, Dan. Even if FP is slower than many sites, I like them and I do reasonably well there. Got 7 sales there this month, what puts it not very behind BigStock and 123 for me in $$.
Regards,
Adelaide
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I got 2 sales this month. my first sales ever at FP.
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My little experience is: 5 sales joining all sites, I'm an absolutely beginner and I'm microstocking just fun (I'm not good enough yet and my equipment is just a coolpix L2 :), but the one I've sold on FP has give me 70% of all my earnings.
The idea of being exclusive on FP in the future is in my mind, the site is the way I like and you could set your own price which I think is very interesting. I think microstock prices are absolutely crazy because they don't respect the talent of the photographer at all. Arts and commercial should be together in my opinion.
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You want to go exclusive with Featurepics? Good luck with that.
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toneteam,
Warm up in the microstock market a few months, test the water on other agencies, at least the BIG 6-7, check and compare numbers etc... Emotions is good but make serious decisions only when stock market situation will be more clear for you. Good luck.
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10 sales this month on FP, with one Small Business Extension License.
7-8 place on my earners list.
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Thanks for comments, i really do appreciate your experience and im grateful when people take me out of my own crazy ideas, Im serious. I have to wait and the most important of all is: I have to make photos more interesting for microstocks first and then begin to plan any kind of future on a real one present basis. I really think that so short prices are logical in a competitive market but I feel so terrible about to get 20 cents of a dollar for a single photo, I mean there must be a way to increase these amount 4 or five times at least. It just an impression.
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Not many sales but every now and then I get $6.99 commission for one and that keeps me interested. I would like to send buyers there but there is the risk of them doing a lucky oliver and that stops me.
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As nothing has changed or improved there, I have just stopped uploading there (and on Canstock). However, I am not going to delete my portfolio. I am going to return there in a month to see whether or not they start selling reasonably.
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I stopped uploading after a drought in sales that lasted a few months.
However, after I put my prices up to $10 from $1, sales have started again??
As a result I've added a few hundred more images at $10, hopefully a few sales a month will follow.
I wouldn't bin them just yet, there seems to be a bit of life in them still :)
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June was good on FP. My BME. Had several sales a week. All my images are at the 10$ price point and it seems to be what works best for me. I sell more now than when I have everything at 5$.
They beat sites like BigStock and Crestock.
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Well I'll be darned. My portfolio basically goes without views and sales for several months, so I leave FP. A few months later I reload, and it only takes a week to get my first sale. $1.80 profit for a small - nice! 8)
Not sure if it is was related to me setting up my personal webpage or not. I kinda doubt it as it is only getting a few hits now and then.
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I uploaded a batch of some new images I have on Alamy. As on FP we can set our prices, I set all images from $100 to $300. I'm really angry at all these 20 cents, so it's finished with these prices. Anyway there are no many sells, my images are very good , I value them and please pay now accordingly if some want it!
About 90% of all my new images go now to Alamy only.
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Not many sales but every now and then I get $6.99 commission for one and that keeps me interested. I would like to send buyers there but there is the risk of them doing a lucky oliver and that stops me.
If we all go around fearing that we'll lose a couple of dollars whenever an agency goes under, we can as well stay with IS and SS and accept the 10% or less they are going to offer when they've taken control of the market. Your maximum loss is $50.
While FP isn't a big seller for me either, it's been increasing lately, and with 7 dollars a shot, I'm smiling all the way ;D
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Here's a funny record:
After two - 2 - days of July, FP tops my sales statistics for the month, just ahead of SS. Who would've thought.
Oh well, that won't last for many hours I'm afraid, but it shows what those 70% commissions can do if you're lucky ;D
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Not many sales but every now and then I get $6.99 commission for one and that keeps me interested. I would like to send buyers there but there is the risk of them doing a lucky oliver and that stops me.
If we all go around fearing that we'll lose a couple of dollars whenever an agency goes under, we can as well stay with IS and SS and accept the 10% or less they are going to offer when they've taken control of the market. Your maximum loss is $50.
While FP isn't a big seller for me either, it's been increasing lately, and with 7 dollars a shot, I'm smiling all the way ;D
hmm, i agree it's funny logic. I 'lost' about $20 (spending on other people so they got payout) when luckyO went down, but before that I made a couple of hundred dollars for the little bit of time I put in. Glass half full :)
worst case if fp went down I'd lose up to $50, but it may never happen and in the mean time I make $50 every 4-5 weeks.
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Not many sales but every now and then I get $6.99 commission for one and that keeps me interested. I would like to send buyers there but there is the risk of them doing a lucky oliver and that stops me.
If we all go around fearing that we'll lose a couple of dollars whenever an agency goes under, we can as well stay with IS and SS and accept the 10% or less they are going to offer when they've taken control of the market. Your maximum loss is $50.
While FP isn't a big seller for me either, it's been increasing lately, and with 7 dollars a shot, I'm smiling all the way ;D
hmm, i agree it's funny logic. I 'lost' about $20 (spending on other people so they got payout) when luckyO went down, but before that I made a couple of hundred dollars for the little bit of time I put in. Glass half full :)
worst case if fp went down I'd lose up to $50, but it may never happen and in the mean time I make $50 every 4-5 weeks.
What I meant was that I don't want to spend lots of time linking photos on my own website to FP if they have to close like Lucky Oliver did. Time is money and I see it as losing a lot more than $50 if that happened. I might lose more money if someone asks were to buy my photos and I send them there. It has to be a risk that they will close and I could lose a good buyer. If they had better sales, I would recommend them to everyone. I really hope they increase sales, as they offer us more selling options than any other site.
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sharpshot,
Aren't you a tiny bit pessimistic now? We don't know anything about the financial health of any of these agencies. One of the big 6 may as well go under as a result of all their marketing costs, overhead or whatever. If nobody support new and/or upcoming agencies, we may just as well leave all our business to IS or SS, and accept the 1.5% commission they'll offer us when the competition is gone.
Or, as an even safer alternative, we could all go home, pull a brown paper bag over our head, and hope that the sky won't be falling until next week :D
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I don't think I am being pessimistic. I had much better sales with Lucky Oliver and was surprised when they closed. I will give new sites as much support as I can but if they are not making much money for me after a year, I won't spend much time on them. Might as well concentrate on the sites that are making me money. There are 7 of those so far, not just SS and IS. Then there are the traditional sites. My 1 sale with alamy made about as much as I have made with FP in 18 months.
I still upload to FP every now and then and hope that they attract more buyers but I don't see that paying us 70% commission and not spending much on advertising is a good policy. All the sites that have good sales have spent lots on advertising and they are unlikely to go under as they now have lots of buyers and happy contributors. Buyers seem to be loyal to sites, so advertising pays well in the long term. Isn't this why LO and several other sites failed? What makes FP so different?
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What makes FP so different?
- They pay us 70%
- They treat us as photographers and partners, not a bunch of "community members"
- They leave to us to value our photos
- They mostly leave to us to decide which photos should be in our portfolio
- They are easy to upload to
- They accept RM and editorial
- They pay promptly, after a couple of days, not after two weeks or three months
- They seem to me to be cost efficient. Not all the fancy (and probably costly) bells & whistles that you find at some other agencies (LO springs to my mind)
If they are able to keep their cost at a moderate level, they can survive for a long time, even with slow sales. That's exactly what I'm looking for: long term commitment.
If a client asks me how to buy one of my photos, I can send him to IS and get 20% or I can send him to FP and get 70%. As long as FP exists, that's a very easy choice if you ask me. Should FP be gone the day after, I'll possibly lose, not my 70%, but the 20% I would have earned, had I send him to IS instead. And I can still send my client to IS or wherever the next time he needs one of my photos.
Alamy obviously pays better than any microstock agency, but at FP, I have both: microstock photos for microstock prices and RM photos for macrostock prices. And FP pays much faster than Alamy or any other macrostock agency.
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Here's a funny record:
After two - 2 - days of July, FP tops my sales statistics for the month, just ahead of SS. Who would've thought.
Oh well, that won't last for many hours I'm afraid, but it shows what those 70% commissions can do if you're lucky ;D
Just one sale this month and FP is ahead of DT, BigStock and 123RF, equal to FT, and after IS and StockXpert only. While it may not last, it's delightful.
Regards,
Adelaide
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Reviving this old thread, I got worried about Featurepics. Being used to having 2-4 sales consistently every month, sales suddenly grinded to an halt after July 2008. That's hard to believe: a stop by deteriorating business should rather be gradual. Apparently, they didn't change the search algorithm too much, since my shots still pop up very well.
The question remains whether anybody else had similar experiences since July.
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My last sale was in August! Since then 0, nada, zip, capute nothing, rien!
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I don't have my numbers here with me, but had some sales every month. This month, two so far.
Regards,
Adelaide
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No sales here, either... I have long ago given up on them...
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So did I. They did not sell a single file for a few months so I gave up uploading. However, I did not delete my pictures. They have still about a thousand of them if they should start selling.
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Nothing since August after 4 good months in a row. Not sure what changed. Will stop uploading end of month if something doesn't happen.
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It's very up and down. July and September were good months for me (BME in July), but I had no sales in August and none so far in October.
I see from sales at other agencies that sales during American business hours have gone down, while European business hours are good, probably due to the fact that the financial crisis started in the US and has hit much harder there. If FP has done little or nothing to market themselves in Europe, that may be one reason for the lacking sales now. On the other hand, a small agency like FP will always have less consistent sales than larger agencies.
If I want to have something to worry about, I would rather look at SS. The number of sales per day there for me are around half of what they were one year ago.
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I forgot to mention that I reached a new pay-out. :)
I am concerned however with their recent site mail:
Unfortunately, we haven't done so well the last 2 months. Our sales have dropped.
It's not a reason to give up, but it is a reason to do more from our side.
And I learnt yeaterday that they stopped the RM licensing. Images currently set as RM will remain so, but new uploads will be only for RF or RF editorial. Sad.
Regards,
Adelaide
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still ticking along but slower last couple of months
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Two days after I made my first post, I got a sale again on FP, the first one since July. Serendipity or synchronicity?
I see from sales at other agencies that sales during American business hours have gone down, while European business hours are good, probably due to the fact that the financial crisis started in the US and has hit much harder there.
Correct.
If I want to have something to worry about, I would rather look at SS. The number of sales per day there for me are around half of what they were one year ago.
Correct also. My earnings went down to 2/3 after a 6 months pause in uploading. When I resumed uploading again, sales took off for a few days. Then the crisis hit, and my SS daily sales the past 1-2 weeks have been at 20% what they used to be. Early sales (EU business hours) staid the same, later sales (US East coast) went down. Latest sales (US West Coast) are a disaster. It's hardly understandable since subscription packages span one to several months, and every day customers miss their download allowance, they lose.
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I forgot to mention that I reached a new pay-out. :)
I am concerned however with their recent site mail:
Unfortunately, we haven't done so well the last 2 months. Our sales have dropped.
It's not a reason to give up, but it is a reason to do more from our side.
And I learnt yeaterday that they stopped the RM licensing. Images currently set as RM will remain so, but new uploads will be only for RF or RF editorial. Sad.
Regards,
Adelaide
That's strange since Featurepics would indicate they are selling Feature Pictures / Editorial.
RF Editorial, that's an interesting apparent contradiction. But never fear, I can search and read. ;D
"Royalty Free, Editorial" refers to newsworthy, personal and educational publications, digital and video work products, etc. that do not generate income or are not used to promote the generation of income.
In other words, none of the people who would want, need or use my photos. If this is the way they are going, I guess I'll have to pull the plug and remove all my images, because they are of no use to FP or me, taking up space there. Nothing wrong with that, just that it doesn't make sense to waste their time or mine. Too bad because I thought the site was a very nice niche for my smaller editorial images.
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Since I started this thread back in June, I still have had no sales.
As I said, I have stopped uploading but unfortunately for me I have earnings there short of my first payout.
Phew!! :'(
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RF Editorial, that's an interesting apparent contradiction. But never fear, I can search and read. ;D
But isn't that the same in other sites that accept editorial images, such as DT?
Regards,
Adelaide
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RF Editorial, that's an interesting apparent contradiction. But never fear, I can search and read. ;D
But isn't that the same in other sites that accept editorial images, such as DT?
Regards,
Adelaide
I don't do anything editorial except Alamy and Featurepics. On Alamy it defaults to Licensed as soon as the boxes are clicked for No Model Release or No Property Release. (If needed) The option to sell Editorial RF doesn't exist on Alamy.
The part that eliminates me is do not generate income or are not used to promote the generation of income because the photos I am submitting are news. I can't imagine someone who doesn't generate income, paying $20 for an image. ??? The price on DT is "as low as 20c"
Maybe I can rephrase it better by saying, I'm confused? No announcement from FP but it's on their forum, I don't see much market for RF editorial. I'm not saying it's wrong... I just don't get it. ;D
RF editorial is the correct choice.
RM license doesn't work for our site, so we deleted it from the list of license options on the Artist's side.
Old RM images will appear on the site.
Thank you, Elena.
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RF Editorial, that's an interesting apparent contradiction. But never fear, I can search and read. ;D
But isn't that the same in other sites that accept editorial images, such as DT?
Regards,
Adelaide
It is. SS, Yay, Scanstock and most recently BS fall in the same category. Traditionally, news media have preferred RM for different reasons, one of them being cost, but with the low prices of microstock, at least that argument falls. I see a lot of my images uploaded to Scanstock in Norwegian newspapers.
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My sales were low too. So I asked them to delete my images and close my account. They did so, and they also paid me the $ 28 I had on my account.
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The part that eliminates me is do not generate income or are not used to promote the generation of income because the photos I am submitting are news. I can't imagine someone who doesn't generate income, paying $20 for an image.
I understand it as not generating income with the photo itself. No posters, no mugs. The buyer only sells a magazine with the image illustrating an article.
No announcement from FP but it's on their forum, I don't see much market for RF editorial.
I saw that and asked for clarification. Strange not to be annouced even by site mail. I have uploaded a RM on Sunday or Monday. I sold two RM images in FP.
Regards,
Adelaide
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Since I started this thread back in June, I still have had no sales. As I said, I have stopped uploading but unfortunately for me I have earnings there short of my first payout.
How can you have earnings without sales? Referrals?
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I've had a few referrals, but I think takestock was referring to earnings from sales before June.
Regards,
Adelaide
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last sale 9/17/08
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funny, everyone talks about YAYmicro and Featurepics, having no sales...
but you don't hear anyone asking the same question about SnapVillage,
Image Catalog,etc...
from what i hear , they don't sell either. or is it just my network ?
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Hali,
People are getting tired - these have been covered before and yes- both are very sparodic performers, (for me anyaway)
Right now I think, the jury is out on quite a few.
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3rd sale this month today.
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Just in the other day i wrote here that i don´t have any sale for months and voilá i got a sale today :)
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funny, everyone talks about YAYmicro and Featurepics, having no sales...
but you don't hear anyone asking the same question about SnapVillage,
Image Catalog,etc...
from what i hear , they don't sell either. or is it just my network ?
That is easy to explain. I have regular sales at SnapVillage, but zero sales at YaY and not a single sales for about half a year at Feature.
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what did you expect from crappy site?