That could be interesting. I'm always interested in self promotion, so I'm curious to see what you have come up with.

The one thing that isn't on the project preview yet is our contributor royalty rates. These will start at 35% and work there way up to as much as 70%. One of the things we will be doing at Creative Warehouse is really creating a community that helps regulate the content on the site and is very "hands on." We want everyone to feel a sense of ownership at Creative Warehouse, and we want to end the corporate feel that all microstock sites have. So the more involved you are in our community, the higher your royalty rate.

How can we sustain a 70% royalty rate? Well, it's really all in the numbers. If we don't have a huge corporate staff and have only the key people that we need, we don't have the massive overhead that all the other sites have. In addition, we are going to have other ways that 1 piece of artwork generates recurring income for a contributor, besides the obvious royalty from a consumer downloading the image. We can't discuss any of these tactics publicly yet because we are closing the first round of funding, but let me tell you; You'll love what we are building!

If you would like to see a quick preview of our project, DM me and I'll send you the link.

Thanks everyone!

I would like to see it, why don�t you post a link here?

I'd be interested to check it out.

Looks like just another micro from someone we've not heard from before, just with a contributor landing page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1458494044/479670521
http://www.indiegogo.com/creativewarehouse

BTW, to the OP, "contributers" is spelled "contributors".

'At Creative Warehouse we turned down the �token� or �credit� based systems that plague the micro-stock market. Why? Because we believe that $10 worth of art should always buy you $10 worth of art.'

... until we raise the price to something else.

"Ridiculously high royalty rates" don't mean anything until there are sales to fund those rates.

Looks like just another micro from someone we've not heard from before, just with a contributor landing page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1458494044/479670521
http://www.indiegogo.com/creativewarehouse

BTW, to the OP, "contributers" is spelled "contributors".

'At Creative Warehouse we turned down the �token� or �credit� based systems that plague the micro-stock market. Why? Because we believe that $10 worth of art should always buy you $10 worth of art.'

... until we raise the price to something else.

"Ridiculously high royalty rates" don't mean anything until there are sales to fund those rates.

Thanks for pointing out the spelling error. We actually saw that after we created the video and are revamping the video with the change.

I'd like to address a couple of your points (which are valid):

We are building this for the contributors, because we ourselves our contributors on large sites. I can't divulge our names because we are exclusive and will lose our exclusivity. I totally agree with the marketing and sales funding the royalty rates. That is one of the challenges with starting one of these sites, but we have a solid game plan on how to execute that part of our model. 

I can't divulge our names because we are exclusive and will lose our exclusivity.

Them's the breaks.

Interesting statement near the end of the video (at 3.21) that (to paraphrase) At the end of 2012 one of the largest microstock sites will stop paying a royalty percentage and just pay contributors "pennies per download". Anyone got a clue to whom they are referring? Regards, David.

I noticed that too. I wonder how many pennies they are talking about.

Interesting statement near the end of the video (at 3.21) that (to paraphrase) At the end of 2012 one of the largest microstock sites will stop paying a royalty percentage and just pay contributors "pennies per download". Anyone got a clue to whom they are referring? Regards, David.

Perhaps they're guessing that non-exclusives will be thrown off istock and will only be able to sell through Thinkstock?  I doubt that will happen but it's the only big site that I can see trying something like that.  I don't think it would be a disaster for contributors though, most of us would leave and take the buyers with us.

The video puts me off a bit.  The music is too loud and everything seems to be about contributors.  What about buyers?  There's some sites that have tried only accepting what they think are high quality images and they seem to have very few buyers.  Reviewers aren't capable of assessing what buyers think is high quality.  As review "standards" are increased, they have an amazing ability to accept images that don't appeal to buyers and reject those that do.  My ideal site would be one that only rejects images for technical reasons but then deletes everything that buyers show no interest in after a year.  I think that's the best way to improve quality, as soon as reviewers have to guess what's good and what isn't, it all goes wrong.

Those high prices look nice for us but will it attract buyers?  Why should I pledge money for this when it doesn't look much different to lots of other failed sites?  I don't believe new sites claims about lots of interested buyers anymore, we need to know there's something different about this site that has somehow attracted the attention of buyers that have so far been very reluctant to leave the established sites.

It looks too good to be true and lots of us have had bad experiences with new sites claiming they can do the almost impossible only to end up being very mediocre.  I think you need to convince us a lot more that you can do what you claim and have buyers interested.

Just seen about the 35% commission to start with.  Now my slight interest had been killed off.

Everyone,

Thank you for all the feedback, it's great to hear all of this (even though some isn't great feedback that I want to hear). I've really poured my heart and soul into this over the past year and it's finally coming to fruition. One of the reasons I wanted to post in this forum was to work through these objections and truly build a contributor built website. By listening to feedback that everyone has we can either kill off certain elements in the site, or build new ones in.

Although the royalty rates are direly important for a contributor, by saying that the lowest we pay out is 35% is really for the contributor who just uploads stuff for the sake of uploading it, with no tie to our community. We want to have the contributors involved in our processes and decisions that are made with regards to the website. There is no other website out there that does that (to my knowledge). By building more of a community, the buyers and the traffic will organically come to the website. We will have a very aggressive marketing and SEO budget that will drive the ads to get buyers to the site, but without great contributors, we don't have great content. By making the contributors a part of the review process for acceptance and having them involved in other areas of the website, we don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every month on "overhead." Therefore, we can afford to pay out really high rates (75-80%). We can't get to that point without everyone's help though.

I apologize if the music was too loud or you think the video is horrible. I didn't want to go out and spend $2,000 to have a video made, so I made it myself to the best of my ability.

I would also like to address the comment "Why should I pledge money for this when it doesn't look much different to lots of other failed sites?" Although right now, this looks like a replication of any other stock site, trust me when I say, this is going to go MUCH deeper. Please understand that we can't lift up our hood and show everyone the insides before it is built. In the public arena our idea would get ripped off in a heartbeat and we would be left with nothing. We have major plans for contributors to make royalties on much more than when someone just simply purchases and downloads their image.

Feel free to DM me and I will give you as much information as I can without the need to sign an NDA.

"Although the royalty rates are direly important for a contributor, by saying that the lowest we pay out is 35% is really for the contributor who just uploads stuff for the sake of uploading it, with no tie to our community. We want to have the contributors involved in our processes and decisions that are made with regards to the website. There is no other website out there that does that (to my knowledge). By building more of a community, the buyers and the traffic will organically come to the website. We will have a very aggressive marketing and SEO budget that will drive the ads to get buyers to the site, but without great contributors, we don't have great content. By making the contributors a part of the review process for acceptance and having them involved in other areas of the website, we don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every month on "overhead.""

I'm sorry, what?  Our job is producing and uploading content.  It's not playing Flickr games or inspecting images or any other 'community' stuff and rates should not be based on that.  Community is a by product of happy producers.  Producers are happy when sales are good, rates are high, and there's no silliness like variable rates based on whether they post in a forum or not.