Author Topic: Y.A.M.S. - Yet another Microstock Site (Read 19414 times)

clustershot · « **Reply #25 on:** July 27, 2009, 10:46 »

Thank you to everyone for your feedback and concerns. Yeah, we have some awesomely crappy photos on clustershot.com. That is what happens when you open up a photography marketplace. We think of ourselves much more like an Ebay than an Istockphoto.

We are going to be launching some new features very shortly (maybe later this week) that will allow photographers to have their own mini-site. Kind of a simple white labelling of our site. We're considering adding this feature and a few others into a "pro account" for 10-20$/year. We're looking for some honest feedback on the idea and are very open to criticism and concerns.

Please let us know what you think and we thank everyone (close to 1400 of you) who use ClusterShot. We're in this for the long haul as we feel this model deserves a sustained push.

corareed · « **Reply #26 on:** July 27, 2009, 13:33 »

I lost count of the number of copyright violations I found.
Hope they have a good legal department.

Sean Locke Photography · « **Reply #27 on:** July 27, 2009, 13:37 »

Quote from: clustershot on July 27, 2009, 10:46

We're considering adding this feature and a few others into a "pro account" for 10-20$/year. We're looking for some honest feedback on the idea and are very open to criticism and concerns.

Sounds like you're not making enough money from image sales and need to make money off of photographers. Like shutterpoint.

PixelBytes · « **Reply #28 on:** July 27, 2009, 14:48 »

Quote from: epantha on May 01, 2009, 13:26

Wow! What an unfortunate name. $:-\$
Did anyone else think it said Clusterf**k at first?

OMG, that's exactly what I thought too

That, and my mouth watered a bit at the idea of Y.A.M.S. (candied and covered with marshmallows, of course)

clustershot · « **Reply #29 on:** July 27, 2009, 15:11 »

corareed: We have a permissive posting policy. Anyone is allowed to post anything. If anything is reported (please send us the copyright infringements you found) we review it and remove the necessary photos. It's important to point out that just like on Ebay you're not buying the photo from us, but from the photographer. It's the photographer's responsibility to make sure they post sell-able content.

sjlocke: As funny as this sounds, we're not really overly concerned about money right now. ClusterShot is a side-project of long-time web development firm silverorange, inc (www.silverorange.com). ClusterShot has no staff, has no office space and has no huge overhead expenses. The only costs we incur are very small hosting and processing fees. Everything else is donated time from silverorange. Silverorange is committed to give ClusterShot the chance we feel the business model deserves and if that means floating it for a year or two then so be it.

Our initial rational for creating the pro-level accounts is to provide photographers tools that they could use that most other picture takers wouldn't. A store to market (think Photoshelter but with fewer customizable options), watermarking, traffic statistics, etc. Obviously it would be nice to give these features away but we're not opposed to charging a nominal fee for them. We want to keep the costs low enough that it's not a serious commitment for anyone to try. If you can provide us with some good arguments on our pricing (or charging at all), we are definitely interested in hearing them.

Thanks again to everyone for their feedback.

HughStoneIan · « **Reply #30 on:** July 27, 2009, 16:08 »

Quote from: clustershot on July 27, 2009, 15:11

... (please send us the copyright infringements you found) ....

Oh, wow, a "community" effort? Cool! Sign me up!!! You know how expensive hiring reviewers and editors can be, right? So let's all share in this labor together (for free, of course, and for the good of the Cluster).

Adeptris · « **Reply #31 on:** July 27, 2009, 16:23 »

Quote from: clustershot on July 27, 2009, 15:11

corareed: <..
..> It's important to point out that just like on Ebay you're not buying the photo from us, but from the photographer. It's the photographer's responsibility to make sure they post sell-able content.

Thanks again to everyone for their feedback.

Nearly there, but your service is not like Ebay, if I take an image of "The London Eye" as the 'Primary Subject' which has restictions for commercial use, I select and choose the "Buy Now" transaction, taking me through to PayPal from your website, your current system completes the transaction between Cluster Shot and the end client or Customer.

This is unlike Ebay that will just broker the transaction and send the supplier an Invoice at month end, as Ebay justs act as a merchant and the transaction is between the Supplier and the Customer, as was proved in a US court Ebay were not responsible to police the sellers products, but this view has since been challenged in a French court $63 Million damages (see links below), so you are not on safe ground here, also your service holds uploaded assets and supplies the downloadable assets from your server, this means that your service has liabilities and responsibilities in any transaction.

Link: This is not legal advice just my analysis on why many think that content and usage is it just the buyers problem?

Link: eBay breaks bread with luxury goods firms (July 2008)

Edit:
As it stands with the French courts now eBay have again won the day, the court case run for 2 years, eBay would have needed to prove to the court that they are themselves proactive in stopping copyright violation, quote: “We are delighted that eBay’s meaningful efforts to fight counterfeits online have been recognised by the court..."

David

corareed · « **Reply #32 on:** July 27, 2009, 16:38 »

Excellent article David.

Sean Locke Photography · « **Reply #33 on:** July 27, 2009, 16:55 »

Quote from: clustershot on July 27, 2009, 15:11

ClusterShot has no staff, has no office space and has no huge overhead expenses.

Did you really want to promote that?

cidepix · « **Reply #34 on:** July 27, 2009, 17:12 »

Quote from: sjlocke on July 27, 2009, 16:55

Quote from: clustershot on July 27, 2009, 15:11
ClusterShot has no staff, has no office space and has no huge overhead expenses.

Did you really want to promote that?

Yeap! That, he didn't want!

Adeptris · « **Reply #35 on:** July 28, 2009, 02:38 »

Quote from: clustershot on July 27, 2009, 15:11

<..
>.. sjlocke: As funny as this sounds, we're not really overly concerned about money right now. ClusterShot is a side-project of long-time web development firm silverorange, inc (www.silverorange.com). ClusterShot has no staff, has no office space and has no huge overhead expenses. The only costs we incur are very small hosting and processing fees. Everything else is donated time from silverorange. Silverorange is committed to give ClusterShot the chance we feel the business model deserves and if that means floating it for a year or two then so be it.

You would need office and staff in time but there is nothing wrong while developing and carrying out proof-of- concept, that would need to be completed to fund a full service, I have looked at SilverOrange and the tools do look quite interesting, the small hosting and processing fees will soon grow if you get a few hundered thousand assets uploaded, this would be a few hundred thousand dollars so you should not expect that SilverOrange will meet all of the cost.

Quote from: clustershot on July 27, 2009, 15:11

Our initial rational for creating the pro-level accounts is to provide photographers tools that they could use that most other picture takers wouldn't. A store to market (think Photoshelter but with fewer customizable options), watermarking, traffic statistics, etc. Obviously it would be nice to give these features away but we're not opposed to charging a nominal fee for them. We want to keep the costs low enough that it's not a serious commitment for anyone to try. If you can provide us with some good arguments on our pricing (or charging at all), we are definitely interested in hearing them.

I.M.H.O. many agree that we need new markets and services so you may not be flogging a dead horse, the first thing you need to look at is the legal side of things and how you protect the artists right through to the buyers, one paragraph of T&C's will not protect anyone, published full terms and conditions for artists, buyers and each licence type is a must.
if you want an open upload policy then you need to understand the different usages Commercial and Editorial and have a clear indicator on each image as to what it can be used for if it has property or model releases assigned, you may find that you can get advice here if you come back with a set of relevent questions after your research.

Forget becoming another Istock the market is already saturated and there is no real chance, offering the high 88% commission percentages might bring a few new or naive contributors but it will not bring seasoned contributors or more importantly customers, prices are already cut to the bone across the industry and customers are already established with agencies, the way to get contributors to submit is to find and open up new markets, they are there but the delivery tools are not as yet.

Pro-Level accounts are out there already Photoshelter doing a better job for stock artists than SmugMug do, and many artists have thier own webspace with just a portfolio of samples and links to thier stock portfolios.

Create a new service that gets our images from your website, our own webspace, PhotoShelter, Amazon S3, or SmugMug in a widgit to places like WP Blog Pages, Twitter and MySpace with an easy PayPal style payment process, where you charge a small transaction fee then you have my full attention.

I am sure some would agree and some will argue, that is the good thing about open forum debates

David

kaycee · « **Reply #36 on:** July 28, 2009, 05:22 »

@clustershot ...
I mention in an earlier e-mail to you about water marking the images. You responded that would be a feature for a pro account in this case I don't think many people would go for the pro account.
For now I leave my 50 images on your site and see what happens in a few months.
But I have a feeling that the low res images would ripped of your site (they could use it for web) so you and I gonna loose money.

shutterdrop · « **Reply #37 on:** July 28, 2009, 07:28 »

If you can not shoot, become a reviewer with an attitude. If you bust-out as a reviewer, open a [Y.A.M.S.] - Yet another Microstock Site.

There will always be monkeys with cameras that you can feed with peanuts.

clustershot · « **Reply #38 on:** July 28, 2009, 09:42 »

@sjlocke - We're not really concerned about what people think about our office setup or our overhead. We are lean for a reason. Silverorange has a full time staff of 14, infrastructure, and all of the goodies that comes with being a successful business for over a decade. ClusterShot is lean because we want it to succeed. We don't want to fool anyone and pretend that we're something that we are not.

@Adeptris Thank you so much for your well thought out, researched, and well expressed replies. You certainly know what you're talking about. I think it's fair to say that currently we are closer to an Ebay model than to an Istock one. We have a lot of work to do to get even closer. As you've pointed out there are legal challenges and of course there are those pesky technical challenges as well. We're up for all of those challenges and will address them as we get to them. We are looking into a few partnerships that will take care of some of these issues.

You said:

Quote

"the small hosting and processing fees will soon grow if you get a few hundered thousand assets uploaded, this would be a few hundred thousand dollars so you should not expect that SilverOrange will meet all of the cost."

I just wanted to take the time to debunk some myths on website costs. We currently are hosting 372,401 photos. 213,791 of those are published live on the public site. Our costs are still in the low hundreds per month for ALL hosting, storage, processing and delivery fees. We're using Amazon for Storage, photo processing, and also using their Cloudfront services. Websites are cheap to host and maintain if you know what you are doing.

We're not trying to become another IstockPhoto. TechCrunch unfortunately labelled us that way and we've been trying to fight off the title since!

David, we're in the process of building out a full API that will allow anyone (blog software writers, gallery software owners, etc) to access and use ClusterShot in ways we could never imagine. We're hoping that this will bring some of the things you listed to life.

@kaycee Watermarking is indeed going to be part of the pro-level account (we made that decision). It's a custom watermark feature (you control what it is). As for your photos being ripped off of the site. That is a valid concern and we understand if you don't want to host your images without a watermark. Most of the images on our site come from Flickr or public RSS feeds. These photos are already publicly available sans-watermark. Us watermarking them seems a little futile at that point. All of that said we're changing and evolving. If we get the feature request enough for non-pro accounts who knows we may back it down into the regular accounts.

Again, thanks to all for the feedback and concerns. We hear you and will continue to make improvements and features based on them.

clustershot · « **Reply #39 on:** August 04, 2009, 14:39 »

As our pro-accounts were discussed above I thought I would give everyone the heads up that they are now live.

Feature set:
http://www.clustershot.com/help/upgradingtoapro

Example of a pro store:
http://danjames.clustershot.com/

Custom watermarking (as discussed above) is included in the features. $20/year.

As always, feedback is welcome.

kaycee · « **Reply #40 on:** August 04, 2009, 16:34 »

Quote from: clustershot on August 04, 2009, 14:39

As our pro-accounts were discussed above I thought I would give everyone the heads up that they are now live.

Feature set:
http://www.clustershot.com/help/upgradingtoapro

Example of a pro store:
http://danjames.clustershot.com/

Custom watermarking (as discussed above) is included in the features. $20/year.

As always, feedback is welcome.

I just wait and see.
Maybe after I gonna have a sale I will pay the price but I guess I'm better off with closing my account.
I think not that many people will go for a pro account.

BTW how does the watermark look I didn't find a sample

clustershot · « **Reply #41 on:** August 04, 2009, 20:15 »

Quote

BTW how does the watermark look I didn't find a sample

Ooops, my bad. I should have put a link.

There is a watermark on the feature image of this pro-store: http://benoitgagnon.clustershot.com/

It's pretty simple overlayed text. Users provide the text and we do the processing for the various sizes It can be applied to all of the photos in your account or to the larger feature images of your pro store (as is in this example).

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers!

Sean Locke Photography · « **Reply #42 on:** August 04, 2009, 20:56 »

It actually looks very nice. I'm not crazy about the 100% crop, as most of them that I've seen don't show anything but areas of nothing interesting. But the site layout and functionality seems to be mostly there.

I would change the terminology "Buy Now" and "make an offer for this photo" as this draws the buyer away from the notion of licensing and towards "buying" - ownership. I would also beef up the RF license detail page as it seems a bit light.

clustershot · « **Reply #43 on:** August 04, 2009, 21:14 »

Thanks for your compliments and thoughts on the design/layout. Yeah, our 100% crop was good when it was in "the lab" but once we started seeing it applied to hundreds of thousands of images we realized it fails fairly spectacularly. It's on our list of things to revisit and make better.

Quote

I would change the terminology "Buy Now" and "make an offer for this photo" as this draws the buyer away from the notion of licensing and towards "buying" - ownership. I would also beef up the RF license detail page as it seems a bit light.

We've wrestled with this and where we initially came from is showing through in our UI a little. One of our main intentions with ClusterShot was/is to be very friendly to that large number of photo buyers out there who go to Google and search for "Looking for a photo of a bird flying". These are small business owners, amateur designers, business people making presentations, etc. They might not understand all of the terminology of the photo industry (lightboxes, RF, Rights managed, Distribution, etc) but they all have shopped on Amazon or bought something online. We're trying to adhere to the "Buy" and "shopping cart" E-commerce UI as much as we can.

To be honest we are still wrestling with all of this (general position in the market, etc) and will probably continue to do so as we're pulled many different ways by many different groups.

Do you have any suggestions on different friendly terminology that newbies and seasoned photo sourcers would find appropriate? We thought "Buy" was the best of the worst.

Thanks again for your feedback. We do read it all and sincerely consider it.

Amos Struck · « **Reply #44 on:** August 18, 2009, 10:02 »

@clustershot: Any news regarding your superb API you want to supply. I want to impliment new stockphoto agencies into my first microstock Wordpress Plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/microstock-photo-plugin/)

clustershot · « **Reply #45 on:** August 18, 2009, 14:48 »

Quote from: Amosnet on August 18, 2009, 10:02

@clustershot: Any news regarding your superb API you want to supply. I want to impliment new stockphoto agencies into my first microstock Wordpress Plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/microstock-photo-plugin/)

It's not ready for release into the wild but I can put you in touch with one of our lead developers. They can help you integrate it with your plugin. Can you private message me on here or email me at [email protected] and I'll get you in touch.

Thanks for thinking of us!

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Author Topic: Y.A.M.S. - Yet another Microstock Site (Read 19414 times)

clustershot

corareed

Sean Locke Photography

PixelBytes

clustershot

HughStoneIan

Adeptris

corareed

Sean Locke Photography

cidepix

Adeptris

kaycee

shutterdrop

clustershot

clustershot

kaycee

clustershot

Sean Locke Photography

clustershot

Amos Struck

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