Hi Donna,

Thanks for additional clarification. One of these days I am going to get better at following the flow of messages on forums!  

I am sorry you haven't had any sales with us and hope that changes soon. We knew when we got into stock last summer that it would take time to build up the stock side of the business; we will continue to work on growing T3DS.

If you have any further questions/concerns about the view count or anything at T3DS please feel free to email me.

[email protected]

Quote from: stockastic on March 20, 2010, 19:55

Quote from: donding on March 20, 2010, 17:26
Haven't had one sale yet after 22,202 views.

Ok that got my attention.  How could that possibly be true? Maybe the site's view counts are bogus, or the prices are too high.  

my guess is that someone has embedded the image into their blog?

Quote from: danoph on March 22, 2010, 21:22


We are still staying niche focused and do not accept photos requiring a model release since there aren't any other sites that focus on non-people related photography. We think that separates us a little bit from the other guys.

While I do have model released photos ... I think you have found an excellent niche and way to distinguish your site from the others out there. My wife and I are both new members and are very happy with both the site itself, your business model (higher commissions) and the sales activity that we've both experienced and witnessed so far. Please please keep up the good work.

-Mark

Quote from: Phil on March 22, 2010, 22:51my guess is that someone has embedded the image into their blog?

Hotlinking by the IMG tag always bypasses any processing (included counting) by the site.

Quote from: stockastic on March 22, 2010, 21:41
All I'm really interested in are object shots with (I hope) a bit of a arty quality to them, so if I can get any visibility in GL's vast sea of vectors, I mght make a few sales.

Where's this vast sea of vectors you say?
Everytime I search for something vectors are 10% of the results now.
I wish they'd make a separate site or place for photos(Hint- photoleftovers.com is available) or something. Maybe a cool interface which will let you switch between photos and graphics with the same account.
The reason I joined GLO(before it got popular on this board) was because I was looking for a site filling a niche for graphics. Now it's just another site(cheers for the commission tho). Oh well...

As for the views, I'm guessing the site counts all views including anonymous(not logged in) and not unique.

I've only been on GL since last Friday, and I'm a fan already.

Submitting is the easiest of ANY site out there.

I got a sale immediately on Friday, and though I was afraid it might be a fluke, I got another on Sunday.  A total of $5.20 for a Friday afternoon thru Sunday afternoon... beats many of the middle and bottom tier sites as far as I'm concerned.

High hopes for this one!

Everyone please note: there is no problem with view counts on Graphic Leftovers.  donding made a post in error, he was referring to another site.  He has since corrected his post.

Quote from: stockastic on March 23, 2010, 15:46donding made a post in error, he was referring to another site.  He has since corrected his post.

Pssst...   Donna is a "she".  

I got a sale this past weekend on GL not much but I'm happy.  Now if I could just get Cutcaster going and the3dstudio (and on that one need to figure out blender and make them some 3d images which could help with getting going on that site

Very easy to upload to once I asked for an ftp account heh!

Anyone have anything to report here?

I uploaded 150 images, and got 3 sales right away.  Since then I've had about 1,000 more views but no sales.   That's not a large number of views per image on average, but still kind of odd that all those views didn't result in a sale.   

I have 1043 images online.  I've only had two sales, totalling $5.20.  The site is claiming that my images have had 6184 views.

Quote from: Phillip Minnis on May 20, 2010, 00:35
I have 1043 images online.  I've only had two sales, totalling $5.20.  The site is claiming that my images have had 6184 views.

A have also a lot of views but unfortunately only one sale. Maybe they are counting also bots and web crawlers to the statistics of image views.

10 sales so far.  Sales are probably low because a lot of us have uploaded our portfolios in recent months, the same has happened with other sites when they are swamped with new images.  Stay patient and hope for the best.  I like their site and the upload is easy, it is hard for the smaller sites but they have a chance if we stick with them.

Well there's always hope.  To bad it's not pay-per-view.   

I like the site because they're not doing model shots. 

My sales have been light but steady... a few downloads a week... and I just hit my first payout there, so as far as I'm concerned this is a site with real promise!

There's always hope.

DT and SS are slowly but steadily dying for me - new images return less than old ones.   Approval at IS is now so unpredictable I hardly bother anymore.  So I'm looking for new sites.  If GL started generating an occasional sale, and offered an exclusive deal, I'd sign up in a second, just to simplify my life and get back to taking more pictures instead of begging for spare change on the Big 3.

I have had 4 sales there so far ... all were $2.60 commission 

-Mark
http://markwpayne.wordpress.com

5 sales (3 months)

Average $35 a month with about 1000 files. But I like them!

Since Feb 20th:

19 sales
$ 54.95
Portfolio: 613

http://stockillustrator.blogspot.com/

I made a few more bucks there so I'm encouraged.  It sort of worries me, though, that they're accepting 100% of my keywords.  I think my keywording is fair, but  I'm worried about all you other guys who I know are spamming.     

Seriously - I think the days of just letting contributors do all the keywording, on the honor system, are over.  That road led to the madness that is Shutterstock.  But I also think IStocks' CV is overkill.  There has to be a middle ground, where reviewers spend time looking at keywords on submitted images, which I know costs money, but shouldn't that pay off in the long run?  How else is a site going to offer a better search? 

I've only had three sales, with a portfolio of 1207 images.  Each of those sales has netted me $2.60 each.  Even though it's not satisfactory, it's a darn site better than the five sales I've had on Featurepics over the past five months, totalling $2.10! 

It's a nice easy site to upload to, and the staff are very helpful and friendly!

Hi everyone,

I wanted to reply to a few of your questions and concerns...

@stockastic: since many contributors on stock sites abuse keywording, we took the same approach that google does in its search results instead of limiting the amount that you can use. Image titles and descriptions are factored into search results a great deal more than keywords are, so if someone is spamming keywords for their images, their images will not appear in all those search results as much as artists who use quality and relevant titles and descriptions. It's less work on our part and the contributor's, and it provides better search results for the buyer that way.

@jareso: you are correct, the views do count bots (like google and yahoo crawling the site) and we intend to correct that soon. It does not count you looking at your own images though.

@sharpshot: we have been swamped with contributors with large portfolios signing up recently, and that is probably the reason for lower sales in the past month or so. Hopefully that will turn around soon with the marketing and promotion efforts we are doing for the site.

Other than that, I'm glad to hear it's so easy to upload to our site. Now we are primarily focused on getting more buyers so everyone can make more money!

Quote from: danoph on June 03, 2010, 17:01
@stockastic: since many contributors on stock sites abuse keywording, we took the same approach that google does in its search results instead of limiting the amount that you can use. Image titles and descriptions are factored into search results a great deal more than keywords ar

Interesting!  So I assume it would be worthwhile for me to revisit all of them and make sure they contain the most important keywords - without spamming, of course?

This is actually kind of a bummer for me.  I tried to do the right thing and came up with an honest, focused but complete set of keywords for every image, and kept my title and desrciption short and simplistic.  Now microstocks are throwing in the towel, saying that keywords are out of control, and in the search the keywords are being de-emphasized in favor of the title and description.  Isn't this just a way of running from the problem?  Won't contributors start stuffing the descriptions?

@stockastic - it's not really running away from the problem...I think of it as an SEO issue, and the issue with SEO is always staying ahead of the curve and what everyone else is doing...Google is pretty good at filtering spam and I tend to use them as inspiration for our own website. Everyone is becoming SEO savvy nowadays so you have to be more creative than the next guy to stand out in the sea of websites/images on the internet, you know? Not trying to say you have to revisit all of your images and redo them, but the more time spent on each image is what separates good from great in my opinion. I see a lot of great images from awesome photographers/illustrators on our site that have one or two word titles and descriptions and I know that when Google comes and indexes images from the site, it tends to look for more title and description heavy pages/images to index. So, good titles and descriptions would help you not only on our site but in google image search results. Also, if you have any suggestions, I'd be willing to hear them