MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Sites that no longer exist => LuckyOliver.com => Topic started by: sharpshot on October 11, 2007, 04:56
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My sales were slowly increasing with LO until the end of June and have been going down ever since. Now, I have gone from having 16 sales in a month to just one in the past 14 days. My views have also gone down. Bryan has mentioned a few times in the past months that new sales records are being made, so why have my sales crashed?
Has something changed with the search or have the free tokens run out? Is this just a temporary situation or something more serious? I am not going to continue uploading to a site that sells less and less of my photos. All the other sites I am on are doing well and this is usually a good time of the year for sales.
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Yes. No download in over a month.
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Jan: 2
Feb: 0
Mar: 1
Apr: 2
May: 0
Jun: 3
Jul: 3
Aug: 1
Sep: 4
Oct: 1
Total: 17
Views: 8757 (record: Tropical acrobat on beach; 455 views, 0 downloads [and very defective watermark on a 500px! thumb])
Earnings: 11$80
Sales: promises, promises, promises. I stopped uploading for now. A year at LO is a typical 2-3 days at SS. Don't worry, sales will come at LO, when Saturnus is aligned with Mars and Venus. Sometimes, you must let go....
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Sales: promises, promises, promises. I stopped uploading for now. A year at LO is a typical 2-3 days at SS.
Ditto. I've given them one year and it's over now. I'll better try Albumo et Snapvillage.
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i still have hope :) but then again I have managed to get a sale every now and again - often from the sideshow. I think their site is really one of the most attractive. They have kept is clean and simple, and almost 'fun' to click around.
Their customer getting skills haven't been proven yet, and I agree it always seems to be wait, wait, wait, they are coming. If they weren't so easy to upload to I would stop too, but it really only takes less than a minute to get 50 images online.
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I'm with Leaf, too easy to upload to pass on for the sales it does bring. For me, sales jumped signifigantly in July and increased through August and Sept. So far, not much in Oct, but no ELs or Sideshows yet. Until when and if they actually do some marketing, that's the only place to make money at LO.
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I think their site is really one of the most attractive. They have kept is clean and simple, and almost 'fun' to click around.
LO is fun, very well done and friendly reviewers. The sideshow? I wouldn't know since this text keeps popping up that I need 83 more sales to get there. LO would be a big blow for my feeble ego and chase me back to Flickr, but then... there is SS, and they sell. So I keep telling myself that it's not all crap what I shoot ;-)
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I am new to all of this (about 2 months) my take is IS is the most selective, but makes up 80% of my small earnings to date. Fotolia about 10%. The other sites where I have sold mimimal amounts are DT,LO,BS,123RF with no sales on FP or Snapvillage. SS have rejected me twice and I probbaly won't bother submitting again. I will go exclusive with IS I think because the increase in commission % alone would earn me more than all the other sites and thats without even taking the additional promotion and uploads into account. I am not surpriesed they are the industry leader ...
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well i wouldn't give up on shutterstock just yet. They make up almost 50% of my earnings. I would work VERY hard and getting in.... if I were me.
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SS make up about 50% of my earnings as well and istock have varied from 15 to 25%. Going exclusive is a good idea for some but SS have sold some of the photos rejected by istock over 100 times. That puts me off the idea.
It is interesting that those in the sideshow seem to have improved sales with LO while the rest of us have seen a fall. It is frustrating for me being just 20 downloads away. I would have over 100 sales now if they had continued like they were doing until the end of June.
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Im giving LO one more month.
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12 months
15,400 views
31 sales
$45.40
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Im giving LO one more month.
I have to agree. They seem to have some of the best images available on the web, their web-site looks good and works very well, and still, they are not able sell. Very surprising. In this case, it's not even worth waiting for a payout. I'll probably get mine in ten years or so ::)
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I had two sales this month, after a zero in Sept. Previous months had been low, like 3-5 dlds a month. LO never took off for me.
Regards,
Adelaide
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I had 13 sales so far this month but only one sideshow and no ELs.
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just for fun... who has the image with most views, but no downloads on LO.
I have one (ordinary pic if you ask me!) that has 1761 views, but no downloads. Can anyone beat that?
cheers.
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just for fun... who has the image with most views, but no downloads on LO.
I have one (ordinary pic if you ask me!) that has 1761 views, but no downloads. Can anyone beat that?
cheers.
I can't beat it, but I have one that is way up there as well.
1436 views no downloads.
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I have no dls - period. Okay, tiny port but I decided to upload a small number, and see whether I get even the occassional sale before uploading more. Nothing, nada, rien, nichts ...
I am not very enthusiastic about spending more time uploading - althought he guys there seem really nice. Too bad.
Tina
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just for fun... who has the image with most views, but no downloads on LO.
I have one (ordinary pic if you ask me!) that has 1761 views, but no downloads. Can anyone beat that?
cheers.
How do I see views for individual images?
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just for fun... who has the image with most views, but no downloads on LO.
I have one (ordinary pic if you ask me!) that has 1761 views, but no downloads. Can anyone beat that?
cheers.
How do I see views for individual images?
click on your 'views' shield thing near the top. The 'shield' shows you your total views, click on that and you can see views per image.
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Hey guys, I published a chart of our sales growth over the past year on our blog:
http://www.luckyoliver.com/blog/270/sales_graph
Also, my last post in a different thread might be helpful for some artists:
Hey guys, here are a few more data points.
1. Images in the database are building up three times faster than the first half of the year. Some dilution is occurring because our buyer growth hasn't quite kept up with the image growth (though we've had 12 consecutive months of online revenue growth). We're working on it!
2. We're still putting free tokens in the hands of users, but those probably account for a very small percentage of downloads. It's more of a warm-up.
3. The next year is going to be focused on building our buyer community. We have to improve our architecture to scale. Right now this is preventing growth. We're in the process of doubling our capacity to handle traffic.
4. New images might take some time to get exposure based on our search engine. As our traffic increases this will minimize, but short term it might have an impact on views. We also have a couple new features which will increase visibility of images.
5. So far results are a little varied from artist to artist, but we have people that are making monthly payouts. We seem to be getting a lot more extended license and sideshow sales which can make up for the volume. General trend? Those with lots of downloads get more downloads.
Hope this helps.
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So those with lots of downloads are getting more downloads but that must be a small % of contributors. I have more downloads than most but mine have fallen badly the last few months.
I remember this happened with StockXpert at one time and they tweaked the search engine so that the sales were spread out a bit more. There is nothing worse than uploading lots of new photos to a site each month only to see sales falling. I hope something can be done to spread the increased sales out a bit more evenly.
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19,109 views in about 13 months
pretty low average of # of dl's a month
Pretty slow but I also like the ease of uploading to them although I wish they'd put a feature so you could select multiple pictures and then add the model release(s) to all of them at the same time.
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Those with lots of downloads get more downloads.
Hope this helps.
No, that doesn't help. Rather the opposite actually. It makes it even more difficult for those building a new portfolio to compete.
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Those with lots of downloads get more downloads. Hope this helps.
It did. A lot. The Matthew effect is built into the search engine and the site setup then. That's pretty cool. I got 11$ till now on LO (projected payout 2016), and about 10x as much on Featurepics. Sure, I probably shoot crap, but I just don't understand why ShutterStock makes me as much in 3 days as LO in a year. Maybe because I upload 10MP to LO and just 6MP to SS?
The watermark on light shots is still defective. The all-mighty business-guru declared solemnly that watermarks don't matter because Dan Heller told so. Pretty cool too. I just miss the meat. Where is the meat? I won't pay for a sideshow just as I won't pay on Photoshelter. Sales on LO would skyrocket in March 2007 after a breath-taking ad campaign. Didn't see anything though.
Well, the big guys might enjoy a lot of EL's and many payouts, and so be it. Good for them and may the upload spirit always be with them. More Yuri, Andresr, Phildate, Deal on LO then. I'm just a crap amateur in the long tail and I rather offer my stuff for free on the *real* Flickr. It will save me the time to reduce noise on 10MP shots, Flickr is happy with 1MP, and SS with 6MP.
Update: I'm about to cancel my LO account. I keep the email on hold till tomorrow. Anybody has any good argument to stay on LO?
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I am giving them until Christmas to improve my sales and to make my portfolio more visible. There are far to many images with no views at the moment.
What is the point in deleting a portfolio though? It is sensible if the site is likely to vanish, like some have but I don't see LO doing that. I have seen some people delete their portfolios and then upload them again later. Isn't it more sensible to just leave the site alone and check to see if there is any progress in a few months?
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I'm giving them until the end of the year to show some signs of life. I've noticed my images with the highest views on LO are the same ones that are selling well elsewhere (SS, IS, DT) which seems to make a certain amount of sense. But on LO, zero sales. Are people looking at LO, but then going and buying elsewhere? I stopped uploading new stuff to them a few months back. If I don't see activity on some of my best selling images, why waste time uploading more, only to have them languish in obscurity. If between now and the end of the year things pick up, fine. I can easily upload more. But if it continues as it has for over a year now, I'll probably pull out and concentrate on those sites that give me at least some return for my time invested.
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What is the point in deleting a portfolio though?
I did it very rarely. Galastock because of fraud for instance. LO, because of the high view count and the large unprotected thumbs. I thought it was only so for the high-key shots, but can anybody tell me what watermark is so annoying on this giant "thumb"? Takes me 5 sec in Photoshop to un-annoy it, et voila ;-)
If I want to put up shots for grab, I do it at Flickr and with my own shots... and not with shots that are on sale at *selling* MS sites too. LO stepped way out of line doing this.
(http://www.luckyoliver.com/photos/derived//LO-tropical_waterfall-1147099.jpg)
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I had hoped we would be offered a good alternative watermark but I didn't like the changes. Here's an example http://www.luckyoliver.com/photo/2199673/
All I wanted was something similar to SS,IS,DT etc. Now if I can't see the watermark, the photo gets deleted.
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That's the other extreme of poor watermarking. Why can't LO find a more suitable one? They work fine in most sites (FT before the change).
Regards,
Adelaide
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Had my first LO extended license sale recently, other than that, sales are pretty slow, but then, I've got less than 200 images there. A little slow to join in, not much time to contribute to so many sites.
Thankfully, LO's submission process is relatively painless.
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Lately I have been crying the blues about my very, very limited sales versus high views at LO. I've been away this past week on a shoot down in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Tenn & NC).... returned tonight, checked out all my sales and low & behold... not only did I have a few sales on LO this past week, I also got my first EL there. So today, I'm a happy carny!!
I sure would like to see LO generate the same sales I experience especially on IS & SS. I've got over a year into LO now, I'm still hanging in there. I sure would like to get some sideshow action going there!
8)-tom
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I had hoped we would be offered a good alternative watermark but I didn't like the changes. Here's an example [url]http://www.luckyoliver.com/photo/2199673/[/url]
This one's looking very well protected to me.
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Are people looking at LO, but then going and buying elsewhere?
Possibly yes - especially since they downsize images so drastically. For instance:
Original 10mp - 3872x2592 = 12.9x8.64 (inches @300dpi)
LO Downsampled - 2709x1813 = 9x6 (inches @300dpi)
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Digiology, they do sell the original size in the Extended License. The problem though, if the buyer doesn't know, or doesn't click through to purchase, they will never know. I've mentioned on their forum that they should consider adding the dimensions on the original public page, and I was led to believe they added on their to do list. LO does seem to sell a disproportionately high number of EL's. I found out my large files were only available as EL by accident - so it cannot be immediately clear to buyers either. I think they may lose sales because it is not immediately clear to buyers.
However, I just checked one of my images, 2592 x 3872 and it states 9.6 mp, by my math it should be 10.03. Minisclue difference in size, but less than 10 mp for some reason makes it look more consumer, less pro.
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Pixart - I never realised the original size is available as EL. That's good to know. Thanks