Well I started that watermark issue on LO in an earlier thread there about images with a high view count and no downloads. One of my images had 350+ views and 0 downloads. Funny, since with less views, it sells well at other sites.

So I had a look at the "thumb" (hey, a giant 500px!) and the white watermark was barely visible on the whitish picture, and not on the main focus at all. It took me 2 mins of sloppy cloning and all was gone.


Bryan replied there by pointing to a Dan Heller article that watermarks don't count, and the absence of it might be a good promo. I didn't reply then but from reading Dan's article, it was about personal sites to attract focused traffic to an individual photographer. A potential customer might be trapped on that personal site and buy eventually.

On a MS site with thousands of anonymous photographers, the freebie hunters won't even care who's who and the benefit (and traffic) will only be for the MS site itself, not for the photographer.

The watermark is defective on light shots, and apart from CrapHamlet, LO is the worst on protection. It's just so easy for LO to add a darker second watermark for pictures that are whitish. But what's happening is that LO is gaining traffic and attention on our sweat with almost freebies they don't have the copyright on. Apart that I, at least, will never reach the ridiculously high payout limit of 100$ the way sales are going on LO now.

At CrapHamlet, I deleted my images except one, not for the lack of sales, but for their bad protection of images. I don't care if LO sales are a disaster, because ShutmeUp gets me in 3 days what I got on LO in almost a year. LO is a great looking site with very friendly expert reviewers. It's no hassle at all to upload with FTP.

But if LO is going to persist giving away our 500px (whitish) shots with an almost invisible watermark, I'm affraid I will have to remove those shots too. I hope they address the issue soon by just using a difference watermark instead of an added one.

I suppose if you can't see it at all, it isn't going to be very distracting

It certainly doesn't render the photo unusable.  I just feel it makes the people who browse LO and don't seem to buy many photos more likely to use it without bothering them with their credit card details.

I just checked my stats over there, sales are so poor for me I tend to forget about LO.  I have one image that has had 1508 views and one sale.  Definitly food for thought.

The Ultimate LO Watermark

Breaking news: LO just announced its brand new watermark, that will be definitely annoying and 100% distracting. 

434 views and 0 downloads... where is the watermark???
I think I will delete this photo like sharpshot has done...

third place... 138 views and .... 0 downloads


SHARPSHOT, you are RIGHT!!!

I will stop uploading to LO! Right now! :-P

Trying this again...  781 views, 0 downloads

Hey guys, we've been following the thread and just let you guys talk it out.

We're listening. We're currently in the process of scaling our system, so our resources have been spent on building our platform.  In order to scale our marketing efforts we need to be able to handle the traffic.  We appreciate we everyone's patience as we work to build sales.

Please do not mistake views with people stealing images.  Some images get lots of traffic via search engines- that's it.  We're working hard to create more opportunity for everyone.  Our strategy has been focused on building a community based on education and people.  Early on this might seem useless and nonproductive, but longer term it will catapult LuckyOliver. This industry has to change and the current methods of attracting the longtail customer are not adequate. Many people are viewing images in curiosity.  This will eventually translate into more sales.

We thought about the watermark early on- it's not a random choice. We introduced the blog sized image to the market- others have followed. We're actively encouraging people to buy images in this size- other sites have followed.  This is good for everyone and has helped stimulate more sales across the industry. We have no intention of encouraging people to steal images. In fact there are no free images on the site.  We're interested in helping artists.

Right now our resources for scaling our system our important to our growth, but if you feel you want your watermark strengthened then let us know via email at [email protected]. This would be changing the opacity levels. We're looking into switching primarily white images to a black watermark based on the average. We don't believe the watermark is an issue, but we're flexible in trying to meet your individual needs.