Microstock Photography Forum - General > Microstock Charts

Financing Version 2 of Microstock Charts

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Lee Torrens:
Thanks to you, our 450+ registered users, the Microstock Charts project is going great so far. What's not going so great is our plan to build new features while maintaining the service for free. We have two great advertisers who are giving us great financial support - thankyou to BigStock and CandyBox Photography. But it's not enough. We want to earn enough to pay for the new features as quickly as possible, but so far we haven't even earned enough to pay for the initial build of the system. So, while the current site is in no danger of being discontinued, we're looking at two changes to fund version 2 and all the great featured you've suggested:

Option 1 - Charge for the Service

Making Microstock Charts free for you, the end users, has been part of our planned business model from the start. We'd really prefer not to have to charge, though we realize this is often what it takes to keep projects like this moving forward and increasing their usefulness.

Option 2 - Sell Anonymous and Combined Statistics

We've had expressions of interest from some agencies and industry people about getting access to the statistics behind Microstock Charts. As we've made very clear on the home page, the Terms & Conditions page, and the About page, we've build this system so it can be completely anonymous for you, the end user. Besides that, we would never sell or publish or reveal in any way the data without first combining it and making it 100% anonymous. And finally, if we do decide to sell anonymous and combined data, we would emphasize the data of the Trusted Accounts, which is only a small portion of the total user base. But this is another option we're considering.

Tell us What You Think

We've setup a this poll and thread to get your feedback on these two ideas. Of course if you have a different idea, we're open to suggestions.

Thanks,
Lee & Amos

corepics:
Bump.

I think the initiative for microstockcharts.com should be rewarded and expanded. With a newsletter and a post on MSG, how come only 13 people out of 450+ users so far have responded?

mtkang:
if i have to pay, i guess i will just use excel files..neither i feel comfortable to have my statistic sold for a chart service like that.. unless the upgraded version gave more analysis tool to user like lookstats

Sean Locke Photography:

--- Quote from: mtkang on September 18, 2010, 00:16 ---if i have to pay, i guess i will just use excel files..neither i feel comfortable to have my statistic sold for a chart service like that.. unless the upgraded version gave more analysis tool to user like lookstats

--- End quote ---

Yep, I'm not in the market of providing my sales data for aggregate compilation.

travelstock:
I support the concept behind microstockcharts, but I was hoping those contributing the stats would get to see some aggregate data, rather than have it sold. I think providing this information will massively increase the traffic and advertising potential.

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