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Author Topic: Introducing pixamba.com - by creators of ProStockMaster software  (Read 34771 times)

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« Reply #50 on: June 29, 2009, 23:41 »
0
could you duplicate the effect categories for people wishing to browse by create links for searches of "business", "wildlife", "apples isolated on a white background" :):)


« Reply #51 on: June 30, 2009, 06:17 »
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Yes Phil, I guess we can do that  :)

Following our discussion above, the minimal upload size was changed to 4 MP.

LSD72

  • My Bologna has a first name...
« Reply #52 on: June 30, 2009, 10:17 »
0
Good Stuff David. A site that is actually listening and implementing changes based on its contributors.  :D

Now I can add photos.

Edit: Maybe not. I tried to upload more pics but it said they were too small. One I checked was 2460 x 1647 which equals 4,051,620. Why would it be kicked out for being too small?
« Last Edit: June 30, 2009, 10:38 by LSD72 »

« Reply #53 on: June 30, 2009, 10:57 »
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Edit: Maybe not. I tried to upload more pics but it said they were too small. One I checked was 2460 x 1647 which equals 4,051,620. Why would it be kicked out for being too small?

Please send me a sample to my email below, we'll find out why

fotorob

  • Professional stock content producer
« Reply #54 on: June 30, 2009, 11:26 »
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Categories are mostly used by buyers who are new to the stock market (believe me, I've asked over 10 stock agencies  ;-) http://bit.ly/category ) and as microstock gets wider known the need for categories vanishes. That's why pro agencies like Getty, Corbis etc. don't have categories. They hand-pick the best images for "portfolios" which is a much more inspirational approach...

Bye,
Robert

LSD72

  • My Bologna has a first name...
« Reply #55 on: June 30, 2009, 11:46 »
0
Thanks David. Sent you 3 pics that were rejected for size.

Update.
The size problem seems to be fixed. took 5 of my shots without a problem. Thank you again David.
« Last Edit: June 30, 2009, 13:33 by LSD72 »

« Reply #56 on: June 30, 2009, 14:05 »
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With my tiny portfolio I should not even be commenting here.  But, here goes.

To make me want to come in, make it easy for me to get out. Let me explain. I recently submitted all my images to a couple of sites, waited a few months and saw that I was getting no sales and would never reach payout. I didn't want to leave my images there, and might want to be exclusive somewhere, someday (who knows) so I decided to close the accounts.  That turned out to be a major pain, requiring me to remove each image individually.  I will NEVER go through that again. So now, before I'd consider a new site, I'd want to know how easy it is to get out, if it isn't working for me.

No categories. t's just too much work, and my images typically don't fit well into the categories anyway.



« Reply #57 on: July 01, 2009, 04:42 »
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The size problem seems to be fixed. took 5 of my shots without a problem. Thank you again David.

Now, here is the funny stuff.
For us, a thousand is 1,000 and a million is 1,000,000, and a megapixel is a million of pixels - 1,000,000 of them.
Sounds reasonable, but not for the programmers.
For them, a thousand must be 1024 (it's a 'K', is not it, man?), and a million is obviously 1024 * 1024, so the MP becomes to be 1,048,576 pixels.
That's why any image of 4MP could not pass - it was treated as just a 3.8 MP picture  ;D

« Reply #58 on: July 01, 2009, 05:15 »
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Standard license should have some limitation (e.g. 250.000 copies) and ELs should be at $50, better $100.
Note, that at last some leading agencies start offering unlimited run, e..g. Fotolia. Thus, the limited run would not attract the buyer.

Just because ONE other agency does it, does not mean that all other agencies should immediately race to the bottom.  Almost all of the other agencies differentiate between a standard sale and an EL sale.

It has been shown time and again that buyers are not that sensitive to prices.  The fact that you seem to be racing to the bottom on price, just shows me that you really don't understand the industry and are trying to make a quick buck off of other people's work.

This type of attitude really concerns me and has left a very sour taste in my mouth in regards to your agency.


I second what GeoPappas said. I don't need another Fotolia.
« Last Edit: July 01, 2009, 05:17 by Konstantin Sutyagin »

« Reply #59 on: July 01, 2009, 06:06 »
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I can only say what I think but I also think that many top contributors might agree... if you want to attract top contributors, you'll need to invest in them. We need a risk to reward ratio that makes good business sense. We invest our product and uploading time. What will you invest? For me, I would need financial compensation to invest with a new agency. A bit like what Fotolia did when they started.

With many startups falling like flies, our risk to reward ratio is too high to warrant our investment without a financial risk from the new agency.

+1

« Reply #60 on: July 01, 2009, 07:04 »
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Quote
With many startups falling like flies, our risk to reward ratio is too high to warrant our investment without a financial risk from the new agency.

Many startups fail because established artists "sit on the fence" waiting to see what happens, a new agency could have $500.000+ of "financial risk" before going to market, it is not that cheap setting up a new business, the risk to the artist with a collection of stock quality assets is more of time and bandwith, the biggest risk is of faith "will this stocksite survive and not stuff the contributors later".

Nagging thoughts could be how can a new agency deliver higher percentages, one factor is cost, the older sites have the assets on olders technologies, newer sites are using "the cloud", SmugMug made a smart move and saved $1 Million back in 2007 moving to the cloud, so the new websites are starting with the cloud from a lower cost base, but without established artists submitting their portfolio's, new sites will pick up new contributors and a much higher cost with acceptance to rejections ratios which is a manual process and prepaid cost.  

Each site that fails adds strength the big players position and weakens the artists power base, it could be wise to "bite the bullet" to get behind a couple of new agencies and see what happens, maybe a special commission rate for one to two years with a coupon code from MicroStockGroup?.

It is a matter of Fair Trade, Chickens and Eggs: http://tinyurl.com/l8dqvb

David  ;D
    
« Last Edit: July 01, 2009, 07:06 by DWL »

« Reply #61 on: July 01, 2009, 07:59 »
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"the cloud" ?  You mean this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing ?

That mentions:
Cloud computing customers do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question. Instead, they avoid capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use.

« Reply #62 on: July 01, 2009, 08:30 »
0
Quote
With many startups falling like flies, our risk to reward ratio is too high to warrant our investment without a financial risk from the new agency.

Many startups fail because established artists "sit on the fence" waiting to see what happens, a new agency could have $500.000+ of "financial risk" before going to market, it is not that cheap setting up a new business, the risk to the artist with a collection of stock quality assets is more of time and bandwith, the biggest risk is of faith "will this stocksite survive and not stuff the contributors later".

Nagging thoughts could be how can a new agency deliver higher percentages, one factor is cost, the older sites have the assets on olders technologies, newer sites are using "the cloud", SmugMug made a smart move and saved $1 Million back in 2007 moving to the cloud, so the new websites are starting with the cloud from a lower cost base, but without established artists submitting their portfolio's, new sites will pick up new contributors and a much higher cost with acceptance to rejections ratios which is a manual process and prepaid cost.  

Each site that fails adds strength the big players position and weakens the artists power base, it could be wise to "bite the bullet" to get behind a couple of new agencies and see what happens, maybe a special commission rate for one to two years with a coupon code from MicroStockGroup?.

It is a matter of Fair Trade, Chickens and Eggs: http://tinyurl.com/l8dqvb

David  ;D
    



Just my opinion :)

I agree but the problem is how many do you support? I have supported a number of small macro agencies, luckyoliver, albumo, pixmac, geckostock etc but wasted my time and effort. I still upload to some such as scanstock, mostphotos, zymm etc in the hope they can one day become bigger like canstock has done and hopefully as snap / veer will.  If there was any significant effort to the uploading (like categories) they would be dropped very quickly.

I dont need instant financial reward to upload, but I want to feel it is going to worth my time and effort.  I want to feel that the owners of the site are going to invest serious cash into marketing and promotion and know where to spend that money.  I really dont want to hear that a site is just 'going to do seo tricks' yet again. I dont expect the next istock but I want to believe that say within 6-12 months a site could be around my number 10 earner and then rising.  Luckyoliver made it to this level and still failed, around the time of failure it was mentioned that the owner didnt believe in advertising?  If I'd known that at the beginning, I would never have bothered uploading. Albumo spent about $25000 getting people to upload and apparently had over double that for marketing, they now get about 1-2 images uploaded a day, sales are next to nothing and most people want to pull their portfolios.

I still get the impression of a number of sites that are announced (although not necessarily in this case) of someone who can write a website with no idea of business or the industry sees istock earning a lot and says hey I'll sell photos and become rich . Which is no worse than what happened in macro stock, I've got a nice collection of images, I'll start a stock library. Nothing real bad about it, I just dont want to waste my time with either. There is a long list of dead stock libraries, both micro and macro.

So for me, like I said in my first post, I want to be sold on the site either by stories of other people selling images, which as you said is impossible if you dont get enough images to begin with, or by the site owners, which I admit is hard with all of those that have gone before (there have been many others that havent even made it to the list on the right).  I'd like to hear how a new site will be different from the others, how it will offer something different for buyers or target different buyers etc etc. Basically why it will succeed. I also would think a reasonably small amount of research, even if only looking through this forum would provide answers to peoples impressions of categories, payout levels etc etc.

All that said I wish David and Pixamba all the best, hopefully in 6-12 months time people will be telling me I was an idiot for not jumping aboard straight away :):)
« Last Edit: July 01, 2009, 08:36 by Phil »

gbcimages

« Reply #63 on: July 01, 2009, 08:57 »
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I thought I would try them and see if any sales come. I was browsing some of the  pages of other top photographers and didn't see  no downloads .

« Reply #64 on: July 01, 2009, 09:24 »
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"the cloud" ?  You mean this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing ?

That mentions:
Cloud computing customers do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question. Instead, they avoid capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use.


That is correct many new stocksites use the "Amazon Cloud", when there is high demand in search requests there is an automatic system that will deal with this demand, server clones are quickly started up, these will multi-thread to deal with the traffic demands maintaining fast searches, as the traffic falls the clones are shut down, the stocksite only pays for the times each server is online and the traffic resources they used, this will maintain a minimum cost to market, and may allow for higher returns to the artists, technology is not a problem getting enough assets is a problem for new sites.
http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/

When I started with microstock Istock were having problems with peak server demand, with the physical servers going to meltdown, to solve this there is a high cost in expanding their own the physical infrastructure to deal with peaks in demand, the higher costs to market affect what can be paid to artists.

There are online backup services for photographers that charge a monthly fee, I have an Amazon S3 bucket, in FireFox I have an S3 plug-in, I can upload store and download my assets into my own space for a much smaller cost, and I can take my laptop and providing I can get online have all my assets ready for download.
The selling point for me on this method is I only pay for what I use, if I do not upload or download then I am only charged for asset storage at micropayment rates, the first 150 images (900mb) I uploaded as a trail for a month cost $0.17, to upload, then $0.15 a month to store.  
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

Many companies use Amazon Web Services so I do not see a problem:
Case Studies: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/
SmugMug: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/smugmug/
Alexa: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/alexa/
ShareThis: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/sharethis/

David

puravida

  • diablo como vd
« Reply #65 on: July 01, 2009, 10:03 »
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David, let me be naive here to ask you this.
Reading the link that Sean has given here, I find the cloud computing usage very accounting wise, in term of cost savings . Granted your nobleness to pass on the savings to contributors in the form of higher %age commissions.
Q1) If this is so, don't you think that older establishments like IS, FT, etc.. can also move to the cloud computing to give us more commissions? They would if they can, as I cannot see any sustaining corporation seeking to displease the contributors, who are their source of income.
Q2) Many here have already a list of redundant newbies which we joined since their inception with a promise of better slice of the pie for contributors vs the Big 6 consistently reducing our take.  They succeed with their commendable PR (public relations), but till today have never delivered on what really matters (sales).
The lingering doubt can be solved with one answer from you, of this question:
What are your buyer base? What are you doing that is so different from the others (Zymmetrical, Cutcaster,Moodboard,etc) who have not turn a dime for many?

« Reply #66 on: July 01, 2009, 12:10 »
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I signed up and uploaded a few.  Looks like a nice site but as others have said, we need buyers to motivate us to upload.  Hope you find a way to get them interested.

« Reply #67 on: July 02, 2009, 02:50 »
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I signed up and uploaded a few.  Looks like a nice site but as others have said, we need buyers to motivate us to upload.  Hope you find a way to get them interested.

I have also signed up and would like to see the site succeed, as it has a nice look and style.
My only gripe is the categories which seem to be so many and a bit mixed up.
If we are going to have to use them,  then I would like to have them in better order and more easy to find.

Looking forward to the Forum opening where people can throw in their suggestions.

« Reply #68 on: July 02, 2009, 04:29 »
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I have also signed up and would like to see the site succeed, as it has a nice look and style.
My only gripe is the categories which seem to be so many and a bit mixed up.
If we are going to have to use them,  then I would like to have them in better order and more easy to find.

Thanks, I think we have fixed this issue now - please take a look if it is make more sense this way.


We do keep thinking how to speed up your uploads and one of the suggestions was temporary shrink down the list of categories, leaving the primaries only, i.e. just go with about 20 main categories visible on the site, at least for now. This way you can upload faster. Plus, if your image comes with IPTC data we can try auto-suggest you the first category selection (needs your verification though).
How this sounds?

« Reply #69 on: July 02, 2009, 04:45 »
0
I have also signed up and would like to see the site succeed, as it has a nice look and style.
My only gripe is the categories which seem to be so many and a bit mixed up.
If we are going to have to use them,  then I would like to have them in better order and more easy to find.

Thanks, I think we have fixed this issue now - please take a look if it is make more sense this way.

Yes David, this is much better and quicker.
Thanks a lot!


We do keep thinking how to speed up your uploads and one of the suggestions was temporary shrink down the list of categories, leaving the primaries only, i.e. just go with about 20 main categories visible on the site, at least for now. This way you can upload faster. Plus, if your image comes with IPTC data we can try auto-suggest you the first category selection (needs your verification though).
How this sounds?

« Reply #70 on: July 03, 2009, 07:56 »
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To get me as a contributor I would need this:

-Submission by DVD, and no extra clicks for categories or such, just sending a couple of discs with images equipped with IPTC data. (This was propably the reason I joined snapvillage and scanstockphoto)

BTW. categories...who needs them anyway?
« Last Edit: July 03, 2009, 08:00 by Perry »

« Reply #71 on: July 05, 2009, 03:36 »
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To get me as a contributor I would need this:

-Submission by DVD [...]


Now accepting!
Please mail them to us

« Reply #72 on: July 05, 2009, 12:52 »
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@davidm
Why must we provide with our vectors such a big jpg file ?????  5000pixels at the longest side little bit over the top don't you think 3000pixels is more that enough or mayby less for preview.


gbcimages

« Reply #73 on: July 05, 2009, 13:30 »
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they take smaller sizes

« Reply #74 on: July 05, 2009, 14:05 »
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@davidm

I just send in 25 images and a few had this kind of massages another member has already send this imagew with this image name if your are sure your the owner please contact support.
Well after a quick search I foud these images and guess what they are mine the fun part is NO THEY ARE NOT STOLEN my name is on all of these images so I was wondering WHO ARE YOU PARTNER AGENCIES ????
At least I think this is the case.
Just strange there are only a few of mine at pixamba.....

PS I send support already an e-mail about this issue.

I just posted here because other members have the same issue and wondering what to do with it.  
  


 

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