You already won Press release of the year, what else is left for us? 

Bucketloads of Starbucks for free in Prague! ;-)

Control and reselling issue

My opinion on this is simple: Fotolia and Dreamstime are fair businesses that want to make serious money. If they have any partners that don't make money or are doing anything suspicious they're terminating that partnerships because it's not only making you contributors angry, but also them. It's simple as that I think, but I'm usually optimistic and idealistic guy.

Pixmac has to and I'm sure all the other channels of FT and DT have to fully respect the terms and conditions of the original site. So this means you're legally covered in the same way.

As for the control, I completely understand that Fotolia and Dreamstime don't show so much clear info about Pixmac or any other resellers, because contributors would be able to go to those agencies directly and that's not helping either FT and DT. So even that I understand their behavior, I agree that it's not open and clear to you guys. I can promise to keep that in mind and if anything comes to my head (as it did with the one stop idea that's now being copied by other agencies) I'll be making everything possible to have it implemented. But still we're small David and they are Goliathes.

But the question is obviously right. Should I as a contributor get more sales and be more afraid of what's happening inside the agencies or should I build up my own site and try to market my images on my own? Both options have pros and cons.

Portfolios differences

Guys Dirkr and mtkang, this is really strange. I'm going to find out what's behind that, because we should have everything. I'm sending the info to our dev team and will wait for their findings.

And we're doing the duplicates detection based on the small thumbs. So no keyword should harm that. It's some University technology that compares visual data and matches duplicates.

We're taking the prices and sizes from the API and what I've seen was that the set of sizes sometimes don't match to set of sizes on the actual Fotolia/Dreamstime site. I think it's because they have some API partners that need to have exact set of sizes, so any change in API sizes would cause a problem.

As for the prices, you should get your standard revenue as if the image was sold on FT or DT. With the OneStop sales you get also the revenue as if it was sold for less, because what we do is we give the price difference to the customer as a free coupon to buy a credit pack. The idea is: "You can taste Pixmac and if you like it you can get the same price as the credit pack customers get."

We don't change contrast or saturation of the files we get from FT and DT but we make them a bit more colorful and sharp if they're in our direct collection (3-5%). My opinion is that shining apple sells better than the others. It shouldn't be much but for the results I hope it helps.

Contributor credits don't expire

The expiration was changed a few weeks ago for contributors. And yes there's a minimum of $0.10 fee to all contributors if it's sold via subscription. But be sure that our subscription is not too much popular as it only has 230k+ images.

Thank you Sharpshot, Rubyroo and Artemis

Guys, this is really something to thank you for! It's been busy two years here at Pixmac and I'm the one who was fighting a lot to make Pixmac the best site ever and you don't even know how hard it sometimes is. I wish I can tell you everything. But anyway, I'll be here as long as I can and I'll do my best to change the old rule that: "Contributor is never satisfied" to "Contributor likes what Pixmac does" (yes I'm idealistic). Honestly, thank you! If you ever feel bad, write an email to [email protected] or send a DM to http://twitter.com/pixmac and I'll be listening.

is there a way we can see how many images of one's in pixmac?

and is there a way to know which sales of dreamstime are from pixmac.

i would like to know how many pictures of my dreamstime and fotolia portfolio are in pixmac.

any advantage to upload directly to pixmac?

1. On Fotolia you should be able to see "Sold via third party channel" or something like that. I hope it's still there. This was discussed in some Fotolia forum thread about a year a go.

2. I don't think you'll be able to see it on Dreamstime. But I'll ask Serban...

3. We take all the images that FT and DT offers via their API. We update that every day (every 24 hours) and there's no way how to choose which images we take and which not. So if it's sent over API we have it. In some cases the updating may be broken, so there might be delays in the sync. But if you spot any significant differences and if they have any logic in it, just let me know, because I want to have complete data not a portion of that. If you upload to DT and FT at the same time, part of the images might be set as duplicates, but together it should be the same amount of images. If not let's investigate the case and fine the cure.

4. You'll be in our subscription (which most of you don't like) and you'll be in our API chain of partners as eg. http://www.ccvision.de/de/microstock/ but currently our focus is to generate serious sales. As we've started with paying for uploads as any other new agency did and found out that we were not able to satisfy contributors later on with sales.

So our general target now is make the fastest site in the market (we're almost there). Make it easy for the buyers (I'm sure we are already leaders in this). Make the site localised for several markets (we have 15 people locally already in several countries). All that together with some other ideas that we're launching soon should make you guys a bit more satisfied. Because that's what I've been doing for those two years (just check the forums here for my nickname and you'll see what has changed during that time)...


Vita

Anyway, some of you should watch more of this:

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

rather than the conspiration movies some of you probably like...

Vitezslav, Pixmac's CEO

At Pixmac we're syncing every 24 hours. We have a separate Java based search index that's faster when working with local data. So the change should be applied in 24 hours in search and autors page. The purchase is not available immediately and there is also a check that tells the buyer the information just before purchase (there's another check).

If anyone of you have any questions, I'm ready to talk about them.

Vita, CEO

Hello. I'm Pixmac CEO: Vita Valka

Check out this:
http://blog.pixmac.com/2009/10/28/dreamstime-stock-photos-at-pixmac/

And this:
http://blog.pixmac.com/2008/11/24/why-do-i-have-my-photos-at-pixmac/

Please give me a link to your picture at Pixmac that have EL set to $50 and link to Fotolia where is set to 100 cr. and I'll check that with our tech team.

Other questions directly to: [email protected] please.

Yes, Lucie was right. You should get the same money as over DT. And you don't have to care about 1 year lock-in at Pixmac. Anyway, the Year long lock-in is a real headache for many photographers, so we're working on it and hopefully we'll solve it soon :-)

Yes, we're selling Fotolia and also our own collection and also celebrity content from a traditional agency for micro prices. Feel free to contact us over Skype, Twitter.com/pixmac or email.

And as a bonus, you can see our team photo in this article:
http://www.lupa.cz/clanky/startup-show-2009-zna-sveho-viteze/

Have fun gyus!
Vitezslav Valka

If you mean the page (when you're not logged in) here: http://www.pixmac.com/sell-photos

That just says: 30% for non-exclusives and 45% for exclusive content. The words "starting at" mean basically that there are situations (such as the photographers that came before March 2009) that you can get more. And this is also connected to Affiliate program (best deal as far as I know) where you can get 25% + 25% more if you bring either the buyer or the photographer to us. So in the best situation the math is done like this:

Exclusive picture sold for $10
- you get 45%, 55% remains
- if the buyer is your affiliate, you get 25% out of those remaining 55%
- if you also have the author as an affiliate, you get another 25% out of those 55%

So finally you can end up earning 72,5% of the sale (45% + two quarters of the 55%), while Pixmac gets only 27,5%. Sure that situation happens once in a lifetime. More common, if you're with us for a longer time and have non-exclusive pictures, you can still get 62,5% (50%+12,5%) if the sale goes just over one your affiliates.

And guys, if you have any other questions, send them to me. I'm writing a blog post named: "A way to satisfy photographers?" so anything painful can be answered there from the other side :-)

Zager.

zager:
and what about this?

Quote

it also says a sliding scale between 30-44% but with no explanation anywhere on the site as to how this works or what increments are involved

Thx. I'll keep the number $0.38 in my mind! Proof attached :-)

Guys,
sorry I was not replying to this. I'm checking the forum from time to time, so if anything like this needs to be solved here in the public, please let me know (email, icq, gtalk, skype, msn, facebook, twitter - I'm ready!).

To the issues I found:

1. One year lock-in

This is a painful thing, sure! I convinced the owners to make it "1 year" from "2 years" that have been there before. But be sure, I am working on improving that to even less or another way to make you guys comfortable. The other thing is, that somebody who wanted money just for uploading photos should know that we have to make the money to pay him/her.

2. Snail mail

Calm down. You don't have to send any letters to Prague. An email and some ID confirmation is fine. We're not stupid here and if any of you guys think that we're doing bad things, better than shout here, send me an email, ok? [email protected]

3. Subscription prices

I knew about this and so we removed the advertising from the homepage right away. And also moved the price from $0.06 to $0.10 so almost twice. It's a first step. Now we're considering about taking out subscription completely and finding another way how to satisfy customers in similar way. Also Extended License will be sold only for regular credits soon.

4. Lower commisions

Sorry, Ftolia contract limits. At least the commisions changed for newcomers only.

5. Download calcullation

If there is a problem with counting, please contact us! Michal Prynych is the guy you need. We're doing our best, we don't wanna hurt you. But when I see the forums, there's plenty of voices that never send a word to us directly...

6. Other improvements

I'm preparing an article about what we do for photographers (I just came from honeymoon on Sunday). Sure there is more to do for you, sure we can be "different". Eg. delete community section as Albumo. But we make it differently in other way. My intention is to make the site good for photographers as good for the buyers. Even some of you think we're just stupid bunch of loozers.

Check our blog in next few weeks. Certainly I'll post there also ideas from this thread.

Quote from: zymmetrical on June 06, 2009, 13:59

I would suggest removing the hyperlink and warning people not to visit there in case they ain't covered.

Firefox blocks it. Of course.

I've notified the owner right now. I think he'll remove it soon.

Vitezslav