Quote from: Noedelhap on December 19, 2012, 17:45
I must say that I had my first downloads and I love the $14 RPD. Keep up this great site.

Thanks! Traffic has been growing at a nice pace, so I'm hoping for many more sales next year.

Quote from: chromaco on November 19, 2012, 16:33He said he is really trying to keep a balance between building a solid catalog of images and keeping his contributors happy.

Yes, it does seem to me that there should be some theoretical happy equilibrium point where enough buyers are finding the things they want and the contributors are few enough that everyone gets nice sales numbers.  I don't know exactly where this point lies, but my best guess at the moment is that it's somewhere above a hundred thousand and below a million images.

Since the Toon Vectors catalog is still well below that point, there is plenty of room for catalog growth.  I have not been actively recruiting, since I don't want to disappoint while traffic is still ramping up, but if anyone is feeling bold (or patient) they are more than welcome to sign up.

There is a thread for the site hiding in the "New Sites" section for general complaints and suggestions:

http://www.microstockgroup.com/new-sites-general/toon-vectors/

The article itself is proof that the images are not *completely* useless - although since buzzfeed likely didn't purchase any image licenses for the article, maybe they've got a point.

Computational image aesthetic evaluation is actually a fairly hot area of academic research right now.  There are quite a few valuable applications for this beyond making a microstock reviewer's life easier.  For example, helping an amateur pick out their "best" smartphone photos from a vacation.

A number of high-level image features can be detected and evaluated together to predict aesthetic quality including foreground sharpness, background simplicity, color and luminosity contrast, depth of field, leading lines, symmetry, rule of thirds subject placement, pattern and texture detail, etc.

The current state of the art does not replace a human expert and perhaps never will, but automated aesthetic evaluation is definitely advancing rapidly and should be appearing in consumer applications, search engines and social networks in the very near future. 

If you are a freak like me who likes to read scholarly papers for fun, here is a starting point:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=photo+image+aesthetic+quality

I don't know if this has been suggested before (or if this the right thread to suggest it), but I think it would be interesting to have a general poll entry called "Self" or "Direct" or something like that - i.e. for people who run a self-operated web store and sell their own work directly.

Quote from: EmberMike link=topic=15978.msg270447#msg270447Shhh! Don't tell Getty that!

Honestly, I don't mind sharing things I've learned.  Perhaps this is a bias from primarily being a software developer, where we have clearly seen over the last couple of decades that an open community of shared learning reaps vastly more benefits for everyone involved in the end as opposed to closed silos of trade secrets - especially for the smaller guy.

Quote from: Maui on September 02, 2012, 10:29

Quote from: Toon Vectors on May 21, 2012, 02:34
On the subject of watermarks, I have a new design for these which is present on the most recently published images.  Before going through and replacing all of them, I am still playing around with something for the 140px size, although I am leaning heavily towards leaving thumbnails at that size without watermarks or just adding a bottom bar which is cropped out on the site display but can be seen if you drag or save the thumbnail image.

I would suggest to have a watermark on the 140px size as well, because those images are still quite clean and crisp for many purposes.

What do you think about the bottom bar watermark concept for that size?  Obviously it could easily be cropped off in an image editor, but at least it's a small deterrent.  I was not able to come up with a covering watermark for the small images that I was happy with.

If anything, I'd rather just shrink the gallery images a bit if there's concern.  Is there a certain size that you think would not need a watermark - 120px, 100px, smaller?

Quote from: EmberMike on September 02, 2012, 15:37
Good work, Chris. I'm hoping for good things for you and TV.

Thanks!  For automated EPS thumbnail generation I've been using Ghostscript and ImageMagick - both are free and open source (although maybe a little complicated to setup the first time).  Seems to work pretty well as long as reasonably close ICC CMYK profiles are fed in for the conversion to RGB.

I am sorry to announce that Moneybookers has been removed as a commission payment option at Toon Vectors.  It is no longer possible to add funds to a Moneybookers account in the United States which makes it rather difficult for me to send out money through them.

This unpleasant discovery was made this morning while I was processing August payments.  I spoke with Moneybookers customer support and they confirmed that the ability to add funds was removed "about a month ago".  They have plans to restore it, but could offer no definite time frame.

PayPal of course is still working fine. I'm open to suggestions for other methods of paying contributors who cannot or prefer not to use PayPal.

@chromaco: Thanks for the words of encouragement - I appreciate your support!

Quote from: EmberMike on August 30, 2012, 16:51
Off-topic: How are things going over at TV?

Sales have been poor so far, but traffic (and the catalog) continues to steadily grow.  Marketing and SEO efforts are being refined and expanded, so hopefully things will start to pick up a bit over the next few months.

I suppose it doesn't really count if you're not getting sales, but just for reference purposes:

TV-  $20  / $14.00   /  $14.00

Quote from: Poncke on August 28, 2012, 18:08
Your review process, how will that work?

Just spitballing here, but one way to handle the review process is to break it into smaller components that can be gamified and let anyone who has an account (buyer, seller, affiliate or whoever) participate.  I've been thinking about experimenting with this at toonvectors.com.

Ideally, you have a series of quickly answerable yes/no questions or short fill-in-the-blank like the following:

• Do you like the quality of this image? Y/N
• Is this title relevant for the image? Y / N
• Is this description relevant for the image? Y / N
• Is this keyword relevant for the image? Y / N
• Write / edit title for this image.
• Write / edit description for this image.
• Write / edit keyword(s) for this image.

Points are awarded to the participant for answering these.  To prevent abuse, points are removed if the participant is deemed "wrong" - i.e. their Y/N answer does not agree with the consensus or their suggested titles, descriptions and keywords are deemed irrelevant.  Each participant has an overall confidence score which is calculated as the deviation from the consensus of others who answered the same question for the same image.  If a participant's confidence score drops too low, then they are suspended from reviewing (or banned in extreme cases).

Image quality and title/description/keyword relevancy scores for an image are calculated as an average weighted by participant confidence.  Each image has a separate title, description and keyword set for each language supported by the site. The currently highest ranking title and description in each language are used for the image and the participant who suggested them gets bonus points.  Only keywords above a certain relevancy threshold are applied to the image.  Furthermore, image quality and keyword scores are used as tie-breakers for search result relevancy sorting.

A newly submitted image would not be published until it has reached some minimum threshold of quality and relevancy.  Images are also removed from publication if they drop below thresholds of quality and relevancy - this could occur in two stages: 1) removed from search, and 2) permanently deleted.

Other aspects: a purchase counts as a positive quality vote (with likely more weight than a regular vote).  Embedded metadata counts as participation from the contributor for their own images.  It should be made possible for a contributor to gain a high enough participant confidence score to have their images auto-published.

So why would anyone participate in the review process?

• For quality sellers, the possibility of auto-publication along with some amount of control over search placement might be sufficient motivation.
• Some people might actually think it is "fun" just to participate and climb the ranks of a participant leader board.
• Participant points could be used as an input variable to calculate a voting share for site decisions.
• Participant points could be used as an input variable to calculate a slice for profit sharing if a percentage of site profits were allocated for this.

As an addendum, if pricing by image complexity tiers is supported on the site, then this could also be made part of the points game.  Plenty of other back-end maintenance tasks could be added as well.

Quote from: ICP on August 21, 2012, 01:35
I realize marketing is important and expensive. Do you have any thoughts on the marketing subject?

If you haven't used them before, you can get $50-$100 in free advertising credits as a first time user at Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter.  First, sign up for free Google and Bing Webmaster accounts:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Bing offers you the ad credit right off the bat.  For Google, you might need to wait for them to send you an email or snail mail coupon code.  Neither are amazing for conversions and they both have a good chance of not paying for themselves, but there is no downside to advertising for free until the credits are used up.  I would recommend bidding your ads at the absolute minimum price ($0.01 at Google and $0.05 at Bing).  I also recommend making your ads as narrow as possible on specific image keywords that you have decent coverage for and link them to a search result or category or even an individual image page to put the buyer as close as you can to a sale.  

There's no reason to bid ads higher if you are getting clicks and $100 on Google will give you 10,000 visitors at a penny a pop.

Since I can't find any details about compensation to the copyright holders, it's hard to give an immediate thumbs up or down.  Obviously, there at least needs to be a payout at an extended license level.  Additionally, the copyright holders of the selected images should also be contacted by Thinkstock about the compensation details and given an option to say no.

However, to play devil's advocate...  assuming that an extended license royalty is paid out, how is this technically different than other online usages?  A strong parallel might be made to something like an online game such as Farmville where the photo / illustration is just another game asset in Google Drive that you can achieve (i.e. pick from a list) and put on your farm (i.e. embed in a document hosted on Google Drive).

I do feel in my gut that there is a difference, but it's a challenge to spell it out.

Quote from: cthoman on August 10, 2012, 17:09
The solution to similars is fairly obvious. Just organize and group your files better. Unfortunately, that solution is time consuming and complicated, so you get quick fix band-aid solutions that nobody likes instead.

Agreed. I believe that increasing buyer choice is a net benefit for everyone and thus similars should be *encouraged*.  This is roughly what I plan to implement at toonvectors.com (when the image library gets a little bigger):

• Group similar images by the same artist.
• Download count, view count, rating scores, etc. for the individual images are aggregated for the group.
• For search results, only one image from the group is displayed.
• The representative image for the group can vary based on context: most relevant, most popular, newest or a selected default.
• Additional user interface on individual image pages for buyer to compare similars in the group.
• With artist's approval, possibly a discount for buying a set of similars.

Obviously this is a little more work on the backend, but it's not unreasonable and the extra burden on reviewers can be lightened by automated detection of similars and possibly crowd-sourcing.

Current design trends for web, mobile and desktop software are leaning heavily towards solid flat colors, minimalism and whitespace - ex. the recent reworking of Google's web properties and Microsoft's Windows 8 Metro style.  If you are selling illustrations or design elements to that market, it's something to consider.

Quote from: Starzipan on August 05, 2012, 22:35
[...]

http://www.toonvectors.com/artists/starsania/32

[...]

Any thoughts on what I have so far or hellos from members here are appreciated! 

Wow, that's a really cool site for vectors! 

All kidding aside, thanks for contributing and keep up the great work.  I'm still a newbie myself here on these forums, but I've enjoyed reading the many interesting discussions about the microstock industry.

Most people only think of it as a tool for pirates, but BitTorrent is actually a good tool for this kind of thing.  A big advantage is that the transfer can be paused and resumed by either side at any time and the bandwidth usage can be throttled back, so you can use your Internet connection for other things while the transfer is running.

Also, if you are both in the same country or have a means of quick shipping, don't discount the power and convenience of the "sneakernet".  A 32GB flash drive only costs about $20, is quite durable and weighs next to nothing, so shipping costs should also be inexpensive.

There is also toonvectors.com which is vector-only at 70% artist commissions on fixed ala carte $19.99/$99.99 standard/extended royalty-free license prices.

The site is brand-new, so I can't make any grand promises about sales in the short-term.  However, I do have quite a few ideas that I am working on to improve the site going forward - building on what I think is a fairly respectable starting base.

Quote from: Toon Vectors on May 17, 2012, 18:07
I'll come up with a different watermark design and get those changed.

On the subject of watermarks, I have a new design for these which is present on the most recently published images.  Before going through and replacing all of them, I am still playing around with something for the 140px size, although I am leaning heavily towards leaving thumbnails at that size without watermarks or just adding a bottom bar which is cropped out on the site display but can be seen if you drag or save the thumbnail image.

Quote from: Noedelhap on May 20, 2012, 23:41
I deleted a vector file from my portfolio and dropbox folder, to replace it by a better version, but when I resync, the new file with the same name can't be found.

It does work when I rename the file to something else, but imo it would be nice if it would work the normal way (for instance, checking the modification date of a file to check for updated files?)

Currently, the sync process ignores any files with the same name as existing files to prevent accidental duplicates.  However, letting the sync process automatically replace existing files with the same name could be bad since it might overwrite a completely different image in your portfolio if it happens to have the same filename as something uploaded in the past.

The best solution would probably be to display a message on the uploads screen stating that a duplicate filename was detected, show a link to the existing image, and give the option to replace the existing image or to create a new image.  In the meantime, you can either:

• Submit with a new filename and mark the old version as deleted as you did
  
• Replace with the same filename, shoot me an email and I will resync it manually
  
  I could also place a "resync" button on the individual image editing screen to do the latter process - i.e. make it pull a fresh copy from Dropbox and run through the conversion process again.  Of course, that might have to be two buttons to account for replacing vs. preserving the title, description and keyword metadata.

Quote from: lirch on May 17, 2012, 14:10
Nice site but is there a chance that images on the front page receive a watermark? http://www.toonvectors.com/

There are two size thumbnails that do not have watermarks - 60x60 and 140x140.  The former are used in the shopping cart contents and the latter for gallery displays such as the front page and search results.  It seems fairly standard not to watermark at these small sizes, but I am open to adding them if there is concern.

Quote from: helix7 on May 17, 2012, 14:46

Speaking of the watermark, you've got to change that. You don't own the copyright to the images on the site.

Good point.  I had wanted a curved stamp design and a stylized copyright symbol seemed like a natural choice, but I can see how that might create some confusion over ownership (even though retention of copyright by the original artist is spelled out in the license and contributor agreements).  I'll come up with a different watermark design and get those changed. 

This is exactly the reason I wanted to have an open discussion about the site here, since these types of issues are more easily addressed now rather than later.  Thanks for the feedback!

Not an amazingly Earth-shattering feature, but I did add a Moneybookers payout option for artists and affiliates this week (in addition to the default PayPal).

Yes, this post is a shameless thread bump.

It's a tough situation because Pinterest straddles both sides with many legs of what is right and wrong about the prevailing attitude regarding intellectual property and image distribution on the web.

If you are hosting your own images, Pinterest's practice of copying your image to their own servers can actually be a blessing, since the bandwidth bills for serving a hotlinked image that becomes a social media phenomenon can be cripplingly expensive.

At the same time, you would like to some traction to a site of your own for images disseminated in this manner, and although Pinterest seems to do a reasonable job of source crediting and linking, I have been severely let-down on the actual click-through for this (along with Tumblr and ilk).

In the end, it might seem to be a losing battle against IP-deniers and the only halfway reasonable solution to protect your images is to make sure that anything over ~200px is obnoxiously watermarked. 

I will state, however, that the US safe harbor clause of the DMCA (which prevents infringement claims against providers because of bad-behaving contributors as long as they respect takedown notices) is an incredibly important provision for keeping the Internet a usable place.  This is a battle that cannot be fought in technology (which will always outpace the situation), nor in laws (which always lag behind), but a battle that can only be fought in culture so that individuals will respect the cry of "you are f*cking me over, please desist" and perhaps make people consider first who might be harmed before something is shared.

Quote from: Perry on May 08, 2012, 09:06
Let's not forget that you can put Windoews on Mac, but not (really) the other way around.

That's definitely a big argument in favor of buying a Mac if you're on the fence or anticipate a need for both.  I have a Mac Pro as my main rig, but spend nearly all of my time in Windows 7 by preference.  I don't often have a reason to boot into OS X, but I can when I need to which is great.

Quote from: Anita Potter on May 08, 2012, 22:34
I think the initial thing about Dropbox is that it's sort of scarey to upload to because I'm not sure who all will have access to that folder aside from you and me.  Worried about the potential of someone else coming in and stealing them.  I've not used dropbox before so I'm not exactly sure how secure and safe they'll be.

Only you and I have access to the Toon Vectors folder on Dropbox and it's the only part of your Dropbox that I have access to (and you can revoke my access at any time), but that concern definitely makes sense and I can understand the hesitancy.  

The perception vs. reality of safety and security is an interesting question though - after all, how locked down are the FTP and web servers at your average web hosting provider?  The answer varies.  Dropbox has a lot to lose (i.e. their entire business) if they screw up, so at the very least you know they have to take it seriously.

Here is their statement on the subject:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/27

Quote
Will accepted images still be in Dropbox or will they get moved to the sites server?

The images get moved to storage at Toon Vectors which generates JPEG thumbnails and a download ZIP, so they can be deleted from Dropbox after the site processes them.