You can add me to that Sept chart.  I had my first sale there today.  It was from my site, which I link to clustershot as my portfolio; so it's a "checkout" sale from my site.

I like it.  Its simple, yet mostly has what we need (I have sent in emails requesting features). Editorial is a must with all the images there not model or property released.  I also vote for a usage limit or allow us to set them.

I like how the3dstudio does it where it defaults to editorial until its set RF.

Hey Brandon,
Congrats on the sale. We really appreciate your feature request and we're starting to plan our next round of development. We have drastically needed improved UI coming out on Friday with a pile of feature bug fixes. Once we get that out of the way we're going to start adding features. Some new features will be rolled into our Pro-subscription while others will be available to all.

Editorial licensing is absolutely on our radar and my guess is you'll see it from us in the next few months.

Usage limits: We're really struggling with this one. Do you have any suggestions on how this could be done simply and in a way that makes sense for your average buyers? We tend to shy away from the arbitrary # of copies, etc.

I have a "pro" account and I really like it.

My only concern is the current Royalty Free License text.  It should state a limit in the number of reproductions allowed.  An Extended License should be available.

A Continue Shopping button would be great. 

I'm very glad to hear you like your Pro account.
Re: Continue shopping button" - We're going to be re-vamping our entire checkout process in the months to come. What's there now was our initial proof of concept work. The concept has been proven and we're now focussing on long-term solutions.

With regards to the licensing. We're only offering royalty free right now as we feel that's the lowest hanging fruit. It's simple and easy to deal with. We may get into other types of licensing (editorial is a strong contender) but for now we're sticking with Royalty Free.

We're not keen on limiting the number of reproductions. We feel that's an archaic artefact of the pre-internet pre-digital world.  How do other's feel about this?

Thanks again for your comments. We're listening to this forum as we're more internet geeks than photographers.

Quote from: clustershot on August 25, 2009, 08:15

Quote from: JerryL5 on August 25, 2009, 05:47

Uploaded a couple of test photos back in May, not a pro account.
Just haven't got back somehow. I like the site, but some sections seem slow.
I think they are in the process of upgrading the system.

Yeah, we are a little slow. This is mainly due to more activity then we expected. We have over 250,000 published photos by over 1500 users. We have new hardware going live this week which should speed things up considerably.

It would be good if we can place our proper logo up there instead of a bad looking text. I would definitely want my original logo on the banner If I was to get a pro account.

I don't like the text at all. It should be possible to upload our logo in PNG or jpeg formats if we prefer.

Thanks for your suggestions. We have thought of this and may be implementing it in the future.  Allowing anyone to upload a logo to a page is complicated endeavour as there are quite a few design related challenges associated with that.

As we further develop our pro-accounts you'll start to see more flexibility.

Thanks!

@clustershot: Any news regarding your superb API you want to supply. I want to impliment new stockphoto agencies into my first microstock Wordpress Plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/microstock-photo-plugin/)

It's not ready for release into the wild but I can put you in touch with one of our lead developers. They can help you integrate it with your plugin. Can you private message me on here or email me at [email protected] and I'll get you in touch.

Thanks for thinking of us!

I bet it's sunny somewhere in the world right now

 I didn't realize that it was correct etiquette in here to quote all things I was responding to.  My bad. Thanks for pointing it out.

Also, nice quick edit on your last post . It is indeed sunny somewhere in the world.

BTW how does the watermark look I didn't find a sample

Ooops, my bad. I should have put a link.

There is a watermark on the feature image of this pro-store: http://benoitgagnon.clustershot.com/

It's pretty simple overlayed text. Users provide the text and we do the processing for the various sizes It can be applied to all of the photos in your account or to the larger feature images of your pro store (as is in this example).

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers!

As our pro-accounts were discussed above I thought I would give everyone the heads up that they are now live.

Feature set:
http://www.clustershot.com/help/upgradingtoapro

Example of a pro store:
http://danjames.clustershot.com/

Custom watermarking (as discussed above) is included in the features. $20/year.

As always, feedback is welcome.

@sjlocke - We're not really concerned about what people think about our office setup or our overhead. We are lean for a reason. Silverorange has a full time staff of 14, infrastructure, and all of the goodies that comes with being a successful business for over a decade. ClusterShot is lean because we want it to succeed. We don't want to fool anyone and pretend that we're something that we are not.

@Adeptris Thank you so much for your well thought out, researched, and well expressed replies. You certainly know what you're talking about. I think it's fair to say that currently we are closer to an Ebay model than to an Istock one. We have a lot of work to do to get even closer. As you've pointed out there are legal challenges and of course there are those pesky technical challenges as well. We're up for all of those challenges and will address them as we get to them. We are looking into a few partnerships that will take care of some of these issues.

You said:

"the small hosting and processing fees will soon grow if you get a few hundered thousand assets uploaded, this would be a few hundred thousand dollars so you should not expect that SilverOrange will meet all of the cost."

I just wanted to take the time to debunk some myths on website costs. We currently are hosting 372,401 photos. 213,791 of those are published live on the public site. Our costs are still in the low hundreds per month for ALL hosting, storage, processing and delivery fees. We're using Amazon for Storage, photo processing, and also using their Cloudfront services. Websites are cheap to host and maintain if you know what you are doing.

We're not trying to become another IstockPhoto. TechCrunch unfortunately labelled us that way and we've been trying to fight off the title since!

David, we're in the process of building out a full API that will allow anyone (blog software writers, gallery software owners, etc) to access and use ClusterShot in ways we could never imagine. We're hoping that this will bring some of the things you listed to life.

@kaycee Watermarking is indeed going to be part of the pro-level account (we made that decision). It's a custom watermark feature (you control what it is). As for your photos being ripped off of the site. That is a valid concern and we understand if you don't want to host your images without a watermark. Most of the images on our site come from Flickr or public RSS feeds. These photos are already publicly available sans-watermark. Us watermarking them seems a little futile at that point. All of that said we're changing and evolving. If we get the feature request enough for non-pro accounts who knows we may back it down into the regular accounts.

Again, thanks to all for the feedback and concerns. We hear you and will continue to make improvements and features based on them.




 

Thank you to everyone for your feedback and concerns. Yeah, we have some awesomely crappy photos on clustershot.com. That is what happens when you open up a photography marketplace. We think of ourselves much more like an Ebay than an Istockphoto.

We are going to be launching some new features very shortly (maybe later this week) that will allow photographers to have their own mini-site. Kind of a simple white labelling of our site. We're considering adding this feature and a few others into a "pro account" for 10-20$/year.  We're looking for some honest feedback on the idea and are very open to criticism and concerns.

Please let us know what you think and we thank everyone (close to 1400 of you) who use ClusterShot. We're in this for the long haul as we feel this model deserves a sustained push.

johngriffin, very nice to meet you. We've been discussing the multiple sizes for multiple price points over here at ClusterShot for a little while. The jury is still out on whether or not we'd ever implement it but here are a few of our thoughts:

- It seems weird to us to artificially create price points. We would actually be doing work (processor time to resize) to create "new" images to sell.

- At the core of the transaction we're not sure enough people really care.  Granted, this may be us being naive and sticking our heads in the sand.  We feel that when someone is looking for a photo they are just looking for a photo that will work (it does have to be big enough). If the price of the photo is right they buy it. For the photographer they just want to sell their photo for a certain price-point.

- Our bet, and it's a long one, is that most of the photos being taken today (literally) are by people who don't care about getting a certain amount per size (they also don't care about a lot of other things). They would just be happy to sell any image for any amount. This isn't referring to the dedicated group of photographers here, this is referencing the world at large. Surely there are a million monkeys with a million cameras out there. One of them is going to take the photo a buyer is looking for.

Off-topic: John you are some sort of internet superhero. The amount of honest communication you do on here is astounding. Keep up the good work.

Geopappas,
Thank you for your comment. ClusterShot mostly runs off of silverorange's open source web stuff located at http://code.silverorange.com/.  There is, of course, a layer of code that powers ClusterShot that is not open source.  ClusterShot is roughly made up of 75% open source code that we have developed and chosen to share.

So yes, we do share our own intellectual property.

We're stubborn enough that the fact that all other stock sites watermark images doesn't necessarily mean we should . We're not AGAINST the idea we simply are unsure of the benefit and have decided to err on the side of trust rather than suspicion. Does anyone know of any research, statistic, or even personal anecdotes that prove that watermarking is worth it?

Again, I'm sorry I can't be more specific on the topic of the new features described above. As ClusterShot is a platform for you to sell your photos (it's like ebay, we just facilitate) we would see ourselves as being in the position to offer you a set of tools that would make the identification of your images on the web (and maybe in print) and the requesting/charging for the use of it easier.  Even if we just save you hours of research and headaches we think that's worth something.

  

I should also mention that we're looking into a feature/technology that could potentially trump watermarking for protecting your images. It would also allow you to monetize photos of yours that have been used without permission. After all, it's not that people use your images that is the issue, it's that they didn't pay for the right to use them.