|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - Jo Ann Snover
3901
« on: December 15, 2013, 01:35 »
..Does this show starting a new image marketplace is still viable?...
There has to be some reason that people will come to a new site to buy - and if it's competition based on price (one of the biggest complaints contributors have against agencies) you'll have a hard time these days getting decent content. A number of contributors are more interested in alternatives to the type of agency currently around because the last few years haven't been good from a contributor point of view. I don't supply Deposit Photos because I think they don't operate in an up-front way - they offer people "deals" to get higher commissions and better search placement, but that's clearly something they can't deliver (everyone having preferred placement). I also wasn't thrilled that they came from people who operated a file sharing site, but as far as we know things have been fine in that respect. PhotoDune also seemed promising because of the connection to the other Envato marketplaces, but they've settled into a low performer rut which is hard to get excited about (I do contribute to them) Starting a new agency and suggesting that your goal is to become an agency at the bottom of the middle tier isn't very exciting from the contributor point of view. The last time I saw a lot of people get excited was when Stocksy launched - although that isn't something that all of us can participate in as they don't want most of us. There's absolutely room for something better, but not for another one just like the others but newer.
3902
« on: December 14, 2013, 22:37 »
Here's a working link to that topic http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?id=499The forums moved a month or so ago and all the old links no longer work. You can make a new blank menu and assign it to the Account/Cart menu to get rid of that unwanted list. Even though Leo has temporarily turned off registrations on the forums, you can search topics there to read other people's solutions
3904
« on: December 13, 2013, 21:03 »
I had an existing blog and I've kept the blog but changed the theme on my site for Symbiostock. The blog is now accessed from a menu. You can install symbiostock in a subdomain without a problem, but I think if you want to use a different WordPress theme for your blog you'll need to have two WordPress installations, which isn't a problem either. On my site I have a personal (family photo albums) site, my Symbiostock site in a subdomain which has its own domain name and my husband's work blog in a subdomain with its own domain name. His blog and my Symbiostock site are two separate WordPress installations. It is a valid WordPress installation mode to put it into a subdirectory, but that isn't recommended for Symbiostock sites without having a subdomain set up to point to that directory (in other words you can do what you want, but don't do it via WordPress's alternate installation option). You'll do better asking questions in the Symbiostock forums rather than here, but here are some existing threads covering the issue of where to install it http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?id=448http://www.symbiostock.org/Knowledge_Base/You'll need to be at PhP 5.4 and you'll want your host to support ImageMagick (most do but sometimes you have to turn it on).
3906
« on: December 12, 2013, 17:52 »
Thanks for posting the link - it's nice to be able to do something concrete
3907
« on: December 12, 2013, 13:52 »
Out of curiosity - I've always wanted to go to the Maldives because the images I see look so stunning and I'm a sucker for turquoise water - I searched Shutterstock and there are just shy of 30,000 images for Maldives.
For Aruba just over 1,000, for Cayman Islands about the same, although Caribbean (which I realize is very general) has over 86,000
It's such a great backdrop but clearly fairly well supplied. For my Caribbean images, it seems that identifiable places and popular destinations do better than generic "pretty" shots.
Enjoy your trip
3908
« on: December 11, 2013, 20:34 »
They've done a good job - the site was running a bit slow but I did a search and then wandered over the results to see how the loupe behaved. The smaller display - just the image - is a big win. They've got a timer so that if you just zoom over images they don't try to load anything until your mouse stops. No irritating flickering The position is good so if you want to see the next image over you can easily roll off the current image and onto the next one (previously they covered the next one completely so you couldn't easily get there from here) They handle thumbs that are partially off the top or bottom of the window well It's easy to click on the image thumbnail if you want to go to the image page The only reason people here say harsh things about iStock software is that it largely deserves it. It's not being a "hater" to say that broken things are broken or late things are late. It's also fair to note that they had a fine loupe a long time ago, and the only reason there's any discussion here at all is that there was some train wreck of an "improvement" that was a software "own goal" They've done a good job with this, but it's not innovation and it's not timely. They should keep whoever they had do this work though and put them to work on the bug list 
3909
« on: December 11, 2013, 01:45 »
I think this should be visible to anyone - Mark's Facebook page which his wife says she will be maintaining as a memorial for him https://www.facebook.com/MarkEvans4
3910
« on: December 10, 2013, 19:15 »
I can only assume that was some sort of auto-correct fail, but yes, I meant anti-captcha!
I've fixed the post above.
3911
« on: December 10, 2013, 19:13 »
...
Right now I've got my money on crapstock.com over stockphotos .com in the next few years....
That domain's already taken - a photographer here with a sense of humor is setting up a site on it as we speak
3912
« on: December 10, 2013, 14:55 »
When I'm looking for something I just type in a description of what I'm after and Google finds me (usually) some reasonable choices or the site I was looking for but whose URL I couldn't remember.
It's like phone numbers - you used to have to remember them to call someone and having a catchy easy-to-remember number was a good thing for a business. Now I have contacts on my phone and I increasingly have no idea what number I dialed (I can still remember my childhood phone number though!).
If having a good URL was all it took, photos.com would be the cream of the crop and it's a rather stale looking backwater...
3913
« on: December 09, 2013, 23:12 »
I use anti-captcha and it has cut the spam drastically - one every week or two. Plus, the human user never sees a thing
3914
« on: December 09, 2013, 15:36 »
Based on the various readings and discussions from iStock's first bruising at the hands of Hellman & Friedman, the typical period for a private equity outfit to hold an investment is 3 years, at which point they sell or, if they can't, further damage the business they acquired by taking on new debt to pay themselves a "special dividend".
June 2012 is only 18 months ago, so why KKR is after money so soon is a bit of a puzzle. But then it's a puzzle as to why this sort of practice is even legal!
But, as noted by others, Fotolia is such an awful outfit even by the standards of other microstock agencies, that if they get mangled by KKR, perhaps the other agencies will be the beneficiaries and it'll be good riddance.
It is a shame though, as they started out with such promise, opening up European markets the other agencies hadn't focused on...
3915
« on: December 08, 2013, 19:25 »
Take a look at this thread in the Symbiostock forums which will fill you in on that. http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?id=714That forum post evaporated along with all the others for about 6 weeks, but I think all the important data is the blog post which I updated.
3916
« on: December 08, 2013, 18:08 »
Thanks
I may look at moving the widget-based text into the main body of the image page as I already made modifications for hcard classes. It's just easier for more people if changes can be made without modifying php files
3917
« on: December 08, 2013, 16:50 »
Not sure why you'd be sorry for making a simple observation. Mark was staff, not just a contributor with masses of talent. The organization has said nothing publicly about his death. That's more than a little odd
3918
« on: December 08, 2013, 13:44 »
... But it seems i'm not getting the support here that I need to stop this cheat. I guess thought people here would be as outraged by the whole thing as I am? Guess I was wrong!
I read your post yesterday and, even though I can't imagine why anyone who sells licenses to their images would consider a photo contest, I looked at the images. I wouldn't have phrased it the way gostwyck did, but I wasn't impressed with any of the entries. Given that this isn't a competition judged by "experts", who's to say why voters make the choices they do? That's why IMO the whole thing is hard to get worked up about - what would winning mean?
3919
« on: December 08, 2013, 00:09 »
This is great work Jo Ann. Terrific, useful blog post.
The only concern I have is for the invisible text in the footer. It seems like a great idea, but I know Google has frowned upon invisible code in the past. Mostly that had to with hidden links, but I wonder if this might fall under their scrutiny too. Anyone more versed in SEO and Google want to weigh in?
Now that we know that "by <Author Name>" is apparently an important part of the authorship equation to Google, wouldn't it make more sense to have Leo throw together a quick way to put the byline on our image pages automatically? Maybe right under the image?
It isn't invisible in code terms - it's white and white text is visible in the most literal sense In an earlier version of my site where I had a gray footer, I had gray text the same color. If you know it's there it's selectable and technically - to Google - visible. You can set display visibility off and they say they don't want that - which is why I took the route of visually invisible but to a piece of code, visible. But with some very small changes to content-image.php it could be that the existing author name under an image could be used and I'm looking into the hcard and hatom requirements to see if that can be handled too. Haven't finished that part though. I don't know anything about SEO either You can read a post about some code changes to add hcard information to image pages here http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?pid=8399#p8399
3920
« on: December 07, 2013, 18:33 »
... I seem to be promising to protect them to an unlimited degree. Or have I misunderstood everything?
I don't think you're far off the mark, but just because someone writes language into an agreement or contract doesn't make it enforceable. I think that the reasonable cases of artist protecting the agency is if the artist has provided a bunch of forged model releases (or some such) but otherwise I think agencies would have a very hard time getting anywhere with us protecting them. The best it does is give the agencies some cover for confiscating any income of ours they're holding in the event of some dispute.
3921
« on: December 07, 2013, 18:22 »
Jo Ann,
I got a little lost at this part -
4. Google+ Profile link to author page While editing your profile, go to the Links section and add your Symbiostock author page URL as a place you are a contributor to.
I didn't even know there was a Symbiostock Author page. I have filled out all of my author settings, but I haven't seen instructions for setting up an author page. What am I missing?
If you have an image on your site, click on your name under the image (or, another link to the same page click on the info drop down under images and click on author there). If you have filled out one of the WP fields that's looking for bio information, that is show there and under it a few more links - to Network, etc. The URL for that page is what you'll copy and paste into your Google+ profile
3922
« on: December 06, 2013, 16:32 »
If you haven't set your site up - and uploaded some images - there won't be anything to make a sitemap of. Once you get the site up with a few images, you can set it so the site map gets generated once every 24 hours, submitted to Google automatically. You'll do better to ask in the Symbiostock forums for some assistance (and specify a few details about your version, host and provide a link to your site) http://www.symbiostock.org/community/
3923
« on: December 06, 2013, 10:30 »
Awesome blog, linked to it if you don't mind,
Don't mind at all
3924
« on: December 06, 2013, 01:43 »
A couple of site owners posted about claiming authorship for our images with Google and how to get the process to work - the reason for doing it is that supposedly it helps with search ranking plus it ties all your content together in searches (because Google can show other works by you). After trying to follow Google's directions and getting the same errors others did I thought I'd have another go at making it work. I was able to and wrote a blog post about how - note this is specific to a Symbiostock site but could be adapted for any site: http://www.digitalbristles.com/image-authorship-with-google/If there are questions about it, here's the thread in the Symbiostock forum to follow: http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?id=714
3925
« on: December 04, 2013, 16:09 »
These two things aren't the same type of transaction, so it seems pointless asking which is worse.
I don't like the fact that we can't get details on the types of deals SS is now doing, even though they're proving very lucrative - and I'm talking about the SOD licenses - but there's nothing comparable to Getty/Google there either.
Giving people a way to do things legally - as long as we get compensated - is in general a good thing IMO. I just can't imagine there will be too many takers for purchases of FB-only licenses, but possibly SS can create a market there - which would also be a good thing
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
