Totally agree EmberMike. Although I should disclose that Warmpicture did have sales and was profitable, albeit barely. It can be done, especially if someone with my lack of expertise was able to pull it off. The problem was going from break even, to worthwhile venture. I was putting more work into Warmpicture than I was into my day job, and it was not a lot of fun tracking all those sales and commissions for tax reporting. In order for me to have continued, Warmpicture needed to do more than just break even.

So you are completely correct. Everyone wanting near 100% royalties from a co-op is failing to consider that somebody (hopefully a team of somebodies) is going to be doing all of the work behind the scenes, for free. And who is paying for customer acquisition?

It has to be 100% royalty to contributor.

An agencies killer model.

You are confusing the needs of the contributor with the needs of the customer. While some customers are contributors, I'm sure most have no idea about royalty structure or agency-artist relations. You can't "kill" an agency unless you take all their customers. It has nothing to do with artist royalty structure. If it did, then Featurepics and Mostphotos would have killed iStock and Shutterstock years ago.

Unless you have a plan for attracting customers, a well structured co-op won't change the competitive landscape among agencies.

EDIT - The reason Stocksy is making inroads is because Bruce obviously had a plan for attracting customers, and relations with the customers he built during his days leading iStock. You can build a co-op in minutes with the right software. The key is customer acquisition.

I have added contact information on my blog for those clients who would want to seek contact with me.

Bingo. I would place a large bet that this has more to do with the reasoning than does site speed. They don't want people clicking out of iStockphoto, and they especially don't want people clicking over to your site, where you might offer to sell directly to the customer for a better price.

Symbiostock is a network, not a co-op. There is a big difference between the two from the buyer's perspective. The network requires the buyer to register for each  individual site if they want to make a purchase. A co-op (or virtual agency) puts all the images into one search and allows the customer to register once and download any image from any member.

Symbiostock could be used as a co-op of course. It would require someone to step forward and create a hub of sorts and provide a central registration and payment process. It has been proposed, but initial support was not strong enough to get it off the ground.

A co-op can be easily formed through Photoshelter or K-Tools. K-Tools requires one member to form the site and purchase the contributors add-on, and to manage all payments and record keeping. It is easily established, but it will require a lot of extra work come tax time.

The Photoshelter co-op or Virtual Agency option is probably superior. All it requires is that members link together through their Photoshelter accounts. Sales and Registrations are handled under one umbrella (Photoshelter), but each sale is awarded to the image author instead of a host site. That means approximately a 90% commission for the image author, and there is no requirement for an "agency leader" to be handling payments, taxes, etc.

So everyone who has a website needs to know web development?

Nope. Only those who use themes which might, at times, require them to edit INI files, work with their hosts to solve problems, etc. Nice try though.

Quote from: djpadavona on October 10, 2013, 08:34

Quote from: Ron on October 09, 2013, 16:54

But thats not what Symbiostock is supposed to be. It works fine straight from the box.

There are no less than 3 members on this board claiming that SY won't generate preview images out of the box. You can take that information, or leave it.

Or you can look at different factors causing issues with Symbiostock, instead of Symbiostock being the problem.

If it works for me, why wouldnt it work for you? I have seen to many times people blaming Symbiostock being the problem and it turned out it was something else.

I dont know what your problem is with the previews, but it could be caused by 1001 things not related to Symbiostock. Have you sent a PM to Leo and ask him to check it out for you 1:1? I am sure if Leo looked at it he can find the problem. 

And in the end, it might as well be a Symbiostock issue, but why we dont see 115 sites with this problem is due to that everyone has a different set up, different host, different widgets, different plugins, different you name it.

You responded to my claim above that people would need to understand how to configure their hosts by saying that nobody needs to, and you haven't had any issues. I don't see any consistency with your two responses. Either people need to understand how to do background editing and troubleshooting with their hosts, or they don't. Pick one.

Look, if I write a game for Windows, and it turns out that it works fine for 97% of the machines running it but it crashes on 3% because they have different memory, different motherboards, different competing apps, etc., I can't just point at the 3% and say "It must be something you did." You are going to run into a lot of different host configurations. It's up to the Theme creator of any Wordpress Theme to be as compatible as they can be.

I run Suffusion on 2 blogs that I manage, on separate hosts. It's an incredibly customizable, deep theme with more options than you can dream of using. It's very stable. If you look at the reviews, yes, you will find a few people who claim it doesn't work. But that is out of thousands and thousands of responses. That is what you shoot for as a theme creator - not 100% compatibility, but darn close. I've never read anyone say that Suffusion won't work under a certain host, or that it quit because their host PHP version changed, etc.  Nor have I ever read that someone needed to edit the PHP.ini or turn widgets on and off to get the theme to function.

"I haven't had any problems yet, so I don't need to understand PHP and editing host configuration files."  Hmmm.

Based on being part of WarmPicture (based on Ktools) I couldn't recommend going that route. You customize the store (because it doesn't do what you want out of the box) and then when there's an upgrade you're stuck as there's no path to integrate your changes. It wasn't IMO a great option.

With the power of 20/20 hindsight, I would have done the whole thing through Photoshelter's Virtual Agency option. Everyone would have established their own accounts, and done their own uploading, but we would be linked together as an agency.

KTools is a fine option if you like it out of the box. But as you touched on, customization was a major problem because your work was wiped out by upgrades.

A new gimmick is unlikely to help.

This is most likely going to be correct. But I will at least give them credit for trying to differentiate themselves, rather than settling for "Low Earner" status and status quo. As you say, it is unlikely to help. But why not try?

I also agree with the sentiment that if they want a higher grade of stock, they should be charging higher prices. And that would mean no cheap subscription plans. (Yeah, right)

Thanks. I had all the keywords, title, description in the file from Lightroom. The only problem seems to be that it won't show the image. It doesn't create the thumb/watermarked image and put it in the right file for some reason.

This sounds like the problem I had with SY. Starting in September, new uploads failed to produce preview (watermarked) images. Had a lot of people tell me, "It must have been something you did." So far you are the third person to report this problem that I know of, and it has never been addressed. Best of luck trouble shooting the problem.

I dont have a big established portfolio, and the majority of the Symbiostock network dont have big portfolios, as far as I can see. I do agree with the general point you make, but I think there are as many small contributors, maybe more, than large established portfolios.

It depends on perspective. I make roughly $400 to $500 per month from micro with about 250 to 600 images (depending on the site). That puts me well below the numbers being reported here, but most everyone on this board is successful already. The reality is that most contributors never make payout (we have heard this enough times over the years so I think there is truth to it). So my "meager" earnings probably puts in me in the top 25% of all contributors, if not better. That highly theoretical percentage is based on numbers I have read in interviews with various contributors and agency reps over the years. I'm very happy with how I am doing, but I make very little through self-hosting after costs.

I could have saved a lot of typing by just quoting Shady Sue   

- Sale clearing times. Unlike many other agencies, we report sales in real time. This means, you get notification of the sale when the licence is ordered, not when the client pays. When the client pays, the sale becomes cleared and your balance updated in your Alamy account. Why do sales take at least 45 days to clear? For account customers, depending on who they are and their deal with us, some will have long payment terms. This is normal in the industry, and that's one reason for the time delay. The other, is to allow a grace period where a refund can be issued for the customer. Projects get swapped around and changed frequently and we need to be flexible and allow cancellations of licences within a short time period. If you've ever had a 'refund' on an Alamy sale as a contributor, then it's likely that the sale had never cleared. With that in mind, a refund is more like a cancellation.

"At least 45 days" is very vague. I had a $245 sale in early July, and we are going on 3 months without clearance yet. It doesn't give me much confidence that the buyer still hasn't committed to the image after a quarter of a year.