Quote from: stockastic on March 10, 2010, 03:34
As I never tire of point out   , I now have 25 years of experience in the computer and software industry.  I can tell you that it's not possible to predict the future in ways specific enough to get rich from your predictions.  You can foresee some baseline trends, but that's it. 

For example, in the late 80s everyone could see that computers would get faster and smaller, digital networks would extend into homes, and wireless communication would be big.  Pretty general stuff. No one I know predicted the IPhone, the Web, or cell phones.     

Star Trek predicted all of it in the 1960's 


-Mark

Quote from: Klauts on March 09, 2010, 15:20
Okay, at first I thought that ,although better looking, the site is harder to navigate but it seems I was wrong. You have direct links for your earnings and portfolio in the bottom left of the main page. The only direct link missing is the downloaded stats but you can click on More and then Downloads. I like the fact that you can login directly on the main page now.

So, an improvement.

I didn't know about the direct access at the bottom of the page. For me its in the lower right corner 

Thanks again !



-Mark

Quote from: njnightsky on March 08, 2010, 23:13

Quote from: mwp1969 on March 08, 2010, 22:50

Quote from: njnightsky on March 08, 2010, 22:21
Did you include your Folder ID in the remote path?

I tried like this content.cutcaster.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxx  for FTP server field ...

I also tried putting /xxxxxxxxxxxx in FTP initial folder when above did not work.

-Mark

This /xxxxxxxxxxxx is correct. What FTP software are you using?
I ended up switching to FileZilla to upload to cutcaster.

I was using WS_FTL Le but it did not have a place to put the /xxxxxxxxxxxx

I upload with Cushy 2.3.2 Pro.
There is a field for "FTP Initial Folder" ... I'll try it again using "/xxxxxxxxxxxx in that field.


*** I got it to work !

Thanks  njnightsky


-Mark

Quote from: njnightsky on March 08, 2010, 22:21
Did you include your Folder ID in the remote path?

I tried like this content.cutcaster.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxx  for FTP server field ...

I also tried putting /xxxxxxxxxxxx in FTP initial folder when above did not work.



-Mark

I just signed up to Cutcaster today  


I am not sure I have things set up correctly to find my FTP Files after their upload ...

Here's what I've done if anyone can help me get this to work:

#1 I am using "host: content.cutcaster.com -
username: anonymous - password: (leave blank) - Thank You!"

#2 I have clicked "process FTP uploads" without any apparent results.

#3 Keep checking back to that green button in case I didn't wait long enough ...


-Mark

Quote from: sharpshot on January 29, 2010, 13:44

Quote from: Komar on January 29, 2010, 10:25

Quote from: johngriffin on January 28, 2010, 21:12
Keep your chin up sharpshot. We are getting more sales each month and there is NO WAY we are closing anytime soon. I run a tight ship budget wise and am in this for the LONG HAUL. I know getting up to the top 3 is a challenge but Rome wasn't built in a day and no one ever said this was easy.

Keep up your support. I need everyone's help in order to change the system the way it is now.

Well said. Patience guys. The system is so much nicer for contributors as we have more control over how we price our images, you can go for microstock prices if you want or price it higher if you think the image is worth more. I got my first payout with Cutcaster last year, with 5 sales and I only have 70 odd images with them. So they are attracting buyers, it does take time to establish a business like this and we can help by uploading and keeping our images with them. Even if you don't see any results immediately or in the near future, you never know what the future holds.

I have lots of patience and don't regret using Lucky Oliver and Zymmetrical.  I stick with sites, never seen the point in deleting portfolios, unless the site does something like cut commissions or has security issues.  But I am far from the typical microstock contributor.  People complain about the big sites, then delete their portfolios from the smaller sites when they don't get many downloads after a few months.  Then the buyers just go to the sites with the bigger collections.  It is just hard for me to see how Cutcaster can get around that problem.  I still hope John can do it and make people wish they had more patience but I think he needs to come up with something to break this trend.

For what its worth ... and I hope its worth something  ... I signed up to Cutcaster through your referral link. I greatly appreciate your insights here on MSG as a champion for non-exclusives.



-Mark

Quote from: RacePhoto on March 08, 2010, 07:19

Quote from: elvinstar on March 08, 2010, 05:14

Quote from: mwp1969 on March 07, 2010, 18:30
I found a solution after troubleshooting these issues myself. My problem seems to be with Firefox after their site redesign.

I found I was able to find my FTP results using Internet Explorer. It loaded fairly quickly using IE whereas I was waiting 30mins - 3 hours for incomplete results to spool up using Firefox.

I hope this helps any others who are having problems.

-Mark

Thanks Race. I made the change to Firefox that you suggested and will check the process on my next batch of uploads.


-Mark




Thanks for the useful info. I will give it a try!

The browser you view with doesn't change what happens on a website like 123RF. If things are showing on one and not another, just click the page refresh and it should be there. Also Firfox has a setting for load page new on view.

"by default Firefox is set at 3 which means that it will always used an old, cached version of the web page, unless the server specifically indicates a newer one is available. You never know if you're getting the right stuff."

Change it to 1 and you will be happier with new uploads but have less pages stored in cache, which will pop up faster. IE loads new every time, so it's slower, but doesn't miss recent webpage updates. And then there's that little blue arrow up in the corner of Firefox! You can do it yourself... This would be the same reason why people don't see other things with new uploads on other sites, I suspect IS where people have acted superstitious and go to the forum then come back. What you really are doing is forcing the page to reload new when you come back, not that something on the Stock Agency site is magically changing because you walked around your chair and tossed some salt over your left shoulder.

Here's how to change it. (and you will get a warning box saying be careful)

browser.cache.check_doc_frequency and it can be found in the about:config menu of Firefox.

So you type "about:config" in the URL box and look for "browser.cache.check_doc_frequency;3"  and change the 3 to a 1 and save.

Or use the little Blue Circling Arrow in the top toolbar and reload the page. If that doesn't tickle it, hold the CONTROL key and click the blue reload arrow, which should force a new refresh of the entire page.

Hope that helps?

Just keep in mind the reason why Firefox is faster is that you have 50mb of cached data from visited websites, so it will move along quicker. IE downloads the page new every time if you have it set that way and in the settings you can choose, Tools > Internet Options > Browsing History > Settings > called "Check for newer versions of Stored Pages:'

Changing the 3 to a 1 is the same thing, Check for new versions of stored pages.

Since I can't see into your computer I don't know if you have IE set for check for new versions and Firefox is just running with the default settings.

Quote from: lisafx on March 07, 2010, 21:16
I'm not seeing a big increase there this month, but over the past year they are the site that has shown the most growth for me.

Congrats on your success there this month, whatever the reason

+1

-Mark

I found a solution after troubleshooting these issues myself. My problem seems to be with Firefox after their site redesign.

I found I was able to find my FTP results using Internet Explorer. It loaded fairly quickly using IE whereas I was waiting 30mins - 3 hours for incomplete results to spool up using Firefox.

I hope this helps any others who are having problems.



-Mark

Best of luck to you !



-Mark

I get to the half way point where you have to click to see FTP results ... It used to work before the makeover. Now it hangs up even when I let it set for quite some time. "Latest Upload Results" just keeps spinning like its caught in a loop that it can't get out of ... I tried multiple times last night without success. I've been trying again this morning.

Is anyone else having this problem?



-Mark

Quote from: gostwyck on March 04, 2010, 10:20
What I would like is the means to disable individual images, without having to write to Support and ask them to do it for us. It's a real pain and waste of everyones' time.

Hopefully this re-design is the first phase of a major marketing campaign.

It would make sense to ramp up their marketing efforts after the rebranding of the site if the rebranding was indeed planned at the time of the acquisition. We've been patiently waiting for some major changes for the better since the buyout. Hopefully this is the start of something good ...



-Mark

Quote from: leaf on March 03, 2010, 11:45

Quote from: sharpshot on March 03, 2010, 07:46
I get a sale every now and then but I am still waiting for their 3rd party sales, they are late reporting them.  If anything goes wrong with that, it wouldn't be worth staying there.

I was wondering the same - when is the third party sales report coming?

I had put in for these 3rd party sales awhile back ... they said something about Feb. for their next batch which is now past. Will I receive any sort of notifications that my images will be utilized or not?


-Mark

Quote from: patrick1958 on March 03, 2010, 11:56

Quote from: leaf on March 03, 2010, 11:51

Quote from: patrick1958 on March 03, 2010, 10:24
I would like the old download stats back... now i see all my downloads but not per day, in non date order... was better with the old download report... day by day...

Patrick.

you can see the day be day stats on this page
http://www.123rf.com/submit/commission_daily.php?mth=2010-03

Correct, but i do not see a tumb of the images sold, that's what i'm missing..  in the old download report i could see what sold on a specific day.

Patrick.

I was looking for the same in my post earlier on this thread. I still haven't found it ...


-Mark

I think the domain name change will be an improvement ...



-Mark

They've stated they've made modifications to the search engine as well ...


-Mark

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on March 03, 2010, 17:39
So they redesigned the site. It completely threw me at first, I thought they had been hacked with a redirect, since even the name has changed (dropping "photo").

Why, whenever there is a problem with sales, do managements think that the magic solution is a redesign? All that actually matters is creating awareness of the product with customers and persuading them to use it, but what the shake-up seems to offer is lots of touchy-feely bits of advice.

I did a double-take myself thinking it was some sort of scam with the domain change ... saw 4 million images + so I thought it might be them but wasn't sure. I read the "about BigStock" to confirm:

http://www.bigstock.com/aboutus.html

It looks legit.


-Mark

Quote from: melastmohican on March 03, 2010, 05:32
Who cares about new layout when earning balance is still negative...

No doubt 

I think it was December I had an unexpected explosion of sales but then it dropped off to next to nothing for the last two months. I hope March is better.


-Mark

I'm trying to find where to drill down to the individual image link or thumbnail of what has sold. I've found "Earnings ... and March 2010"

If anyone figures it out ... I would appreciate hearing about it.



-Mark

I've had 2 sales there since my last post on a portfolio of 309 images.


-Mark

$ 0.18 for an XS at Fotolia at the first canister level ...


-Mark
http://markwpayne.wordpress.com

Quote from: sharpshot on February 04, 2010, 16:58
I still wonder what Corbis are going to do about Getty?  They are their main rival in the traditional market, so will they take them on in microstock?  If Corbis bought SS, FT or DT, the market would look different again.  Or they could just buy Getty and istock, that would be fun  Do competition laws apply here?  I know sometimes a company is stopped from taking over all its rivals and monopolising the market.

Publicly traded companies face such scrutiny ... Getty was taken private two years ago for a premium of 55% to its existing publicly traded stock price at the time for a cash deal valued at $ 2.4 Billion $USD ... the name was probably kept for marketing purposes.

-Mark
http://markwpayne.wordpress.com

Quote from: Randy McKown on February 27, 2010, 00:56
I think the poll results on the right are a cool little feature but I also think people shouldn't put much faith in the results. It's based only on info supplied by a handful of visitors. When it says FT went down it doesn't actually mean FT went down in sales. You can't base real statistics on a couple hundred people votes when the actual company is made up of ... I don't know how many photographers are on FT .. 100K .. 200K .. more?? Plus who is voting? Did 50% of the votes come from people with only a couple hundred shots in their portfolio who never upload anything worth selling?

The poll to the right is still a small sampling of data. Corporations have been bought and sold before on less data ...

That being said, you must always consider the source of data and then it is usually required that it be synthesized into meaningful intelligence to be truly valuable.

A weighted average (if one were possible) based on the size of one's portfolio for the company for which they are voting ... would greatly improve the rankings and give more relevance to them.

An exaggerated example of this might be that 1000 newbies join and all vote for a particular site since they received their first $2.00 commission that month. While this could result in a majority of votes, it is far from being an accurate sampling across all sites and all portfolios. The same type of scrutiny should be used when considering ANY poll. You must always consider the source. That source should be carefully listed under the assumptions. An example ... If you poll only Republicans and you ask if they are in favor of candidate X or Y (X being Republican) your poll will likely have a strong bias. Now to apply this thought to Leaf's polls ... If you have 200 contributors respond ... and they are all in the top 5-10% of all contributors for that site (lets say by RPI, RPD, Portfolio size, or other key metric) then you might have a fairly accurate sampling. If your sampling was 2000 newbies at DepositPhotos ... one result might be that the results could be so completely skewed that you would have DepositPhotos http://submit.depositphotos.com?ref=1007538 at the top of the big six based on those voting were only paid to upload their first images 


-Mark
http://markwpayne.wordpress.com

Quote from: PowerDroid on February 26, 2010, 18:21
Long live Canstock!

For me, CanStockPhoto is actually in the Big 6... moving into number 6 since StockXpert went away.  I'm doing around $1-5 every day at CanStockPhoto, plus approx 3-4 times per month I get one of those Fotosearch commissions of approx $20 or $30. 

Since I started in microstock, CanStockPhoto has generated 2.46% of my revenue, while 123RF has generated 2.35%... bringing up the (far) rear is CRE at 0.75% and VEER at 0.58%.

Still awaiting my first large Fotosearch commission through CanStockPhoto . I've had a couple of smaller sales on 468 images up which I got up there in the last 30-45 days. Hopefully not much longer to wait ...  

-Mark
http://markwpayne.wordpress.com

Hi all.

I am curious as to what to expect for review times and for image status to go from the "pending" state to "online" at the new site DepositPhotos?

http://submit.depositphotos.com?ref=1007538



-Mark
http://markwpayne.wordpress.com