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Messages - stockastic
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501
« on: May 22, 2016, 11:01 »
I just discovered Photo4Me and put up a few images to try to understand how it works. Photo4me used to have a forum, but it seems to be shut down following a rework of the site.
Before I get going on this topic - is anyone else here even interested?
502
« on: May 18, 2016, 19:45 »
I'm always surprised when people say they sell on RedBubble. They don't read IPTC even after all these years. I put a bunch of photos up there years ago, pounded in some keywords, and never sold a thing. Life is just too short to mess with sites that don't read the IPTC data.
After a much-hyped start, Crated seems to have gone nowhere. I've had a couple hundred photos there for several months and have sold one tiny print. Maybe I've posted on this too many times, but their "curation" seems to be heavily compromised because I'm now seeing a lot of junk (IMHO) showing up there.
503
« on: May 18, 2016, 14:41 »
Photo4me now reads IPTC data, although it still takes way too many clicks to post an image. I haven't yet figured out what's really going on at this site, it all seems to be in flux right now. Some of their FB postings are saying that big things are coming.
504
« on: May 18, 2016, 12:53 »
Another hair brained idea to leverage the contributors art. Sad thing is it is yet another distraction to an already over stretched, skeleton crew staff. It took two weeks for a contributor's problem to get solved recently because Sean was "in meetings" for two weeks.
Licensing on FAA went no where as it had no follow through. This wacky product with its robotic recharger is not going anywhere fast. How many will sell? Couple thousand a most. And they will come preloaded with a bunch of free stuff that will be find for the typical nerd who buys one. No one will even bother with it after the novelty wears off after two weeks.
Couldn't agree more - this one will sink without a trace. Who wants their work in this channel, for pennies? And why does Broihier (FAA) waste his time on stuff like this?
505
« on: May 16, 2016, 15:04 »
I have no marketing, but I do sell one now and then on FAA. But the trend seems to be downhill. The guy is playing SEO games that I think are backfiring on him. Or maybe he's just funneling all the searches to his 'collections'.
506
« on: May 16, 2016, 13:05 »
I still believe that the same people sell the same images on FAA.
If you're a new seller... good luck! There's no rotation.
Some people there behave like there's some kind of hierarchy.
In the forums there's always the same people saying that they are selling well... The newbies always trying to find out what's happening because nothing is selling.
My 10 cents.
An accurate summary. The reason you see the same handful of people posting in the forum, every day, is that FAA said at one time that forum participation affects your search rank. But I doubt that's really true - the main 3 factors are previous sales, previous sales and previous sales. I think the people making the real sales are the ones in the FAA "Collections" and there's no way to apply, the selection is done by FAA.
507
« on: May 14, 2016, 09:53 »
Hello Stockastic, I don't know anything about Zazzle. I don't want to waste my time. Could you let me know please why it isn't good? I make images for people to hang up on their walls. If I do go on holidays I also take travel photos. But I don't want to make designs for clothes on the computer.
Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk
It's been a long time but what I remember is this: the process of uploading, creating 'products', organizing your 'store' was enormously tedious and confusing; many people spent a lot of time creating customized store pages, and one day Zazzle just ended it and made all the pages look the same; they tried to force contributors to lower their commissions by pushing you back in the search if you charged more than some very low number, don't remember what it was exactly. Others here will know more.
508
« on: May 13, 2016, 15:40 »
It would be nice to find out that their totally graceless slashing of commissions actually backfired on them. I'm one of those who immediately closed my account.
509
« on: May 13, 2016, 13:41 »
- You may request to close your account after 30 days.
- Earnings of less than $50 at the time of closing will be forfeited.
Ouch. I didn't realize they played that game. I'm surprised, because they were nice people to deal with. Maybe someone else took over the business. I have $35 there which I'll never get. I've had 1 sale this year. :-) If I leave my account open, they'll eventually make another few dollars without paying me anything. I guess I should just close it. A sad ending for this company, which started out sounding very promising.
510
« on: May 12, 2016, 11:35 »
Can I use the FTP uploader for Crated? Copying and pasting is soooo frustrating. Photo4me can't read keywords. Are Crated and Zazzle free? I am not paying FAA!
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Crated doesn't have FTP, but they do read the IPTC data. Crated is also free, for any number of images. You won't show up in search unless you get 'curated', i.e. someone at their end looks at your work and decides they like it. However, as far as I can see, just about everyone who signs up is now getting 'curated' because there's a lot of utterly boring, repetitious stuff showing up. Zazzle is such a total waste of time I won't even comment on it. If Photo4me doesn't read IPTC data, I'll forget about them, just like I wrote off Imagekind for the same reason. These companies just don't get it. To make any sales at all, you'd have to upload hundreds of photos - and no serious contributor is going to do that if the upload code doesn't read the IPTC.
511
« on: May 12, 2016, 09:47 »
Which other websites are there apart from Imagekind and FAA ?
That's what I want to know, too. There is Crated.com, but all I hear over there are crickets chirping. I did sell one small print in about 6 months. I actually think it's ok if Photo4Me is selective and has a focus in terms of subject matter. We just need more sites like that, with different orientations.
512
« on: May 11, 2016, 19:05 »
A British landscape photographer with more than 400 images on Photo4me told me that nothing is going on there. I have not sold one image on there yet but I don't have 400 images on that website. Does anyone have sales on that site?
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I hadn't heard of Photo4me so I just checked it out. It seems to be 'alive', but barely. They list their top sellers, and #2 has sold 4 in the last 30 days - which would be a big number for me, but is pretty low for a site overall. It seems like there used to be a forum, but it's now "under construction". The link to Facebook goes to a missing page. I like the look of the site, and the freedom to control your pricing, and the fact that submissions are inspected. But is it a ghost town?
Are images inspected there?
I put one image up there (didn't notice anything about inspection) and got a barrage of likes and positive comments, presumably selected from a list of possible comments. It seems that that's a way to get ranking of some sort, but I was totally put off by that, as I can't be bothered playing that kind of game, far too time consuming.
I know someone who has sold a few there. He's been there for over a year. It's targetted mainly at the UK market, which I was keen on as FAA targets and is priced for the US market. Some of the Photos4Me sales (I have no idea what proportion) are people using it for fulfilment for pics for family members or personal clients.
I did the free signup and one of the terms you must agree to is that you understand your uploads will be inspected and may not be approved.
513
« on: May 11, 2016, 16:06 »
A British landscape photographer with more than 400 images on Photo4me told me that nothing is going on there. I have not sold one image on there yet but I don't have 400 images on that website. Does anyone have sales on that site?
Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk
I hadn't heard of Photo4me so I just checked it out. It seems to be 'alive', but barely. They list their top sellers, and #2 has sold 4 in the last 30 days - which would be a big number for me, but is pretty low for a site overall. It seems like there used to be a forum, but it's now "under construction". The link to Facebook goes to a missing page. I like the look of the site, and the freedom to control your pricing, and the fact that submissions are inspected. But is it a ghost town?
514
« on: May 11, 2016, 15:54 »
Is it worth it paying the membership fee on FAA and getting a website from them?
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If you have no marketing of your own, sales are going to be few. Unless you have a unique niche which is reflected in your keywords, you'll be so far back in the FAA search you'll never be seen.
515
« on: May 11, 2016, 12:19 »
I'm a bit more cynical. I suspect they are making money by selling "premium" upgrades to contributors with little or no concern as to whether anything on the site actually sells.
Yes, and if you think about, that's very close to being an outright scam.
516
« on: May 04, 2016, 15:25 »
"Another chance to rise our sells."
Honk if you remember Andy Kaufman.
517
« on: May 02, 2016, 10:46 »
I've been contacted by an art consultant who wants to use one of my photos in a local hotel. I don't know the details yet but they want to license the image and do their own print. I'd like to make this happen and am not really worried about them ripping me off somehow; but I'd need to gin up some sort of licensing agreement, giving them rights to some number of printed copies. Can anyone point me to a generic agreement I could use?
518
« on: April 25, 2016, 17:56 »
I got out over a year ago. Nothing about IS was making sense anymore.
519
« on: April 24, 2016, 18:05 »
It seems there's a growing number of 'zombie' sites: no action, no site development, no forum activity, no one reporting any sales, no advertising or promotion. They stay up, so they must be bringing in a bit of money, but they're not going anywhere.
When I hear about a new POD site these days, of course the first question is, what's the percentage split on sales. If it's reasonable, and I can set my own markup, I check it out further.
First I try to find out if it has a pulse. Is there forum activity? Do they post on FB more than once every 3 months? Does the stuff on the main page change?
Then I check the submission process. Is it dated and clunky, or does it read all the metadata, so I could actually put up a couple hundred in a reasonable time?
Most of these sites are just sitting there, dead in the water, producing a little income for someone by selling stuff that was uploaded long ago.
520
« on: April 23, 2016, 20:06 »
Do I love getting 38 for a sale? No. But IMO that sale would probably not have existed before subs.
Why do you say that? People who buy subscriptions obviously need images for their work, on a regular basis. I'm guessing that whatever business they're in, it existed before subscriptions; and it would continue to exist even if all subscription plans ended tomorrow. They might have to pay a dollar or two for those images, but doing so wouldn't put them out of business.
521
« on: April 19, 2016, 10:11 »
Their forum administrator just came in with this:
"Please remember that for every comment here against, there are people who love the changes and are happy, as is the norm. I'm one who loves it."
522
« on: April 18, 2016, 21:59 »
What I've concluded is that the guy has zero attention span and never finishes anything. He flits from one big idea to another like a butterfly, and they never go anywhere. Well over a year ago he announced the new 'customizable' "Artist Web Sites" and today they're still a half-baked mess; I'm redirecting my domain back to the main FAA site and forgetting about my 'personal' site.
There was a thread on their forum recently about this latest chaos: the auto-generated description and the list of colors supposedly in your photo. The thread went nowhere and nothing got fixed. Things change from time to time, there's never any explanation and often no sense to it. It's like someone is just noodling around with the site code with no goals or direction.
FAA is never going to get any better. We just really need some serious competitor to show up and I don't mean Crated.com.
523
« on: April 14, 2016, 20:20 »
As the article said, "the stock imagery business is very clearly becoming commoditized". And the outcome will be "reductions in pricing and lower margins", which can only mean royalty cuts. How can it be otherwise?
Long term I think they'll end up selling the business, meaning basically their content archive, maybe even to Adobe. And Adobe will then complete the demolition. In the end, nothing but dust....
524
« on: April 14, 2016, 13:32 »
SS is no doubt telling shareholders they'll compete with Adobe by having a 'better search engine'. They'll describe themselves as a technology company with superior R&D. But I don't think it will work, given the enormous amount of LCV and generally poorly-composed material they've already taken in - and it's still flowing in the door. There's a lot of hype about "AI" these days but the reality is, it doesn't exist, no piece of software can recognize a good photo. And SS can't afford to have human reviewers go back over 10s of millions of images and rank them in some meaningful way.
My perspective comes from 30 years in the software business. One of the oldest acronyms in that business is still applicable in the era of "Big Data": GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
525
« on: April 13, 2016, 11:22 »
Everyone now wants their product or service tagged with "AI" in some way. Too bad there actually isn't any.
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