Hi Everyone, thanks for the feedback on this. I'd like to address some of the concerns voiced in the comments.

First of all, there will not be less content for customers just because we plan to be stricter with certain types of images, often the very types you have also been complaining about in the MSG forums. Remember those ridiculous, spammy portfolios from one of the leading agencies with tens of thousands of almost identical, useless images? Who needs those? Nobody. I'm sure inflated numbers sound really good at shareholder meetings, but we operate at a very different scale, and what works for the big guys doesn't necessarily work for us.

As for being arrogant by curating content and being more selective, we really don't mean to be. But I'm sure you are all well aware of the fact how saturated the market has become with images, if not from the growing number of topics here about earning mere cents per download. I'm not saying there isn't an element of greediness on certain agencies' part, but the fact of the matter is that billions of photos are taken and shared every single day (some big agencies claim to add over a million files a week) and there's so much competition -- even when it comes to sites offering free content -- that some of the images submitted to these agencies have almost zero value. I understand this thought upsets many people, but it's not like what it used to be ten years ago. Certain types of images are still very valuable of course and I believe customers should and will pay good money for them, but there are some that at this point people don't even want for free.

As a small agency with limited resources, we obviously need to operate very efficiently. On one hand it costs a lot of money to review incoming content and if we know from experience that certain types of images don't sell well, we need to stop those at the gates. This does not automatically mean that the content is bad, some just don't sell well here. This also protects contributors from wasting their time on things that don't work. On the other hand we also need to help top selling artists get their content online as easily and quickly as possible, and we're always coming up with new ideas to make their lives easier. Although we try to be as contributor friendly as possible, it's not possible to make everyone happy. In the end there has to be some level of curation, there's just no other way. It doesn't make sense to let everything online just because someone decided to upload it. Of course volume is important and I understand why people think it's the only thing that matters, but at this scale it's more like a balancing game where you need to take all sorts of issues into consideration.

I don't monitor this forum often, so if you have any questions about anything, feel free to send a message through our contact form and I'll be happy to answer it. Thanks! 

Not sure what's going on, but please post an example or contact us through the support form and we'll look into it right away. Thank you!
http://stockfresh.com/info/contact_us

Quote from: andy_arden on February 05, 2016, 21:30
Hello i want to ask you who have files here if it is worth for me to upload 30k files here. You get any sales or i will lose my time? Thank you.

Hey Andy, thank you for your interest. We're a small agency so it depends a lot on the type and quality of content you have. Please PM me with your portfolio and I'll be able to tell you if it's worth it. Thanks!

Quote from: Monkeyman on February 28, 2015, 16:09

Quote from: Microstock Man on February 28, 2015, 11:38

Quote from: EmberMike on February 27, 2015, 17:38

Quote from: Monkeyman on February 27, 2015, 16:19
I don't know if this happened after the redesign, but have the previews always been blurry at Stockfresh? The zoom looks sharp but the standard view looks pretty bad because of the blur.

Yeah, they're definitely blurry. Hope they can fix that.

I asked this on their forum. Peter said they are still using the old small previews. They will be regenerating new previews for all existing images at some point soon.

Ok, that explains it. Pretty bad idea to stretch images while waiting for the new previews, though... hope they'll fix it quickly.

And using a watermark with lines and text across pretty much the whole image would be nice too. It's quite easy to steal icons and other small design elements now when the previews is getting bigger.

Regular previews are indeed a bit blurry but fine for the time being. The bad ones are the really wide landscapes on the search results pages, but they were like that even before the redesign. All going to be fixed in time. No big deal, after all there's only 4 million of them

QuoteI wasn't crazy about the somewhat low prices.

Have you seen the Dollar Photo Club?

Jokes aside, it's not easy for a small agency to balance between impatient contributors who often expect sales levels they have on hundred million dollar businesses and customers who are conditioned by the top 3 agencies to want everything for almost free, but we're doing what we can. Stocksy for example is a fantastic idea. I don't think it will turn the entire industry on its head just yet, but it has a very solid potential in its niche. It won't be able to take on board all the photographers who are struggling with the lowered royalty rates though, so there have to be other players fighting the big guys...

We already pulled Yuri's content from Stockfresh and I'm curious about the rest of the sites. I wonder how long they are going to drag it out... 

Quote from: pro_microstock on April 23, 2013, 03:55
It is certainly your agency's right to accept or reject the applications. As it goes for you, it also stands for the people to express their views. If this equation hurts you, you are at wrong place.  Even if you discount what I feel, read what others have to say.

There are people on this forum with legitimate concerns and people who love to distort the facts and in some cases flat out lie. The latter of course are usually completely anonymous because otherwise they would have to back up their claims and that's not convenient at all, is it?

I take legitimate concerns seriously but if you make a false claim you'll be called out for it. I've been running similar services for almost a decade now, trust me, you're not the first person to come up with the cunning strategy of complaining about the rejection of so called "best sellers" that have 0-1 downloads at best on top tier sites. Do you honestly think we are that blind and stupid? We have heard ALL the stories before.

Did it ever occur to you that it's you who is at the wrong place?

Quote from: pro_microstock on April 22, 2013, 19:51
They asked me the links to my ports. I sent them links to 6 portfolios which include super selective Fotolia as well.  Yes included my best 5 images as well. All 5 sell well on various sites.  I do not understand what bothers this agency. Slow and full of attitude.

I don't usually reply to nonsense like this, but this time I'm calling on your bluff.
You have 0 sales on Depositphotos and Dreamstime and you have 1 sale on Fotolia.
I'm not going to link these galleries, do it yourself if you dare.
Go ahead, show everyone what you have, let them decide who has an attitude.

Quote from: noodle on April 20, 2013, 03:23
My application has been there since February, sent 2 e-mails inquiring whats going on, and no response

Can I have your username so I can look into what's going on?

Quote from: leaf on March 02, 2013, 13:45
well.. if you want to buy this site.. now is your chance
https://flippa.com/2893358-pr3-stock-photos-web-vistors-return-rate-45-7

Highest bid: $125
I would say it is worth $130, but the reserve is $1500... I'm not paying that much!
Could have been a great acquisition story!

Quote from: mtkang on February 28, 2013, 02:49
Hi, Peter,

why let thing to slow down your business if you see the progress..if it is making money.

I see no reason don't paid for advertisement, don't get enough employee to do the job. If you really see a progress in business, you have to do it fast. 1 year is a big year in internet.. unless it is the other way, that the websie just want to maintain as it.

We're gradually adding new reviewers.

Quote from: tavi on February 28, 2013, 06:16
   Happy to see that some people are doing great at stockfresh. Sad I'm not in that situation. I have 1000 images and I have 1 dld/month. Or none.
   This is my port: http://stockfresh.com/gallery/taviphoto
   I'd like to have some feedback about  the photos. I know they are not commercial, but 1 or 0 dld with 1000 accepted images seems strange from an agency witch made it in the middle tier.

I don't think we're in the middle tier, someone has been messing around with the voting system. We're a bit lower than that. There's nothing wrong with your images, it's just that not that many people search for these kinds of subjects (yet). Our customer base needs to grow to generate more sales for less popular topics.

Quote from: cclapper on February 27, 2013, 23:45
I had an interesting conversation today with our SEO guy (I'll call him Fred) at work. I work on e-commerce sites, web designing, loading products, etc. Fred was asking us web doods if we had made any changes to categories, because he has been noticing a significant drop in our organic search results from about Feb. 5th through the 15th. He could not pinpoint a cause, so of course the first people to blame is us.  Anyway, I related to him that that was just about the time when Google made the change in their image search.

It also took me a while to figure that out, despite the fact that I knew about the change... First I was worried about the effects a bit, but we actually benefited from it. Our sales weren't affected negatively and there's considerably less pressure on the servers without all that "fake" traffic.

The key takeaway from this is that people WILL buy the images if they can and if they know they have to, but you have to let them know by watermarking all the images you intend to sell on your own website. There shouldn't be any unwatermarked images on Google search from agencies except for the teasers on their front pages. If there are, they are doing something wrong.

It would be great however if we could provide Google with some HTML based data about the legal status and price of the images because I think that vague disclaimer stating that the image might be protected is not quite useful enough.

Quote from: mtkang on February 27, 2013, 09:16
i notice one can only move 20 files everyday..

it seems not very efficient for contributors..any guys think so?

if you upload 1000 files, u have to remember to login every day just to move 20 files..

Everyone has a quota. There are hundreds of contributors trying to add their files at the same time and we have a limited number of reviewers. We're thinking of a weekly quota though, that might make things less annoying.

Quote from: robertosch on February 25, 2013, 14:00
Hello Peter,

Any chance in the future to upgrade the size for eps\jpeg uploaded to SF to be bigger than 20MB?
I know that SS size for vectors is just 15 MB, but I think they should make it bigger too.
Thanks

The size limit is 25mb and it's more than enough in my opinion (for the time being of course). If it's starting to bother others as well, we can definitely go higher.

Quote from: mtkang on February 24, 2013, 13:49
ic..is the vector now priced as 10 credits..that's 10 dollars right?

i saw a thread ppl complain about the vector price..but i see faq listed as 10 credits.

Yeah, it's been like that for quite a while. You get $5 after each vector sale.

Quote from: mtkang on February 24, 2013, 02:27
hi all,

do we upload eps+jpg or a zip file for vector with IPTC jpg?

do we upload separated jpg for raster sales?

thanks.

These are the combinations that work:

my_file_1.jpg
my_file_1.zip

my_file_1.jpg
my_file_1.eps.zip

my_file_1.jpg
my_file_1.eps

A JPG file is mandatory. We need it for previews, but you can limit the size to 1600x1200 if you like.
Metadata is read from the JPG file.
Although you don't need to zip EPS files, that way you can include all kinds of different versions for the customer.

Quote from: somethingpretentious on February 18, 2013, 00:31

Quote from: cardmaverick on February 17, 2013, 21:05

Quote from: Xanox on February 17, 2013, 12:40
all this talk about Stocksy is "vaporware".

as it is now, the microstock is a mature oversaturated cut-throat industry.
there's not a single chance for a tiny startup like Stocksy to get the foot in the door without being backed by investors and VCs fueling the company with TENS of millions $.

and these guys are there to make fat profits, not to provide photographers a "fair share" environment.
they will try to grow the company as much as they can and then sell it to the highest bidding competitor, that's their business plan.

early photographers who invest in Stocksy could make some money, but all the other random contributors being merely content providers will be taken for a ride again.

would you invest in Stocksy ? NO !

A lot of people here probably hate what the post above says, but he has a point. The overwhelming business model of choice for many agencies since about the late 90's has been to start an agency, grow the collection, then sell it off to Getty or at the very least sign a distribution agreement with them. To be fair, only iStock has taken this road as far as micro agencies are concerned.

...and Stockexpert.
(my bold above)

I did not want to comment on this topic because as the owner of another agency I'm obviously biased, but there's a common misconception about Stockxpert that I'd like to address. It was only a coincidence that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis Jupitermedia had to sell their entire images division (which we teamed up with right after the launch because they had way more experience in the industry than we did) and like all their assets, Stockxpert ended up at Getty as well. Our intention was never to grow the company in order to sell it, but to run it better. We shared the same goals with Jupiter, but Istock / Getty had different plans so we sold the remainder of our share and left, and as you are well aware they shut the site down. With Stockfresh we are totally independent and plan to keep it that way even though in some ways it makes our jobs a lot tougher.

Best of luck to Sean, I'm sure all the agencies will gladly add his portfolio.

Quote from: EmberMike on February 11, 2013, 13:48
I'm way down at SF lately. I've earned a dollar there so far this month. I almost hate to admit it here because I was such a big cheerleader for SF last year.

No idea what's going on, but I'd love to hear from Peter about how they're progressing and if they are still seeing the same site-wide increases they were talking about previously.

On a positive note, last year I made the suggestion to Peter that search results pages should include the total number of results pages, not just indicate the page number that you are currently viewing, in between the arrow icons. The way it was, I thought it made it look like every search only had 1 page of results. It took a while, but they did finally make that change to the site and now a search result page indicates how many more pages of results there are. I think this gives buyers a much better idea of how deep their search goes and how big the collection is.

I'm sorry to hear that, Mike! Overall sales are increasing and although we did switch search engines last year the new one returns almost the same results so it's definitely weird to see such a huge drop. In theory one reason could be seasonality -- I know you have quite a few pics about the US elections for example. We also seem to be getting a lot more vector content these days than we used to and that might increase competition, but your work stands out so that shouldn't really be a problem. I'll try to look into this in more detail.

We are doing pretty good with the site, November and January being our best months ever. We've been out of the red for some time now so we are definitely going to stick around for quite a while. The fix you recommended (thanks for the feedback by the way) is not the only thing we did recently, among others we redesigned the entire purchase flow with a brand new shopping cart system, added several different new languages and our current goal is to improve search results. Although we beat most smaller micros in relevancy and options, there's always room for improvement, especially if we want to go after the big guys.

By the way kudos to the person who voted us into the top tier about the week ago, it was hilarious. Although we don't belong there, I'm pretty sure we don't belong to the bottom either, which is quite an unfair assessment of what we're doing.

Quote from: loop on June 16, 2012, 15:53
I wa there too. I dind't say that there were no ads, I said they were very scarce, and, by the way, just from ms sites or fron small unknow companies, nothing that suggested good business. Look at morguefile. com for a today's example.

We used to have ads for sxc.hu's sister microstock site, Stockxpert, but we tried to make sure they don't ruin the user experience. Getty later replaced them with Istock ads in a similar fashion.

Everything written with big red letters is a scam. No exceptions. There's no easy money, there are no wonder pills, you're not going to make $9999 per day with Forex, there's no trick to beat the casino and there's no surefire way to pick up women. If this thing is genuine, they are not doing a really good job making it credible...
Btw the guy sounds exactly like Penn Jillette! )

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on May 21, 2012, 23:11
I'm the brilliant mind that suggested putting your money where your mouth is and you say you have, and have even designed the site yourself. Of course you have put SOME money into it, but you hold up the $1m-$3m for DP as an example of the heavy capital investment needed to boost a site ... yet I seem to recall that anecdotally you are meant to be a multi-millionaire from the sale of StockXpert. If so, why do you appear to find DP's investment impressive when you should be able to match that yourself? If you have and have not got results then I am sorry but that also fails to inspire confidence.

I never said DP's investment was "impressive" to me. It seems to be a reasonable amount for their size / purpose if you ask me, but it was merely an example to show how ironic it is that many photogs complain about "selling out" while obviously expecting companies to sell out so they can grow their customer base more aggressively which means a lot more $$$ to them. There are a lot of ironic things on this forum, for example it's also an interesting phenomenon to root against new players in the market (who try to work out a better deal for everyone) while complaining all the time that X agency lowered royalty rates again. It doesn't really matter though, it's just an observation.

As for finances, I'd like to respectfully point your attention to the fact that this forum is not a shareholder meeting and the company is not publicly traded. I'm happy to read feedback and answer questions, but I'm not going to talk about my personal finances or discuss how much we've invested in the company, how and when we're using that money and what our exact future plans are, even if that makes you skeptical. We are doing our best to grow the site by using our funds wisely and we're happy with the results we have achieved so far. Of course there's still a long road ahead of us, but the notion that it doesn't make sense to exist just because some other companies seem to grow faster is just ridiculous to me. You never know what goes on behind the scenes and how it will all play out in the end. You can waste a lot of money in a very short period if you don't do things right.

Hi Everyone!

First of all, thanks Helix7 for the kind words and the initiative to support Stockfresh and I'm also very grateful for those who have been supporting us all along. I read the original post about 2 days ago but didn't continue reading the rest because I expected the exact same reaction that you can see in the first couple of pages and this kind of negativity, ignorance and malice is not easy to tolerate.

Instead of personal replies I'd just like to follow up on a couple of general sentiments.

1. The idea of "selling out"

This is the last time I'm going to write about this. Stockxpert was party owned by Jupiter right from the start. Most of you weren't even there yet. The reason why it got shut down eventually is that Jupiter had to sell their images division during the 2008 financial crisis and within the Getty family there was no place for StockXpert. This wasn't a planned event, but an unfortunate coincidence.

This is not the real point though. The point is, most stock sites out there are already partly owned by a 3rd party (or going to be soon) because companies need to raise capital to function and grow. This happens in all stages. Depositphotos got $1-3 million, Fotolia just got $150 million and Shutterstock is going for an IPO as we speak.
Labeling us as "sellouts" just for taking investments is ridiculous, especially if at the same time you also blame us for not growing as fast as the competition who are also "sellouts". Make up your mind! By the way, I have to mention that during the Jupiter partnership which lasted several years, not once has the royalty rate been reduced. Not everything was perfect, but we're definitely proud of that.

And also, for the brilliant mind who suggested investing our money to prove that we believe in the project: well, guess what happened! We took a big risk and invested our own money and a great deal of time into Stockfresh. I personally designed and developed the whole site from scratch for example. All the work we put into the site is already paying off, and it's just going to get better.


2. The site has been around for ages, it's not a startup any more.

Stockfresh is about to become just 2 years old. If you ever tried to build a business, you'd realize that success doesn't happen overnight. It takes many years of hard work and dedication. I know that expectations are very high but it's unrealistic to expect Stockfresh to rise to the top so soon. We have great growth though and the site can already support itself, so I have bad news for the guy who hoped for our Lucky Oliveresque demise that we apparently "deserve" (how can someone be so evil in the first place, that's a really good question): we're definitely not going anywhere and we'll continue to grow at an even faster rate. In your face!


3. My photos don't sell at all / I had a lot of sales on StockXpert but this site is a waste of time.

It's a fact that despite our growth we're still quite small. Some types of images therefore won't sell well, or at all. Not everything can be attributed to the lack of traffic though, we often see clearly useless subjects or badly keyworded and dated imagery that have very limited potential. Obviously a lot of the latter sold well on StockXpert partly because that was 4-5 years ago and partly because we had significantly larger traffic there. A lot of things changed since then. As you are all well aware of this, competition between contributors now is fierce. There's a huge influx of talent and you have to be really good to stay on top. This effect gets amplified on sites with smaller traffic, so Stockfresh is not for everyone (at least for the time being), but a number of contributors do quite well, even some with smaller portfolios. We also try to make it easy for contributors to submit (we even import portfolios if necessary) so you don't waste any of your time, but you have got to have what it takes.

Once again thank you very much to those who support us. If you have any questions you know where to reach me. There's been a few things I'd still like to address but I have to run now so I'll do that in a later post.

See ya,
Peter

I'll never forget the day when I saw people in the Istock forums cheering that StockXpert was killed.
I wonder who's cheering now.

Quote from: RT on January 11, 2012, 16:24

Quote from: peter_stockfresh on December 22, 2011, 12:21
It's a lot of work and whoever thinks it's possible to become successful within just 1-2 years has no idea what it takes to establish a business like this.

I've been with Photodune less than a month, only half of my portfolio is online and I've made more money with them that I have with Stockfresh since it started 18 months ago. Sorry Peter you're a nice guy and I wish you the best but I've had enough of the excuses and empty promises, I upload my photos to agencies so that they can market and actually sell my work, I've lost faith that's ever going to happen with Stockfresh.

What excuses? I'm just telling you what's going on.
Photodune: started with around 1 million potential customers - Stockfresh: started with 0 potential customers.
How on earth would we be able to compete with that at this point?
I'm not going to be ashamed just because we are smaller, especially since traffic is going nicely.
I understand everyone's very impatient (including me), but you have to start somewhere!

Hi Everyone,

I know you all have very high expectations of Stockfresh, and we're trying to live up to that. However, please don't forget that we're a small team with limited funding as opposed to other newer agencies who have either had huge investments (Depositphotos) or have a massive community to build on (Photodune). Without those it's simply not realistic to expect stellar growth so soon. Stockxpert started off quick because we had 500,000 potential customers on SXC already, but keep in mind that it took 4 years for SXC to grow that big. It's very easy to build on a huge community, but when you start literally from zero, it takes time to build a customer base, get your name out, establish yourself, saturate the search engines etc. It's a lot of work and whoever thinks it's possible to become successful within just 1-2 years has no idea what it takes to establish a business like this. Anyway, we're working on it, I believe we're on the right track because traffic is growing nicely and even though sales might be disappointing at the moment, I hope one day you'll all be satisfied!

Happy holidays!
Peter