Quote from: Herg on March 01, 2016, 16:36
Perhaps my footage on Pond5 is priced too high at $59 ?

No way! Probably too low. My sales tend to increase when I raise the price at p5. Why sell below the industry standard of $79? I've tried lowering prices at P5 trying to increase the number of sales and it hasn't ever worked. Sales increase when I raise my prices back up.

We just had a really good month at CanStock selling video.  Much better than normal.  Then today I received an email from them telling me that all the still images I just uploaded were rejected for various reasons.  Never had that happen before.  Oh well, I think we made like $3 there this month selling images so I'm not gonna worry about it.

I don't seem to be able to download Stock Uploader.  I log in and refresh the download page as it says to do but no download link appears.  Any ideas?

I gave ya a like Ana    Nice work...I wish I could draw!

Thanks for the replies!  I thought the symbio forum had been locked to new messages.  Apparently not.  Jeeeeez, I can't keep up with it all. 

Sometime around one of the last theme updates (I'm on 3.3.3) my site has begun to respond very slowly when a search is performed. 

At first I thought it might be a plugin conflict so I disabled all of the plugins but that did not improve the speed. 

So then I thought it might be my host (although I haven't had problems in the past) so I verified that by installing a different theme and although I couldn't search my images with the theme, everything seemed pretty snappy again.

Then I used a plugin called P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to scan my site.  The plugin shows what components of your site are taking the most resources and causing the site to be slow.  The graph I got is attached.  It seems to be showing me that the problem with my speed is a result of the theme itself.  Look at the crazy load time for the theme (over 20 seconds). 

Is anyone else experiencing a slow down on version 3.3.3?  I checked a few other symbio sites and didn't see a problem but I don't know what version they were on.

I tried them out a long time ago (before symbiostock) and purchased several of the add-on features.  It was buggy and I couldn't make it work properly.  That was quite a long time ago tho so maybe things are more stable now?

Quote from: ShadySue on February 04, 2014, 22:19
How's Symbiostock doing nowadays? That might be worth considering.

Pretty good.  With the exception of January, we've had monthly sales on our Symbio site for the last few months.  Not a huge volume but it's a start.  In fact, yesterday we had an xlarge image sale and because of it I was able to have a nice email discussion with the buyer which may lead to additional sales in the future.

Hey Martin,

Nice looking distribution tool and exactly like what I've been looking for to distribute our video files.  If I understand the pricing, however, it doesn't seem very affordable for use with video.  For instance, right now I've got 22 video files I need to distribute that add up to approx. 6gb of data.  I want to distribute those files to 10 different distribution partners.  That becomes 60gb of outgoing traffic for just 22 files.  Those 22 files alone put me over your largest package of 30gb which has already hit a pricing point that becomes too expensive for me.  I'd need to see an unlimited traffic plan at a more affordable price point for this to work for me.

Great idea though and best wishes for your success!

Bryan

Quote from: leaf on December 29, 2013, 23:51
I have avoided this problem by simply not uploading my video to Dreamstime.  There is no point supporting a start up (in regards to Video, Dreamstime is still a start up) that has lower prices and lower commissions than the industry leader (Pond5).

Can't argue with that logic!

Hi everyone!

I'm still messing around with the video side trying to decide how I want to move forward.  As Jo Ann mentioned, I do have around 40 footage clips available for license directly from our symbio site ( http://crackerclips.com/?s=footage&post_type=image ).

I have a major concern that's kept me from continuing tho and that's in regards to backing up the site.  I don't want to put in the days, weeks and months to get all our footage up and running only to lose the whole thing if something goes wrong and gets corrupted or the site gets hacked.  Having the site completely backed up with an easy way to restore is crucial.  If it were only still images it's not that difficult to find a service or a way to back the site up (I've got one now that automatically backs up every file on the server every night) but with the massive files we're talking about in regards to footage it doesn't seem to be that simple or straightforward from my research.  If I were to upload my entire footage collection to date we'd be looking somewhere around 600gb worth of data.

Since I'm no expert in this area and managing something that big makes me a bit nervous I'm considering using another service to handle the actual sale and delivery of the file.  In other words using symbiostock as you see it in the link above (symbio has great SEO) but each video would be linked on the detail page to where the actual deliverable file resides.  Photodeck would be one possible solution to handle the backend.  I'd be paying monthly for the service and the storage but still be receiving 100% of the sale.  I also wouldn't be responsible for backing up the files and maintaining the database on that side of the equation.  Sure it would cost me every month but the cost would be about the same as if I were paying monthly to have all that data backed up anyway.  Also, in the case of Photodeck, I could actually send in a hard drive and have it uploaded to my account, saving me literately months of uploading.

So until I get this all figured out, the bulk of our footage will be available through the Pond5 API we set up at http://stockfootage.crackerclips.com .

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on January 17, 2014, 02:03
I'm not sure what you mean, but take a look at this clip - not the only one like this - which is for sale directly, not via Pond5

http://crackerclips.com/image/half-dome-from-yosemite-valley-stock-footage/

And there was a discussion about the two sites which had cobbled together something here

http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=520

Haven't had a need to talk to support recently so I don't know about that but we are still making sales and just had our monthly payout a couple days ago.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on December 09, 2013, 00:25
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=714

Thank you!

Thanks for the blog post Jo Ann!  I used your guidelines to successfully set up google authorship to my site.  As I have a google+ business page, I linked using that and it worked just fine.  One thing I did change was I did not hide the link to my author profile.  I placed it in a text widget in the "image page bottom" section and that seemed to do the trick.  I don't think google likes hidden links or text.

Using the google tool you mentioned I did get a couple errors noted in the Extracted Structured Data area under author: "Error: At least one field must be set for Hcard. Error: Missing required field "name (fn)". Not sure what those errors refer to.

It was my approach when setting up our site in the beginning to do my best to design the layout using only the basic theme and plugins.  I didn't want to make any custom CSS changes due to the constant updates and changes.  To this day I haven't made a single CSS code change.  It's not that I couldn't figure it out it's just a conscious effort to keep things as simple as possible and I'm very happy with the way our site looks.

As in most things worth doing, there can be a learning curve but nobody should let that stop them.  Using a camera, learning photoshop, lightroom, ftp clients, color spaces and understanding all the hoops one needs to jump through to submit to agencies at one time required a learning curve.  For most of us now those things are second nature.  This is a project that I took on with a long term time frame in mind.  An investment in the future of my business.  I'm very happy with the direction it's going.

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on November 22, 2013, 16:42
So I made a first pass at a page for my Symbiostock site. Not sure if that's what you had in mind Leo, but take a look:

http://www.symbiostock.org/Sites/digitalbristles.com

That looks great Jo Ann!

Quote from: Microstock Man on November 22, 2013, 05:52
The mirrored content is cheaper than I have set my Pond5 images at, so I'm not sure whether getting it all mirrored would be a good thing anyway. I thought initially we were told we were going to be able to control our pricing on both sites - am i remembering that right?

I think you're remembering correctly.  It was my understanding that we would be able to control our own pricing on Pixmac as well.

I stopped uploading pictures to Pixmac a long time ago because we were told that images would be mirrored at both so I just upload to Pond5.  Unfortunately this hasn't happened yet as far as I'm aware and I'm wondering if it's ever going to happen or should I just start uploading to Pixmac directly again?

I was accepted too.  Sounds good, I'll be interested to see how it goes.

I liked the pricing and capabilities of Microstock Analytics as well.  Having said that, I cannot get the program to work properly for me.  Some (not all) of the images/video are importing with incorrect metadata.  The metadata it's importing for some footage is not even from video I've ever taken.  Don't know where that info is coming from? Also, if I sort by revenue it tells me that my top selling footage clips at istock have made double what they have really made and what the istock page shows for overall earnings for that video.

My portfolio is primarily footage so maybe it just doesn't work well with video? Dunno.

I've also tried stock performer and while it was much faster and appeared to be giving me accurate numbers unlike MA I didn't feel like I was getting much useful information (I only tried the sparrow or "lite" version) other than my sales total for the day.  Maybe the full version has more useful info?  I tried looking for some sort of information that would help walk me through analyzing some of the data but didn't find much info.  I also felt it was too expensive. 

That's awesome! Congrats on your sale.

Congrats Redneck! 

I got another one yesterday as well.

FTP is working but the images are not being pulled off the server.

Yes, they still exist.  I really like ClipCanvas and we sell there every month.

Quote from: elvinstar on October 28, 2013, 20:31

Quote from: CrackerClips on October 28, 2013, 18:46
Unless you're camera is capturing uncompressed footage (which is unlikely at this point) you're working with a compressed format out of the camera.

Doesn't Magic Lantern give you the option to capture raw video?
link: http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?board=49.0

I've never used Magic Lantern so I don't know what it offers.  Sure there are ways to capture uncompressed footage but it's not very straightforward or common right now.  That said in a few years our iphones will probably be capturing uncompressed video

Edited to add: I should have said uncompressed footage capture is not very common in the stock footage world as of now.