Hi, Microstockgroup people, the reason I am posting is to get some feedback on a project.
There has been some talk on the forum over the years about contributors finding a way to sell directly while overcoming the drawbacks of each of having a limited number of images.
Well, Leo Blanchette, the illustrator famous for those orange men business mascots, has come up with a great idea for interlinking portfolio sites and is enough of a programming whizz to pull it off.
He kindly set me up with a site so he could test out some of the functionality. It is basically a one click upload site, fantastically easy to use.
My site is here:
http://www.atstockillustration.com/and Leo's is here:
http://www.clipartillustration.com/I have been getting decent sales even with just the two sites on the network and zero promotion by me, and kept 100% of the money paid by the buyer.
Apparently that is because of some great SEO stuff Leo has been working into the way the site works. I think the real strength of the idea is that it can work as a network of contributors all bringing in traffic.
The idea is to eventually make it possible to search across a network of sites from any one contributors site. Each contributor would have control over their own site, pricing and so on and get paid directly by the buyer.
If you don't want to sell direct it can also be used as a "referral engine" to your other agents like IS, so exclusives may get something out of it to.
So here's the problem, Leo has already spent a lot of time working on this, and will have to spend a lot more to get the project complete. I have been racking my brain trying to work out how he could finance the model. I have got permission from him to post here to ask if anyone has any ideas about how this could raise revenue, I think a lot of us would like to be able to be part of something like this, but how would you be prepared to pay for it? Monthly subscription? One off payment for the site? Should he maybe Kickstarter it? Any ideas or feedback would be very much appreciated.