My name be haloed or cursed forever on...

I suppose I should give a few word to address the common "why, oh, but why?" question and a few other points raised on this thread.

"Why?" - give you one guess, and some of you had reasonable guesses for part of the issue: sustainability, or lack thereof.

"Why not raise the price?" someone said. Well, you tell me, this very thread has a mix of comments between "it was great and cheap" and "credits sucked and it was too expensive". I guarantee you, it makes it quite tough to find the right price point to balance the customer base with the revenue targets, and your operating costs.

I will give you a comparison that is a bit crude but has the benefit to make your reflect on the matter with the proper angle. Most of us, me included, have no problem spending $5 at Starbucks to get a coffee. Well, heck dude, you can get a coffee just about as good, if not better, for 50 cents if you make it yourself. I don't see us counting our pennies then, right? You enjoy the coffee and forget you just pissed out $4.50.

When it comes to providing a service that revolves around you (or I) making money, suddenly prices become a much more sensitive story. You start comparing your income versus your cost. And the truth of the matter (some here pointed that too) is that the majority of contributors really don't make that much. And because most people don't value their time, the $5 spent on a coffee suddenly becomes a more attractive proposition than $1 spent on saving you a couple hours of work.

Because, from the start, based on our positioning as a tool for contributors, and not a microstock agency on steroids (with distribution), we were caught between a rock and a hard place: most potential users don't really feel like paying and we can't make a commission on content sales for fear our distribution network would collapse under anti-distribution warfare from agencies who would see us as direct competitors endangering their supply line. You have this attitude to thank for Shutterstock persistent refusal to be listed on the network (and them threatening to sue me personally and closing my personal contributor account a couple times). Believe it or not, we grew to feed 5% of their weekly content supply through that magic "Generic FTP connector", but does that really matter?

In the final analysis, much like anywhere else, the Pareto principle applies: 20% of the contributors publish 80% of the content. Of those contributors, 20% make 80% of the revenue. Everyone else is reduced to see micro stock, now very much a commodity market, as a mildly enticing waste of time or moderate income source, which, in truth is disproportionately small in comparison to the energy we spend "feeding the beast".

As a final point to answer "why", yes, iSyndica had some reasonable backing, however the business results were disproportionately small in comparison to the original objectives. We weren't supposed to just focus on micro stock, for one thing, but problems following one another, we ended up being stuck there. You do not get investors without having to measure yourself to some minimal expectations.  And thus, while the platform was technically sound and could have gone further (for fear you might cry bloody murder I won't give you details on some of the features we kept under wrap in the last 3 months and would make some people who post in these forums look like Mickeys at the Zoo, I won't name them), but in terms of business, in terms of pure profitability, we shot ourselves in the foot (and the head) from the start and it was time to pull the plug, instead of pissing money in a black hole - excuse my French (I get discount points for actually being French).

So there is for the "why".

For all those of you out there who used us - even for free - you have my most sincere apologies that this flight-of-fancy is coming to an end. Believe you me that nine of you will be as sorry as I am after giving my heart and soul to this venture over the past 2 years. For those of you who didn't use us, you should have tried, it would have made you realize how valuable your time is.

Now, regarding specific points raised in this thread:

- Syndication was paused for a couple hours today as I rolled out the account closure/refund page. Things should be back in order now.
- If you run out of credits for your last syndications, contact support. (@isyndica.com) you can't place orders for credits anymore because I want to limit accidental user errors causing frustration for everyone at refund time, BUT we will arrange something fair and I certainly won't begrudge you a few pennies if that's all you would need - that's on the house
- Refunds: we pay you back pro-rata for your subscription and storage and credits based on your average purchase price, everything rounded to your advantage, AND your referrals. No payout limit. No BS. BUT you must fill out the Account Termination form because we do not have your billing information to pay you back and Paypal does not allow refund on old orders. I have extended the deadline for refund requests to October 17 and will be playing Captain on the deck on my sinking ship to fulfill all the requests we receive.
- Manually synchronizing your portfolio after iSyndica to figure out what you sent, where: no need. Connect to you FTP account on iSyndica and download the Syndication.tab.txt file that you can open up in Excel and transform into a Pivot table. If you need more details, I can probably accommodate this as well,l.  Contact me on the support email.
- Other solutions in the life after iSyndica. My cynical side would say no other sucker got caught into that trap, but there are some ways: PSM, Cushystock, and eventually Pixamba, the makers of PSM actually mentioned they were planning an online distribution service. There is also a slim possibility that the service could be revived by either of a few companies that contacted us for a possible transfer.  This is a discussion in progress however and there is no promise (and no, iStock didn't buy us to plug exclusive account leaks, god bless them they never figured out everybody cracks the API key from their Aperture pllugin to syndicate to them!)


I think I answered all the questions raised in this thread, if there is more, please contact me at [email protected] - I guarantee you I will treat everyone of you as best as I can.

Ladies, gentlemen, again, it has been a pleasure (if all relative in light of the abyss I now contemplate) to serve you these past two years, and for what it's worth, you have my sincere apologies for capturing you along with me and all our team at iSyndica in a dream that ended sooner than desired.

With all my Best regards,


Seb, CTO, iSyndica

PS: Dave thanks for the lovely blog post. Funny I had in mind to put a tombstone on the homepage after I put the key under the door. That and maybe this cool poem from Yates, you know: "... But I, being poor, have only my dreams, thread softly, for you thread on my dreams..." maybe I should just point the DNS to your blog ;-)   

Hey guys,

We have sorta botched that transition due to the abruptness of the events.

iSyndica has offered to take over the "debt" in unpaid commissions as well as transferring content - more details here:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/did-fotomind-com-sell-our-email-addresses/msg143049/#msg143049

Your balance will be transferred into your iSyndica affiliate/referral balance where you can get it as cash (similarly, subject to payout limitations, but you can get up to $24 in commission for referring users to us, so those payouts are quite easier to reach and we've done a few already).

Cheers,

SC - iSyndica

Hi,

I figured I'd chime in on the thread.  We are going in iterative steps in our implementation, so yes, for our first release you could compare us as a "glorified FTP uploader".  This is not were we plan to stay however.  Some of you are technical enough to have found alternative solutions for this already, as I could have done on my own if I only wanted to do this as well.  Similarly, if you do have a super-duper internet connection the initial service might not be very helpful.

You have to understand however that I am not coming into this project "just" because it is a business opportunity but also very much because I do sell stock and I do have a personal problem with the hoops and loops I have to go through to make this a sensible proposition for the time I spend on it - currently, it isn't.

Over the coming months, we will add more functionality to help centralize MRF management, categorization and all the little things that currently force us to visit each site separately, along with keywording tools (including translation so we can approach international markets), and reporting.

"My" personal ultimate goal is that I might be able to sell my content without even ever having to visit the 10, 20 or 30 channel sites I sell that content on (there are a lot more sites than most commonly know of, in regional markets), beyond the initial registration step.  However much a "techie" I might be, I find it personally quite pleasant when I can do something without having to write a batch script, and I think a lot of other photographers might enjoy the simplicity of our service, be it even a simple "glorified FTP uploader" that allows you to upload in a tenth of the time it would usually take you, even with a good internet connection, or obviously a service that actually cuts down on the finicky management we have to do on the stock sites.

Regarding the fact you "can't" choose the channels.  This might change in the close future based on your feedback and what makes sense for our business.  Clearly there is a difference building a system for yourself and fording the costs you personally incur and weight that against my additional gains from selling in more places (and the time I no longer waste), and building the service for thousands of photogs.  While we do use the channel lineup as a type of upsell strategy, we did not lump all the slow channels in the cheap subscriptions and the good channels in the most expansive subscriptions - we used the selling statistics of several photographers and the information on MSG (and a few other sites) to come up with a gradual scale as fair as possible that blends additional upload volume with sale potential with each increasing subscription level.  You can easily compare the information on the right side of this page with our subscription lineup to see it.

But yes, the ability to pick and chose your channel is a common enough request that it still is a matter of discussion at iSyndica.

I hope this answers some of your questions.

Thank you.

Seb / iSyndica USA Inc.