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Messages - collis
27
« on: October 21, 2011, 01:33 »
Hey Pixart, Ah yes there is quite a bit of support in theme selling. It's much less a *passive* income stream than photography. I think Orman's themes are one of the easier to use (this is total hearsay I've never tried myself  ) The royalty structure on all our marketplaces is as follows: - Exclusive authors earn 50-70% based on their sales volume. Once they have sold $75,000 they have hit the 70% mark (it's an incremental scale going up in 1% blocks). After $75k they enter our Elite Author group and get further rewards. We are actually closing on our first author to break $1 million in sales!! You can learn about the Elite Author program here: http://elite.envato.com
- Non-exclusive authors earn 25% of every sale as a flat fee. As you might guess, our marketplaces are heavily slanted towards exclusive authors. In fact close to 99% of all files sold on our marketplaces are by exclusive authors. Though as we branch into new areas like photos, that's changing a bit
Hope that helps!
29
« on: October 20, 2011, 14:41 »
Thanks Leaf for posting about this massive milestone for us!! Pixart asked about themes, which is our biggest area. 99% of people selling themes with us sell exclusively, and the volumes are large enough that many of them make 70% on each sale. You may be interested to see that last month for instance we had a new record for most take-home earnings on ThemeForest, a huge $47,000! You can see the details here: [link]http://notes.envato.com/milestones/ormanclark-breaks-monthly-marketplace-sales-record/[/link] If any of you are web designers as well, I do highly recommend it
30
« on: October 04, 2011, 16:05 »
Hey guys! A few things I thought I should answer: @zastavkin: Thanks for the feedback, I totally understand, and respect those photographers (including yourself and Lisa) who have opted-out of extended licensing on PhotoDune. Certainly if it becomes a more attractive proposition in this light, I'll be knocking on your door :-) @dirkr: I think it's important as a new agency that we move cautiously and incrementally. We started up only a couple of months ago, so far things are going really well, and we are taking small incremental steps to address areas we might be weak in. You are correct that those two settings would get a lot more support. Don't get me wrong, we are definitely well aware what would win many friends amongst the photographers. However it's really important that we look at all the different requirements. We must build a site that delivers sales, and that works within our network of marketplaces and is consistent therein, and which provides value to buyers, and which photographers feel is worthwhile in terms of pricing and rates. And hopefully if all of these align then the site grows and is happy and healthy. The push and pull of these (sometimes quite different) requirements is what makes it interesting to try to run a microstock marketplace - especially in our unique position of having it be one of nine marketplaces! Anyhow, this may not convince you that we are doing the right thing, but hopefully it explains how we operate a little more. @Smithore: I totally understand your concerns. I don't think we will kill the microstock industry, I don't think anyone can kill it, it's got so much momentum! But I do see why you are worried about Ext License pricing and whether it's a trend downwards or if it will hurt the same type of sales on other sites. And on a brighter note, I'm just glad you called me polite! I'll take the positive feedback where I can get it @bizair: You're welcome :-) I figure it's good to give updates, but also to get to know us a bit, especially in these early months! At the moment we haven't been doing any editorial stock yet, however it's something I hope we can do in the near future. Definitely I'll make sure if/when we do, we announce it here on Microstockgroup.com @luissantos84: Thanks for the feedback Luis, and for giving PhotoDune a try, it's been good to have you on the site! That certainly would be a fun announcement to get to make  In the meantime we'll keep working on the site to see what we can do!
31
« on: October 03, 2011, 16:03 »
Hey guys, Thanks for the feedback! I was very impressed with how Veer handled things, and the post that Aaron put up was great! Really well written. Certainly they went up in my estimation too
32
« on: October 03, 2011, 01:47 »
Last month I got lots of good feedback about posting up some stats and updates, so here goes again! Things Going Well!- Sales continue to grow. In July (private beta) we had 1700, in August we had 4200 and in September we posted up 7200 sales! I'm sure the big guys will still get a chuckle out of our numbers, but I must admit I'm pretty excited! And we've had a lot of good feedback from our buyers about the quality of images which is great!
- Last month we had 150 authors with at least 1 sale, this month we've almost doubled that number up to 265 authors who've had a sale!
- New items per day have swelled up into the thousands, and should increase more (see below about the rate limit change!)
- Last month I noted reviewing as something that needed more work. Well thanks to the hard work of Jarel our review manager and his fantastic team at MicrostockSolutions (MSS), we have really amped up our review capabilities and team size, and are now getting through three times as many files a day.
- We seem to be establishing some early trends on what our buying audience is interested in. Check out our Popular Files (http://photodune.net/page/top_sellers) page. Solarseven really seems to have nailed our market, and image for image outsells everyone on PhotoDune by an enormous margin! He ranks #10 on our Top Authors for PhotoDune (http://photodune.net/author/top_authors), despite having a portfolio of just 235 images! A good lesson on how to do well on PhotoDune it would appear!
Things We Need to Work/Think On!- Uploading with Model Releases - We've had some complaints about our upload process when model releases are involved. We've fixed a few bugs, but there are some underlying differences in how we do things on PhotoDune. I need to figure out if it's a case of getting out better info about our process, or changing it. Either ways - it needs work! :-)
- We've had quite a bit of discussion about our non-exclusive rates here on MSG, and that's still something on the discussion table over here, so no word just yet!
... And Two Big Changes: (1) Extended License pricing increaseHere on Microstockgroup we've had a lot of people voice their concern about our Extended License pricing. This is a combination of a low pricing multiple, and a different approach to ext. licensing. Along with that feedback, we contacted a number of top authors to gauge their input before further reviewing it. As you may have realised we offer extended licenses of different image sizes. This is different from most marketplaces which offer just the largest size with an extended license. Personally I think it's kind of neat to have many tiers because different customers have different needs. Someone wanting to sell the photo on a postcard for instance needs a large print-ready resolution photo. Whereas someone making an iPhone app will just need a 640x960 size. For our extended license pricing we apply a multiple to the regular image price. Previously that multiple was 5x, we've now revised it upwards to 8x. This means if you need an extended license on the largest size we offer you are paying around $72 - which is fairly standard for the industry. However if you are a buyer looking for just the small size you are paying upwards of just $8. Of course for that price you get a *tiny* sized image! I think that some photographers may still groan at offering *any* sort of extended license for $8, and of course we still have a simple opt-out for extended licensing. However personally I think with this revision it fits better into the industry standards while continuing to offer something new to buyers. As you will find, we're big fans of gathering information and then making decisions. So we will continue to gauge this new price point to see how it performs, and then will revisit the decision in a couple of months. (2) Increasing from 50 submissions p/day to 250 p/dayWe previously had an artificial submission limit of 50 photos per day to ensure we didn't crumble under the load of resources and reviewing. Two months in and we're feeling more confident and we've now increased that limit way up to 250 images per day. I imagine this is going to yield a much faster library growth, and of course is a bit more pleasant for photographers as an upload experience! Of course this also means we are opening the floodgates to some extent, so we'll be watching closely our review times to make sure we don't move the bottleneck somewhere new :-) And Next Month
Next month we kick off a really cool GraphicRiver/PhotoDune bundle which will feature a lot of our current photographers. As you may know we share revenue on our bundles at a 50-50 split regardless of exclusivity. Bundles are very popular with our buyers and have sold up to $200,000 worth in a matter of days. But primarily they are a way for us to drive new buyers to check out contributor content. So I'm pretty excited about this bundle as it will showcase some of the best PhotoDune content to our massive pool of buyers! Onwards and upwards! Hope you all had a good month as well!
33
« on: September 04, 2011, 19:41 »
Hey folks! Wow this thread got a lot bigger while I wasn't looking! There are a lot of good points, and some good criticisms for us. I can see we have our work cut out for us to win over the hearts and minds I saw an interesting comment about Lucky Oliver which led me to reading up about them. A very interesting (and unhappy) story!! So far I have to say one of the things I'm enjoying most about the photo market is how deep and rich the history is. Lots of good lessons for us to learn Anyhow I shall keep reporting back, and we'll keep working to make the site and service more attractive to contributors. We're still only a few weeks in, so there is much more to do and to happen!!
34
« on: September 02, 2011, 16:20 »
OMG!!! Absolutely hilarious!! Congrats to the LUCKY winner! ROFL!
I had wondered why that photo was the top seller for a time. My husband (the model) and I had speculated that maybe PhotoDune was the stock site of choice for foot fetishists. 
I can see my stuff will fit right in there at Envato. I will certainly look you guys up if I ever get to Australia, and I will be sure to bring my famous hubby and my celebrated toes. I have a strange, quirky sense of humor too, in case you hadn't noticed...
Aha! There was a bit of speculation as to whose toes and who the model those might be! I'm pretty sure someone thought it was you and your husband, I will have to find out, they'll be excited to know they called it! That is too awesome, and glad you have such a great sense of humor. After I posted I suddenly thought - hmmm maybe that's not the best thing to write on a public forum in case you were like "hey that was a very serious photo thank you very much!!!" Yes do come to Melbourne, you shall have the red carpet treatment!
35
« on: September 02, 2011, 16:18 »
I don't usually complain about specific rejections on a public forum but since PhotoDune is very new and I am just starting to submit to this site, this is more a general question than a complaint: what is your official position towards exterior architectural pictures of old buildings taken from publicly accessible space?
The rejection says "Please check if there is a Property Release required": should I just resubmit with a note that it's not required? even in that case, it's a lot of work; or should I mark all as editorial? (even if it's not usually the case)
See sample rejected picture below.
My port is 70% architecture, if you don't accept it I'd better stop uploading completely.
Hi there! Good questions, I have to admit I don't know the answer myself, so I'll ask Jarel our review manager if he can stop in to the forums and answer, shouldn't be too long. Thanks for your patience!
37
« on: September 02, 2011, 00:10 »
I have to say that of all the new sites I have tried, PhotoDune is BY FAR the best selling. I am really impressed with the way you guys run the site, and with the sales! 
Hey Lisa, I'm really thrilled to hear that! We were really excited to have you on board so early on! Meanwhiles, I've been meaning to write to tell you this, but one of your photos became a sort of cult hit here in our melbourne HQ office. It's the one called Romancing the Toes. I'm not sure how it began, but one of the designers found it and printed a copy to frame it and put it on his desk, then the team decided that it should be the top seller for the week and all started depositing money to buy it, then we had an office pool competition and the framed picture became a part of the trophy .. you can actually see a photo of the pool comp winner James holding the trophy and framed picture. And finally, the framed picture is now the first thing people see when they arrive at our offices out of the elevators in the foyer. Its all (very) strange, but (very) true! Our office has a very quirky sense of humor If you ever visit Melbourne, Australia you have to come and visit, and I will introduce you as the photographer behind Romancing the Toes  Anyhow I thought you might be wondering why one photo had such a big run on sales numbers vs the normal sales pattern of a couple of sales per item per month!!
38
« on: September 01, 2011, 21:29 »
Thanks for the update Collis, I'm guessing I speak for more than myself by saying I really appreciate the transparency.
I did have good sales at PhotoDune last month and have high hopes for a bright future there. That being said, I think I'll have to enjoy my 'celebrity status' of 7th place while it lasts. I don't think I'll be able to hang on long
hehe true! I think you should milk it for all it's worth. Maybe start referring to yourself as one of the top ten photographers in the world :-) Don't bother explain that that's according to a tiny microstock marketplace! Top ten is the important part!!!!
39
« on: September 01, 2011, 20:16 »
Oooo, I've been poking about MSG doing searches for PhotoDune and Envato and found the August Earnings thread where several members are reporting PhotoDune climbing the ranks of their portfolio! I don't know if it's totally representative or if there are other MSG'rs who just haven't reported in yet, but still ... Yay!
40
« on: September 01, 2011, 19:53 »
Hello Microstockgrouper's I thought I'd stop in and report on how PhotoDune is going. I wrote up some stuff for our own PD forums and thought MSG might like to see it too! In previous threads there has been a lot of questions raised over our pricing and rates, and as I've mentioned we're planning to re-evaluate both after a few months of being live. In the meantime, here's how PhotoDune is going!
Things Going Well- Sales are climbing, our first month out of private beta saw sales increase more than double, from 1700 sales to 4200 sales for the month. Small still, but a good trajectory!
- We've passed 150 authors with approved items on the site, you can see the list ordered by sales here on our Top Authors page - Yuri is still dominating, that guy is a machine! And MSG's Leaf is up at #7
- The library has been growing by about 750 a day which in the wider world of microstock is not much, but for us just starting is lots!
- We had some performance problems in the upload queue, but after a lot of hard work, we seem to have solved them making uploads much smoother
- We hit 750,000 pageviews last month, almost double the prior month!
- Search traffic is zooming upwards with 2000 visits a day flowing in already
And one that I'm sure Leaf in particular will be interested in: Microstockgroup.com sent over 1000 visits!
Things We Need to Work On- Interestingly extended license sales are super tiny, despite the low pricing. This is interesting because the main driver of the low pricing is higher sales, so as I mentioned above this will go into our retro discussions when we hit the first quarter mark
- We're learning fast about how fast items pile up for review :-) Right now our review queue sits at about 5000 with 2000 being processed per day, meaning an average of about 2.5 working days to get a file approved. This is pretty so-so and we're working to improve this!
- We have a bunch of search and interface improvements that are still slowly rolling out. Of course this is something that will continue to the end of time really :-)
And finally we're starting to ramp up our marketing push slowly but surely, so I hope I'll be able to stop in next month and report more stats for anyone here interested
41
« on: August 18, 2011, 18:01 »
So, we expect a "big hug for wounded microstock contributors" from Evanto... 
No we don't we just want money, the same like Collis does. He wouldn't have created PD, if he thought he wasn't going to make money, we're not going to submit if we think we're not going to make money.
:-) I have to admit we have created some sites with not a lot of hope to make money, but you are correct about this one! I definitely hope it pulls its weight in the marketplace stable. So far, so good, things seem to be climbing. So hopefully that will mean we will be able to make money for contributors - though I am very aware about the rates issue and how that is likely to affect income. As I mentioned on another thread, it is something we're going to review after the first couple of months! In the meantime it's wait and see really. Nonetheless borg gets a big hug
42
« on: August 18, 2011, 02:36 »
Wow 80% is great from Zoonar, though I must admit I'd not heard of them until now.
I knew that iStock had cut commissions (which was odd given they had such tough commission rates already), but didn't know that Fotolia had as well. I've been reading the Selling Stock report lately which has some interesting things to say about what iStock and Getty are trying to achieve. I'd be fascinated to hear from Bitters/Bruce Livingstone on how he feels the company has gone since the purchase, it's certainly a lot bigger!
Meanwhiles since we're running our 70% for all authors week, I've run a PhotoDune post across the Envato network today, figure we'll rack up some more sales while everyone is on the bumper rates :-)
43
« on: August 16, 2011, 22:15 »
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what the highest commission rate that a photo marketplace offers?
44
« on: August 15, 2011, 17:42 »
Hey folks, just remembered to come and mention that it's the 70% week this week! :-) So every author, non-exclusive or exclusive, gets the same 70% commissions on sales for the next few days.
Anyhow if you're selling on PhotoDune, hope you get many sales this week!!
45
« on: August 10, 2011, 23:23 »
Thanks for all the feedback, lots to learn from this site! I have to say one of the best things about launching a stock photo marketplace is during our research I ended up finding Microstockgroup.com. I didn't know there were people here chatting about GraphicRiver all this time!
With relation to the upload process on GR that cidepix mentioned, I have to say, I agree it is pretty poor! I didn't realize how poor until we worked on the PhotoDune project. But our PD upload is much smoother (and getting better as we do more live testing) and one of our next projects is to port that same upload out to GraphicRiver. So hopefully it'll be better soon cidepix!!
And sorry I forgot to cover Extended Licenses in my last post, as Mat mentioned we do have a low multiple at the moment of x5 on whatever price that particular sized image has. This translates to $5-45 depending on what size you are buying.
There's a couple of reasons for this, but I should point out that it's easy to opt-out of this licensing. Of course if you're worried about industry trends as Mat is, then that's not exactly much comfort!
The main reason for the low multiple is actually that we were looking to drive usage of PhotoDune photos in templates for sale on GraphicRiver and ThemeForest. At the moment we have a lot of Creative Commons licensed imagery which is OK, but it would be nicer to have authors buying better photos to package in. Both because then there are sales going to photographers, and because presumably we'll have better looking templates as a result which will sell more themselves.
Additionally on our other sites we've noticed that lower extended license pricing drives more overall sales volume than when we have fewer people buying more expensive licenses. So we've been lowering a lot of our extended license prices over the years as it results in more overall dollars in sales.
At the end of the day, my experience has been it's much easier to raise prices than to lower them - the latter usually resulting in a lot of angry forum threads :-) And we've taken the tack that people can opt-out and not take on the pricing model.
But I certainly wouldn't want us to start a trend of low extended pricing, so I will take that to the team as well when we discuss the results of our first couple of months after launch!
In the meantime I can see there is lots for us to do to win over contributors from here on Microstockgroup, so I will give some thought as to how we can do that :-)
So far the launch seems to be going well. We've doubled up to past 4000 visitors coming in a day, and launch day was our second highest sales day for the fledgling site with just under $400 in a day. Pretty tiny numbers in the grand scheme of things, but even oak trees grow from little seeds! Anyhow we've now emailed the Envato mailing listand next I need to start putting our marketing plan into action!
Hopefully I will have interesting news to report back here over the coming months ... and years! And hopefully some of that will slowly win you guys over ;-)
46
« on: August 09, 2011, 21:37 »
Hey cthoman and velocicarpo, Thanks for the feedback, that definitely makes sense. And I must admit I can see what you mean. I actually have some *very* old illustration files still selling on iStockPhoto that I keep meaning to go and delete. Obviously I'm a non-exclusive there (!) and so my rate is 20% I think, or whatever the latest rate is. I checked today and my files have made me $10,000 which is pretty cool, except I kind of agree when I think about the $40,000 that didn't make it's way to me, it is a little depressing. Well I shall take it to the team for more discussion, and as I mentioned in the previous post, I'd like to see what the response is from our core exclusive authors as well as that is our major focus with the marketplaces. So far my impression is that the bulk of authors in this market are non-exclusive though. Interestingly we do have some similar issues in 3D which is also not one of our core markets. I know cthoman mentioned GraphicRiver, but actually the vast majority of authors there are also exclusive. I suppose though it may be that we have such high exclusivity rates because non-exclusives don't on the whole bother uploading to our marketplaces!! I'd not thought much about that possibility!
47
« on: August 09, 2011, 20:14 »
Thanks for the post Leaf, we're *very* excited to be live! It's still a public beta so there is still more ironing out to do, but we're open to the public which is pretty exciting.
I know the non-exclusive rate is a sore point as lots of people have mentioned. This doesn't exactly excuse it, but by way of explanation our rates are ported over from our general marketplace family. On the majority of our other sites, such as ThemeForest and GraphicRiver, we have exclusivity rates approaching 99% in many cases. And historically our focus has been *heavily* towards creating unique libraries of content.
With PhotoDune, we're obviously entering a very different market with a very diversified industry that heavily favours non-exclusivity. And as a few have mentioned the rate is more like the rate a big established player would offer. And of course we don't have the sales volume to justify something like that.
For now, I'd like us to get to know the market a bit better with our offering out in public for only a day so far. And specifically I'm curious to see how much content we get from our existing author base as well, which as mentioned is more towards the exclusive end - where I think our rates are pretty good.
Someone in the thread asked what they were missing as to why people would bother upload. I guess my answer would really be that it's about the large buyer market that already uses the Envato Marketplaces. We're closing in on 1 million members, a large portion of whom are active (i.e. spend money :-) ) and to a great extent we've mostly launched this marketplace in response to their needs. If I could count the number of times we've had people ask us why we don't have a photo marketplace in the set, I'd .. be really good at counting!
So far during the beta period our top seller (no surprises who) has netted a little over 800 sales, so the early results are looking good I think. Over the coming months we'll be marketing the site more and more, and I'd anticipate the sales to continue to grow.
Now from a non-exclusive photographer's perspective though, you'd have to be asking yourself are the buyers the same people who were buying on some other site and are now buying here. I read recently somewhere that the stock photo market has plateaued and it's the same buyers/revenue being pushed further and further. To be honest I don't think I believe that as there is such a vast pool of people coming online every year, and there is the increasing democratization of content creation that has people like my Mum now buying photos!
Add to this, our other marketplaces are all growing very quickly as more and more people make their own websites, newsletters, flyers and creative materials. So I guess my feeling is that we are introducing new buyers, as well as (hopefully) siphoning off some buyers from our competitors :-)
Finally, someone mentioned stock photos being a race to the bottom. I know a few people have mentioned that here and in other industry sites. I thought this was curious as for me, I started buying on iStockPhoto back in 2005 I think it was, when 1 credit used to equal 25c! Over the years I've spent about $20,000 on that particular site, but I've definitely noticed that my money goes less far than it used to. If anything I thought stock photos were going the other way and getting more and more expensive. But maybe I'm just a cheap buyer ;-)
Our experience running the Envato Marketplaces is that as sales build we also tend to slowly increment prices up depending on the elasticity of buyer demand - i.e. how sensitive they are to price. In the end, I think it should be a tight relationship between marketplaces and authors, because one's success depends heavily on the other.
Anyways, enough of a long message, I'll add myself to the forum notifications so I can chime in again!
48
« on: August 05, 2011, 22:26 »
Thanks Leaf! I think there are some GraphicRiver contributors here on the forums as well who will benefit. The 70% is for all contributors - exclusive and non-exclusive. And 5 days is the longest we've been able to offer this special rate (previous years were just a couple days) so we're really excited! It's a nice opportunity to give back to all the authors who make our marketplaces what they are! Meanwhiles ... 5 years went quick!!
49
« on: July 25, 2011, 20:45 »
Hey jsnover, sure will! We're working on our upload process at the moment to take a bit of the pain out :-)
50
« on: July 20, 2011, 17:56 »
Oh just realized there's a second page of comments on this thread!
With respect to rates, as I mentioned previously our focus has always been on authors selling exclusive work. In our core areas - Flash, Themes, After Effects, Photoshop files - almost everyone on our marketplaces are exclusive because our sites are *the* sites to sell on. We've increased those exclusive rates three times in the past so that now I think they are pretty solid. But non-exclusive rates, to be honest, haven't really come into consideration. But the more we move into non-core areas - Audio, 3D, Photos, Vectors - where there are lots of marketplaces around, the more it seems to be getting more important.
As I say, we don't run a low non-exclusive rate to be disrespectful in any way, much more of a case of really pushing exclusivity as the way to go with Envato. Anyhow it all needs more thought, and lots of it as this is (obviously) a huge deal strategically and has lots of implications for us.
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