Hi Steve, I get that it was supposed to be open source (didn't really turn out that way though did it) and I know Leo is grateful for all of your efforts. I'm just not seeing the connection here. It feels to me like this is something other than Symbiostock in that it really is targeting non symbio site owners. It also is involving new "partners" who Leo has never heard of, and who sound as though they are in the inner circle and speaking on behalf of Symbiostock itself. I believe this thread is quite misleading. Your enterprise here is commendable and somewhat along the lines of what Leo had in mind originally. Although I think he really would have preferred to have collaboration in the coding of the theme itself. All I am saying is that it would be better if people actually understood what you are proposing, who is responsible for it, and who in the end will be benefitting/profiting from it.

Maybe you can clear things up for me. Who is Skyfish? What is his/her contribution to this new endeavor and how is marketing other self hosted platforms for your personal search engine related to Symbiostock? I think the problem here is that Leo has sought to remove himself from this forum and is currently working hard on a new improved and polished version of Symbiostock. This trainwreck of a thread is doing that effort an injustice. Especially when insinuations of collusion are made indicating key developing people are benefitting from it. Since there really is only one developer, this hardly qualifies as open source, and the assumption is that Leo is somehow reaping a reward from this project is grossly misleading and massively unfair.

Lets just call this what it is... "Cascoly's search engine of self hosted microstock sites" and leave Symbiostock out of it.

I love the part about don't use the same titles and description as you would on other sites. That simply means they know this will erode sales.  and we will then need to keep two sets of files? ha. forget it.

Actually I find the advise pretty solid. Just not for my files at Istock. Definitely for my own sites or for an agency paying 50% but not for 15-20%. I'm assuming these percentages are for on demand sales. Obviously sub sales would be a much higher percentage of direct customers. Also interesting that social media was only 2%.

Quote from: chromaco on March 12, 2015, 12:59

Leo is switching the forum from .org to .com lots of upgrades and an improved look. This is all in prep for an upgraded theme. I think the emails are an unintended side effect. For what it's worth I'm beta testing it right now. Uses woo commerce and the visual capabilities are much better than the previous version. Also allows for physical products like tees.

OMG SO EXCITED!!!  I don't have to buy it on Themeforest do I? (I heard mention of this in past).  I'm on a bit of a boycott.  Hopefully from Leo direct.

I might be speaking to soon but I believe this is how it will play out. Leo is building a for sale theme which is really nice. It has a lot of bells and whistles for aesthetic modification. This is separate and a theme which will be for sale via theme forrest and probably through symbiostock.com. Then he is making a plugin which does the image processing and the core features that set symbiostock apart. According to the .com site that plugin will be free. The way I understand it is that the plugin will work regardless of the theme. (don't hold me to that) Maybe I can con Leo into coming here and explaining it. In the meantime the theme is quite functional and really, really, nice but the plugin is still being built. Once things are up an running on my beta site I will come back with a link and let everyone take a look.

You might seriously consider having a lawyer write up a demand for payment and email it to these people. Getty charges punitive fees well over the price of licensing the image. Even if only 1 in 10 is intimidated enough to pay, the letter could pay for itself and you might make some money from the image. Don't know if it's worth your time.

I appreciate that, but its not my style. Just because other people can be like that doesn't mean I need to be. I learned a lesson from that image that in the long term will pay off much more handsomely than any earnings I would have gotten. I spend a lot of time controlling my own future and as a result I have never posted a complaint about earnings. I do however comment a lot about things that I view as harmful to my own future. This situation is one of those times. And no, its not about Dreamstime or any other agency... it's about us as a collective and how we keep shooting ourselves and each other in the foot.

Its not really about how well they would sell. Its about what happens to them when they are in essence free. I have one particular image that was so popular it is now everywhere. It has probably been downloaded 20k times. But guess what... its only sold half a dozen. Someone got ahold of it traced it or stole it and uploaded it to a free site. Then someone else modified it and uploaded it again to another site. Now you can't go to a free site anywhere on the web without finding a variation of that one image. It's everywhere and I only got paid a few times. I even have people contacting me wanting me to clean up my substandard "free art" for them because the free version isn't done very well.  I can't even fight it because stopping it would take more time than the image is worth. That image is now dead for me. How many potential sales could I have gotten if it weren't in the public domain? Maybe thousands of dollars. But the impression is that image should be free... so that is now its current value. Every one of your images that Google has chosen now has the impression that it is free. That is the new value of your images and you made $2.00.
     Its not about actual sales it is about perceived value and once your images are worth nothing then people start thinking all images should be free. This is where we are headed yet I keep seeing the woo-yays for one time earnings of $20 to $200 dollars followed up by complaints about how the industry is dying and the agencies keep screwing us.
Insane!!!

Sure... but now you need to be 3 times more creative, then next year 4 times, and so on. Perhaps some of that creativity should go to figuring out how to make more than $.38 or less per download.

Ok, I know Leo checks symbiostock.org frequently. I would go there and ask. I bet he can offer some help with this one. Is it all of your images or just some of them?

First: The Symbiostock still works, but setting up all properly and tweaking template is a LOT of pain in the a**. Especially new plugins and Wordpress version might make some problems and you have to know exactly how it will go on your hosting - there are some tricky settings which are not always available.

Second: To succeed, I hardly recommend creating also blog with stories, tutorials, extra showcase etc. NO eshop or commerce site is able to compete against content rich blog and NO SEO features will overcome this. I do websites for over 15 years and simply put - you have to get backlinks, you have to create and periodically improve text content (not just few sentences or keywords) and you have to build serious social presence. Otherwise there is no reason in building your own website. This takes a LOT of time and effort - especially if you are not well known person or do not have any background in internet marketing. It is easy to overcome agencies SEO because agencies rely 90 % on pure brute force advertising and PR.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think you meant "strongly recommend". "Hardly recommend" can be interpreted as do not recommend. Your second point matches my own experiences. I agree on point one as well but I don't think any self hosted site is plug and play. Just about every self hosted site will need a decent amount of attention.

Over 70 downloads since midnight, over half on-demand at $.92. I usually average 3-8 sales a day. Anyone want to guess on the over/under for fraud?
I don't even know how to handle this one. Someone just got almost my entire port at DP and odds are for free.
I hope not. Am I having a great day or am I likely to get a nasty claw back in about a week?

The Symbiostock theme actually works very well and offers a great number of benefits that would cost thousands of dollars if you were to have someone build it from scratch for you. Once it is completely set up it works almost flawlessly. But it does require a bit of time and effort to get running. However, it will NOT sell for you. You have to do that yourself. If you are just going to upload the same images with the same metadata as Shutterstock and Istock the big guys are going to win every time. The only way to compete is to have unique images or at the very least unique metadata (keywords don't matter but titles and descriptions do). Also I can't prove it but I think uploading to your own site first has a lot of value. If you are willing to make the extra effort for your own site you will be much more likely to be successful. Also you should know your market. If your customers are likely to go to Google images and buy Single images for a project then you will probably do pretty well. If your customers are more corporate and drawn to the sub model your Symbio site probably won't help you (no matter how you price your images) and you will do better with the micros.

You can't compete with the microstock sites so you have to circumvent them. Being creative in your uploading and descriptions and getting to the customers first or finding ones that aren't buying from the big sites is the secret. Also competing on price is pointless. You will make less sales so they better be relatively big ones. The customers who are aware of the subscription model won't be buying from your personal site anyway.

Leo is working on a new version which should be much prettier from the customer side but I think he is done with the "free" concept. Also he is around on Symbiostock.org to help if something goes wrong with your site.

If you know what you are looking to accomplish and it fits with what Symbiostock offers then the theme is a great solution. If you are just building a personal site because you don't know what to do next you are very likely to be disappointed.

Phoebe don't take it personally, your question was entirely reasonable.

When the 49'ers first discovered gold there was a ton of money to be made. Then everyone and their brother descended on the area and over saturation started... but there was still money to be made. Finally, the corporations came in bought up all of the small mines, began strip mining, destroyed the landscape, monopolized the market, and exploited their employees until the only people making money were the stockholders.

You are asking the "miners" how to get a job with the "corporation". We are just wondering if you know what you are really asking for. Most of us are looking for a way out.

15 keywords or 50?
How much time should I spend on descriptions?
Nature or People?
Cartoons, Backgrounds, or Design Elements? (for illustrators)
Just the Big 4 or all 20 or so sites on the list to the right?
Should I go exclusive? Should I drop exclusivity?
Self hosted? Which Platform?
Why aren't my images selling on X Site when they sell on Y?

Each of these questions will appear at least once in a new thread in the next 90 days.

Unfortunately selling stock is really a moving target and no one really knows how to correctly answer these types of questions for anyone besides themselves. If you want to get into this seriously you need to just start uploading and pay attention to what happens. Some things will work and some things won't. Read every thread in this forum for the next few months and you will learn a ton, plus get a variety of contradictory answers to every one of the above questions. New contributors can certainly make money at stock but it is much harder than it was 5 years ago.

Quote from: chromaco on January 20, 2015, 16:18

This is my guess.


Step 4) New contributors cannot/will not provide high quality imagery and established contributors refuse to offer it to the subscription model. Newer venues slowly grow in size and viability but are not available to new contributors because established artists have learned the lesson about creating a higher barrier for entry.

I agree with all but not with the point 4.
Why new contributors  cannot/will not provide high quality imagery?
To be a new contributor does not mean to have no experience.
(Speaking about myself, I became a new contributor after 35 years of activity in advertising�)

I stumbled across Dreamstime in 2008 and decided to upload 15 images or so off of my hard drive. Two weeks later I had made 34 cents so I quit. I checked back 6 months later and was amazed to find I had made $95. That was my motivation to keep uploading. What I know now is that almost all of those initial sales were from 1 single image that was unique and the only one of its kind on any of the micros. It is also an image that today couldn't even make it through the inspection process. How likely is that story in 2015?

I am certain that new contributors are capable of creating amazing work. The question is why would they do it? Let me put it this way... in the near future those that are capable of making those images probably won't for subscription royalties and those that are willing to sell at that pricing probably can't make the images.

I have always thought that a point would be reached where this thing would simply not be worth the effort to upload - even for the "weekend shooter" like me, never mind the pros, at which point content will start to go where it does remain viable.  If I were a betting man I'd say SS will probably react first to maintain content. We're not there yet so not holding my breath

We're not there yet because there aren't enough alternatives but I'll ask a hypothetical question.
If you had an agency that paid 20 times more than SS but had 1/20th the sales who would you upload to first? In other words if you were earning $400 at SS over 500 sales or earning $400 at X on 25 sales which would be your preferred agent?
Would SS still look so good? Would IS, FT or DT?

I'm not on Stocksy or Creative Market but it sounds like they are pushing that barrier right now and I do get enough Symbio sales to make me seriously question the need for sub sites.