Yes, my portfolio is mostly 3D renders and they ate selling. I have animations and stills. The key is subject and quality...the downside to this is it is hard to pump out a lot of these as rendering times can be quite long.

+1

I'm not sure, but I think visits are considered as so many pageviews by the same person within a certain time frame.

So if they are visiting pages REALLY slowly (maybe like 10 minutes between page views) then it might be counting as separate visits.

With buyers like these it'll take a while to cover hosting costs though... 

What p!sses me off with these "awesome opportunities" is that these applications are developed in order to create traffic.

If you don't pay the photographers at least give them a share of the advertising revenue.   

This sucks. I cleared my cache and all of that with FF and IE and I only get a blank screen...

... I have 3 daughters under 12 and while I agree that it's ideal to keep them sheltered from this adult content I can't help but remember that I saw Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was 9. We owned the soundtrack which I sang over and over with my mum and I had no clue what any of it meant.

And would you consider yourself "scarred for life" because of that experience? I would think not.

Quote

May I note that I think your watermark is very faint

It is always a balance between being obnoxious and putting off the buyers and avoiding free use of the image. Many of my best sellers are already visible without watermarks at similar sizes, because they are on various blogs and websites and I take a relatively calm view towards this. Someone could right click on my own stock site and use it with the watermark - but that person is not going to be a buyer either, so no money lost. So, I've erred on the side of showing the best view of my images that I can, and if they are stolen, then they are stolen...

Steve

I totally understand. Just wanted to make sure

Wow - that is great - and great job, Leo for building in the right SEO from the start. Perhaps it will start to appear in the Images searches soon!

Steve

May I note that I think your watermark is very faint?

I could barely see it. Well, just too faint for my taste.

... Why some photographers are "more equal than others"? National Geographic content is superb, but so is content from some of your better contributors. ...

Elena with all due respect and with no intentions to step on your toes but I think you need to grow a thicker skin.

It's "just" Scott saying something about some agency and you appear to be quite offended by it.

You know that your content is good because you have quite some experience under your belt now and your income speaks for yourself!

At the start, I was all over the idea of "Offset" but the more we get to know about it, I can see that Offset is not going to be a good match for me. As it has been pointed out and something which is very obvious is that Offset will target a different audience.

This does not necessarily mean that the content will be generally of superior quality it's a matter of how the potential customers are confronted with "different" content.

If Shutterstock let all contributors into Offset - well then it won't be any different than SS in the first place and there wouldn't be a need for Offset.

I don't have a problem that "better" or "superior" content will be available at Offset (beauty still lies in the eye of the beholder...!) although I believe that I create the best and most beautiful pictures ever made. There will always be people who beg to differ and some of those people have the means to pop out an agency and have the "freedom" to pick whatever content they see fit.

I mean where is the limit? If I'm supposed to be allowed to submit to Offset, then what? Then I'm entitled to submitting to Getty directly or Corbis? All these agencies have their vision and strategy to achieve their specific goal. That has usually never anything to do with our content.

One word: politics.

I hope I didn't end up on your sh!t list because of what I wrote but I think we're all a bit strung out in the microstock business (especially the ones making a living from it). But it is what it is. All we can do is submit to agencies that actually want and sell our stuff. That's good enough for me.

Changing the slug after its been established is bad because its as if you are creating a whole new page and deleting the old one in the eyes of the search engine, which leads to a 404. The main mission here is to make "stock photo" a prominent subject of the page as well as the whole site. If you add it to slug during page creation its fine, but if its not part of the slug its most likely a minimal difference.

Hmmm, I installed SEO Ultimate from the start of Symbiostock and created custom Meta titles and descriptions this way.

Now it's part of the Symbiostock SEO (which is awesome) but now I'm afraid I have to re-do my image titles and get rid of my SEO Ultimate?

I don't see why you shouldn't stay in RM with these images you have on your site. They just don't seem to be very sharp on your site but I assume the full resolution is spot on.

With Alamy you have to give it a year to be fully processed into the Alamy rank system with newly submitted content and their (sometimes) erratic review policy.

Once you hit 5,000 images with Alamy after a year or two I could see $2k coming in per month at least. That's a pretty conservative guess though.

Alamy has a ton of distributors worldwide so your stuff will be shown and sold all over the globe.

My 2 cents.

Thanks for the advice everyone.  I'm glad I asked.

Maybe someone has an opinion about this:


click mentioned subdomain "stock-photos" .  Does the dash - maybe help with google, or can I leave that out?

I also own domain pixartpress that I should have no probs running sales through my registered business.  Any reason to/not-to use this vs sub-domain?    I could always point pixartpress to sub-domain so I would have an easier domain to remember.

Rebelstock is mine - but not a registered business so no numbers or bank accounts.  I was wondering about running receipts through it from my pixart account.  But, wouldn't that confuse the customers?

I do like the name rebelstock though - I registered it years ago when we were talking about a coop.  A symbol of the peasants uprising.

You could create a URL forward from rebelstock to your new sub-domain if you want to make it easier in terms of business licensing and tax purposes. Just my 2 cents.

The "stock-photo" thing is something I do. I'm not a SEO guru but I thought it would not only be easier for search engines to separate any words but also look better than stockphotos. Also just my 2 cents. I could be totally off though so maybe some SEO king can chime in

since you are already own a licensed photography business, I think it would make most sense to run Smybiostock on the same domain using a subdomain.

Right now your business web site is: http://pixartdesign.com/

In order to run a separate Wordpress installation with its own database you can use something like: http://stock-photos.pixartdesign.com/

You can/could design your Symbiostock site identical to your business web site and link to each of them to make it look like as if the visitor is never leaving your main web site (they aren't leaving your domain anyway...).

Then you can run both sites independently which in my opinion gives you a little more freedom than trying to cram all of it into one site.