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Messages - djpadavona
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101
« on: August 11, 2013, 13:29 »
Another thing to consider is the number of Buyers who are photographers and illustrators and have had their goodwill to agencies tried to the breaking point, who are open to a Symbiostock concept. When I got involved in microstock in 2005, one of the key features of the microstock concept was bringing professional style images to Mom & Pop shops and business's who could not afford traditional stock photography, so these business's had clip art adverts that the local newspaper had as freebies, now look at how very small business can look so professional in all aspects of their operation from print to point of sale and T.V. These business's haven't gone anywhere and are a good potential customer of each Symbiostock website, small business trading with small business owners.
I think you made a valid point. Furthermore, most of the local businesses that I see using stock photos only have a few. They don't need several of them, let alone 250 new ones per month. Buying a credit plan with a stock agency is largely a waste of their money. The other side of the coin is, don't expect much in the way of repeat business. They just a few new photos now and then to freshen up adverts.
102
« on: August 11, 2013, 13:17 »
Just out of curiosity, what would YOU do to turn around IStock if you had the chance to steer the ship?
It is rather presumptuous to assume anything without knowledge of what the books truly look like. But my goal would be to restore contributor confidence and make IS the #1 destination for future uploads. Why? Because
1) I want the best images available
2) Happy Contributors upload more, and recommend that customers purchase from my agency
3) People who are treated well tend to be more productive and take more pride in their future work than those who feel unappreciated.
I would begin by immediately pushing up contributor commissions and completely eliminating the RC/crown system. Set non-exclusives at a 30% commission rate, probably similar to or higher than SS and just below DT. That would be a huge message that things have drastically changed in favor of artists. Commission rates would be even higher than they were during the Bruce era. Push exclusives into the 35% to 40% range, and try to come up with added incentives to keep them around.
Secondly I would hire a team to completely revamp the uploading procedure. Even if I feel a need to keep categories, I need to decide if the merits of my own keywording system are not enough to overcome the snag in the upload process. My goal is get the upload procedure at least as efficient as DT, and hopefully SS.
Third, I would swallow my idiotic pride and humbly ask Sean to return with his full portfolio. I would acknowledge that he, and many others, were treated unfairly when they fought against the Google fiasco. Regardless of how much they rocked the boat, their position had strong merit.
Fourth, I would make a decision about the forum. The current forum is a mess, and buyers see it. If the forum is going to remain a Gestapo run cesspool, then it is going to give us a bad image. Why continue wasting company resources on it? Either clean up the forum and its administrators, or simply eliminate it. Where is there a rule that says a stock agency has to have a forum?
I may be a Pollyanna and I don't know what their books look like. But I think that if they shocked contributors with this type of goodwill, they would see a stampede of people returning to them. The goodwill would likely slowly spread back to the buying community, just as all of the bad will in recent years soured it.
103
« on: August 11, 2013, 12:52 »
I think the future is going to be much worse for Istock though. I (stupidly) uploaded about 100 new images to IS a couple of months ago. Since then those images have garnered about 15 sales for a total of about $10. That works out at about 5c per image/month. Yes ... I really did say 5c/image/month.
I have uploaded fewer than you have, but out of curiosity I decided to do the math. I found that over the last several months the images I have uploaded to IS have been worth about 6 cents per image per month. The same amount uploaded at Dreamstime has returned more than 5x the IS results, and believe me DT has not been gangbusters for me.
104
« on: August 11, 2013, 12:47 »
It looks like LisaFX copied my sales graph. 
105
« on: August 11, 2013, 09:28 »
Right... I have not been on this forum very long but if I had a dollar for every time I read the word Symbiostock I would be one happy chappy. I too have thought about starting up my own micro stock site but I have a few questions. I am playing devils advocate here and for some feedback that would convince me why I should redirect my time from agencies to Symbiostock?
1. A buyer is limited to time and I suspect would not have the time wade through various sites to find a specific image. where does the buyer start? Or he could just go to SS as every possible subject is covered in one site and find what he/she is looking for in a flash?
A large buying firm isn't going to look at Symbiostock at all. If she needs files in bulk, she will go with an agency and probably get a subscription plan. On the other hand, Dan Heller did some research into this a few years ago and found that the majority of image buyers find their images through Google search, not through an agency. And many don't even know the agencies exist. I would add that many probably don't even know what a "stock photo" is. All they know is that they have a need for a photo, and what better place to begin looking than in Google Images? This latter, much larger, group is what you are targeting. And as an addendum, many of these buyers have no idea what microstock is, nor that many images are available for a few dollars at X agency. So there is no reason to feel you are forced into microstock pricing. This is something we need to experiment with, as it is quite possible that many of us are pricing our images far too cheaply just because we are trying to mimic microstock pricing.
106
« on: August 11, 2013, 09:19 »
Mine is - http://dpstockphotos.com/155-2/photography-and-design-blog/I warn you ahead of time that until the SY Page of Posts bug gets fixed, your blog is going to be a bit of a mess. I have nearly 60 posts and they are all on the same page. SY doesn't recognize the 6 posts per page limit. I know Leo is working on it, and I don't want to keep bringing it up, but I'm not sure it's worth a lot of effort blogging until the bug gets tracked down.
107
« on: August 09, 2013, 10:55 »
I appreciate the offer I received to present Symbiostock to PACA, but it's not a commitment I can make at this time due to my work schedule. Besides, I'm hardly an expert at Symbiostock. I haven't even figured out how to get my author image to show up. 
108
« on: August 08, 2013, 12:50 »
I guess it must be part of that number and the "Contributor royalties payable" is what? I guess they aren't lying on the earnings call so it must be $15.5-16 million in royalties paid or 27-28% overall.
Did you listen to the earnings call? I just wonder if they are mixing in YTD numbers in the call. I didn't listen to it, so I cannot comment. Otherwise I don't understand the big difference between the printed quarterly report and the conference call.
Thinking about it a little more, the "Contributor royalties payable" might be money that is left on contributors accounts but is below the payout level.
Are you looking on the balance sheet or the income sheet? If it is the balance sheet, then I believe the unpaid royalties would be as you stated, and treated as a liability (potential future expense if/when people make payout). If it is on the income sheet, then it should be a cut and dry, already paid royalty number. I used to know this stuff inside and out when I was investing, but as an options trader none of particularly matters. 
109
« on: August 08, 2013, 12:47 »
You will get butchered here for asking for a raise. They will call you a hater; 'If you want a raise, produce better images'. And, 'you got a raise already, the SODs are your raise'. The SS fan boys will whiplash you for even thinking about a raise.
In fact it's more likely to head the other direction - commission cuts. As a recent IPO, they need to move their stock price up to satisfy first-round investors wanting to cash out, and the quickest way to do that is commission cuts. And as their market share continues to increase, they know photographers are even less likely to remove their images in response to cuts, because other sites are declining.
Maybe. I'm curious to see how much industry power they really will have several years down the road. There are plenty of very strong IS exclusives who left IS but refused to join SS, including one Mr. Locke. They are losing out on a lot of excellent content that will go elsewhere, and potentially build another agency into a powerhouse.
110
« on: August 08, 2013, 12:44 »
I guess it must be part of that number and the "Contributor royalties payable" is what? I guess they aren't lying on the earnings call so it must be $15.5-16 million in royalties paid or 27-28% overall.
Did you listen to the earnings call? I just wonder if they are mixing in YTD numbers in the call. I didn't listen to it, so I cannot comment. Otherwise I don't understand the big difference between the printed quarterly report and the conference call.
111
« on: August 08, 2013, 12:38 »
I dont know if you are missing something. Give people some time to respond. I know you love to bash SS, but its a bit early still.
If you think dividing royalties paid by revenue and coming up with a number is bashing Shutterstock then you are a bit sensitive. It's just math.
Aren't you forgetting their costs? If my revenue was profit, I would be doing quite well but unfortunately profit is revenue minus costs. Running a site as big as SS and marketing it must cost quite a lot and I presume that makes your simple math completely wrong?
When you say you get 15% at Istock what are you referring to? It's 15% of the revenue, the actual amount a buyer paid not 15% after costs are factored in. I don't know if there are any sites that figure your royalty rate after costs.
Actually he is correct here. If you want to compare apples to apples, then you divide the commissions paid by the revenue, not the profit. That is if you want the commission rate at SS to be comparable to IS, DT, etc. What seems to be at issue here is the amount of royalties paid, which doesn't appear to be cut-and-dry per the line item, breakout that tickstock quoted.
112
« on: August 06, 2013, 12:08 »
I turned off photo comments too, but I get them everyday and can't make the comment box go away. The blog page doesn't work correctly either. I have my Page of Posts set at maximum 6 posts shown per page, but it shows all 30+. The Related Posts widget seems to be incompatible too, which is shame because that is a great widget which I've always used on my blogs.
113
« on: August 06, 2013, 09:13 »
Make sure you install Askimet. Askimet catches on average 40 to 50 spam comments per day for me.
114
« on: August 04, 2013, 19:24 »
We need a guest registration or a no registration option
I kind of disagree.
1. I don't think there is any website out there where somebody can purchase something without some kind of registration.
But with most e-commerce sites, the registration and purchase screen is often the same. If you try to buy from a Symbiostock site, you have to register, and then you have to enter your personal info for Paypal. That's two registrations. What I don't understand are the people who want the registration to be forced on every website. Those of us who don't want it simply want it as an option. If it's an option, then each website can determine if they feel the registration is necessary or not.
115
« on: August 04, 2013, 15:35 »
If your portfolio is really below 1000 images then 550-750 USD is actually a good return IMO. I mean I dont know how expensive your average shooting is, but this sounds good to me.
I make about $400-$500 per month on an average of roughly 400-500 images. It varies, as I have ~700 on SS but only ~250 on DT and IS. I'm happy with those returns. But as Ron mentioned, adding new images doesn't seem to help. For the last 12-18 months, almost everything I have uploaded has failed to sell anywhere. Old images keep selling, and selling. So I have no incentive to upload more, and except for a few random uploads here and there I stopped contributing to microstock several months ago.
116
« on: August 04, 2013, 14:58 »
One option I have considered is changing my licensing to be more in line with Dan Heller, and with similar pricing. So there would be no need for an extended license. You give the buyer fewer limitations (print copies, etc), keep the legalize simple, but charge a price much above micro.
117
« on: August 04, 2013, 14:52 »
Yet another reason why I can't stand forcing Registrations. It just opens your site up to more spam. Basically everyday I need to delete 5 to 10 emails alerting me that I've had a new "registration", and about 40 more spam posts which Askimet catches. Great fun.
BTW how do you kill the email notifications? I don't need to know every time someone (or some bot) registers.
118
« on: August 02, 2013, 14:12 »
I don't think any of it is necessary. It isn't likely that social media helps your SEO unless you have a significant social presence with a lot of participation. I have a hard time believing you are going to get tons of retweets and Facebook shares for uploading new images.  On the other hand, I write a Disney blog and promote new posts on Facebook. These get "Liked" and "Shared" repeatedly, and it has clearly helped my SEO. Social media helps most when there is something you are promoting which people tend to get excited about.
119
« on: August 02, 2013, 14:09 »
I love the symbiostock model but I would have liked to see the integration of sites that are using other scripts be included into the network, then I believe that many more users would definitely be on board. Not sure how that can happen though if it is not wordpress.
The buying process is too clunky with SY/WP. I can't see the SY network taking off as a viable option for buyers when they have to register for every site they visit. I think the best option currently available is for photographers to join up with Photoshelter and merge together into a virtual agency, which has been done repeatedly by others. Their SEO is pretty weak, but the buying process being smooth is absolutely imperative and I just don't think there is a better option than a Photoshelter virtual agency at this time.
120
« on: August 02, 2013, 10:34 »
I barely look at Google Analytics anymore. It used to be useful to see how people were finding your site through organic searches. Now they block most of the information. Over 50% of my organic searches are "Not Provided", so Google uses the information of how people find my site but won't let me see it. I see no reason to support their product anymore.
121
« on: August 02, 2013, 10:28 »
Appears as though it has been down for the better part of the last several hours. Unfortunately I signed a 3 year agreement with them when I started. I totally regret it right now, and I am sure they won't offer a refund. Oh well, it's not like I was going to get a sale today or anything. I honestly did much better with Warmpicture, even without the SEO advantages of SY. 
122
« on: August 01, 2013, 13:21 »
Google is indexing the HTML page, whereas Google Images is indexing the image and linking it to the HTML page.
123
« on: August 01, 2013, 13:13 »
It is likely a subscription in the sense that it will be recurring unless the purchaser decides to break the agreement for future months. I can't see any downside here. My RPD is less than $2.00, so if they are offering me $2.00 commission per DL on these purchases then I will gladly take it.
You might call this more of an "On Demand" plan, per SS. On average, it appears to pay out about the same.
124
« on: July 30, 2013, 09:53 »
I am fine with #symbiostock. But maybe abbreviate it as #symbio if you really want something shorter, especially when dealing with 140 character limits?
125
« on: July 29, 2013, 23:34 »
If you click on any of the hot linked images, you go to their purchase page. I always use the purchase page as the Custom target URL.
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