BigStock has to be worst of all sites I'm with atm, in terms of slow reviews. Been well over 2 weeks for me now.

Very impressive so far. Already after two weeks and a bit is making up 2% of my total income from microstock and has the highest by far, return per image.

It's quite easy to process and submit there, sort of a cross between Stock Expert and Dreamstime, I would say one of the best systems around in terms of efficiency and speed.

I'd like to know if anyone has got any sales at Albumo yet ?

It's good to see you doing some research in here before you launch your site as it seems this space is full of agencies poping up without much clue or a few years behind in their approach to microstock.

I assume that as well as evaluating everyone's feedback in here you, you've signed up to a few major sites as both a buyer and contributor to get a general feel of what works and what doesn't

Despite the fact that this seems like a busy market place, this is very much a growth area and I believe there is still ample room for new operators, willing to put in some elbow grease.

My suggestions would be to look at a few other successful sites and take all the best bits, living out the bad.

For example:

123RF has nice and easy uploads and processing, though would be better if they showed 30 images per edit page. Dreamstime has a nice feature where you can enter the id of a similar image to use the same information, while StockExpert would have to rate as one of the easiest sites to upload and process your images. ShutterStock is also pretty good, while Fotolia, iStock and BigStock are all quite terrible in that respect.

123RF also has the best model release management system out of all the sites that I use.

Also you have to be careful not to fall into the Lucky Oliver trap of of trying to focus too much on the contributors in terms of their whole site, website and interface included. While I find their site quite cute personally, I just don't think that it cuts it with it's large graphics, fixed width limitations, huge and oversized text. To me LO feels like something out of Sesame Street and not a site that most busy professional ad agencies and designers would take seriously.

Yes contributors are important but believe me if you offer $15 for each 150 submitted and accepted images, untill say a person reaches 900 images (if you can afford that) you will have photographers coming to you in droves with good quality work. If you could do that till you reached 300,000 images you would have yourself a great start in a very short time frame, for not a huge initial outlay.

Then the rest of the budget should be allocated toward marketing marketing and marketing of your agency. Throw lots of dollars toward google adds, print media (design, advertising and general interest magazines), build a strong forum and a loyal community of contributors and buyers. Hold monthly photo competitions with either prizes and or prime coverage for accepted submissions.Offer both credit and monthly subscription options to your buyers. Keep your site vibrant with fresh and relevant photography and microstock related content but most of all MAKE SURE YOU HAVE AN EASY AND FAST INTERFACE FOR YOUR BUYERS!. Just look at Fotolia, I actually rate their interface quite highly in terms of ease of use, finding what you want, the layout etc, except that of course, currently their search engine is stuffed (I can't find any of my 900 images since version 2) and it's still painfully slow. However despite all that they are still getting decent volumes of sales through.

If I was you, I would separate my resources into two devisions, buyers and contributors and have different people looking after each respective side. I would allocate 70% of my time and resources toward existing and potential buyers and 30% toward contributors, remembering that without buyers no matter how nice you are toward your contributors, you will end up going broke sooner or later.

Oh and one more thing, I challenge you to have a forum that allows posting of links and discussions regarding other microstock sites as if you have a good product, you will have nothing to worry about. Sure a few newcomers will find out from your forums about other agencies and sign-up with these, but the good will you will win in return from your members, for having an open discussion area, will be well worth it in return.

If you do all of the above, you will have a chance of succeeding where countless others have failed and indeed are in the process of failing as we speak....

Best of luck to you

Very interesting, has a lot of info on that link actually

Since I got serious about 123 in past two and a bit weeks my sales are definitely on the raise which is good to see, actually doing better then Dreamstime and Fotolia for me atm.

No point retiring but yeah, not going to add anything new there until sales are back to daily again...

How many reviewers does LO have now ?

I've put 100 images there back in May to test the waters and found the sales to be pretty slow, compared to sites like SS, iS or even Fotolia. However having spent the last few months getting my head around microstock, uploading and getting all my old images approved to the major sites I found myself looking to be represented on an extra site or two. I have had a few sales there over the past months but nothing great, to be fair I haven't had so many images there neither. Anyway I've now added 300 more taking me to just over 400 and will see how this goes.

I do love their interface and the upload process, which was the main reason why I decided to focus on 123rf over BigStock which really just irks me. I belive that it's best is to concentrate on a few sites and do it well, then to stretch yourself over 10+.  However in terms of reviews, interface, speed, 123rf would have to be one of my favorite microsites to date. Next I might look at either Albumo or LO...

I agree, 123rf has to have the best system in terms of image processing and model release management

Make one up yourself, it's what everyone else does