MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => Sites that no longer exist => SnapVillage.com => Topic started by: hatman12 on October 16, 2007, 13:58
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Got my first sale at SV.
I've priced all my images at $10, so 30% commission on this sale is $3.
SV are a very late entrant to the market and I don't think it makes sense for artists to undercut the existing agencies who have worked hard to develop a customer base. As my D200 generates 'large' at IS and XL at FT, StockXpert etc, a $10 price tag is above the prices at these existing agencies. So I'm happy to upload to SV on the basis that my sales elsewhere will not be impacted in any way.
BTW, the 'snappyness' thing doesn't work; it is meant to be a 'sophisticated algorithm' based on views, comments and sales. I wrote to them to explain that it doesn't appear to work and they replied to say that at the moment the snappyness thing is based on umm.....'editors choice'........
Everyone expected Corbis to enter the market with a bang, but the evidence so far is more like a whimper; there is certainly nothing yet to suggest they are prepared to invest decent money to get this thing established.
Still, a $10 sale is good news. More please......
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I can't belive it is taking them so much time to implement FTP and fix the stability issues they have.
It's like it is a one man show over there....
Hopefully they are rebilding everthing and are soon ready to present something that will blow our minds away ::)
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Congrats hatman. Still waiting for my first sale there. I was disappointed with snapviallge at first but I had raised my hopes too high. Perhaps one day they will remove the beta and give istock a bit of competition.
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Congrats Hatman! Nice to hear things are moving there.
They are down a lot, but they are, after all, in Beta. I have priced mine at the same price as I have a D200 also and did not want to undermine pricing either. Good to know that others are on the same wave length. I think I may send them a disk, until they get their FTP thing happening.
I do like the feel of the site. It is clean and crisp like StockXpert.
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Congrats! I had my first about a week ago so it seems that things are slowly picking up.
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congrats on the sale!
I send them my DVD's today so hopefully it doesn't take too long to get the images online. Not sure i am interested in another non-performing site but they DO have the bucks for advertising and staffing so it could be allright in the future.
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Well I'm afraid I don't have particularly high hopes for SV; it's too amateurish to offer much potential at this stage.
Their keyword and category choices give me the impression they have employed people who have no experience of the stock industry at all - some of my images are left alone, others have most of the keywords removed; their choice of words bears no relation to the subject matter, and they choose categories that would be my last choice.
My recent submission of my 'businessman slipping on a banana' resulted in them stripping out all references to business and businessman, even though the images are clearly of a businessman in a suit and city shoes. They keywords left in were: banana, slip, slippery.
Doh!
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I'm sure they will get their act together eventually. Except for the glitches, their website is rather functional, and although they haven't poured enough resources into this yet, they don't really have much choice. Corbis can't afford to be the only major macro agency without a micro, and they can absolutely not afford to have one that functions badly.
I'm there with 560 approved images so far, and around 100 in the queue. Most of my images are priced at $10 as well (no subscription), some "13-a-dozen-pics" at $5 with subscription allowed, and the best ones at $25. No sales yet though, but I only started uploading two weeks ago.
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I got 2 downloads, one last week and one this week. $5 and a $10 sale. Looking forward how it will be in half a year.
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Congrats Hatman,
And thanks for taking the time to critique my portfolio on DT :)
Lina (fafoutis)
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No problem. Hope my comments help.
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Had my first download today. I priced it at $5, so made $1.50 but all new uploads are priced at $10.
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Yeah, $10 seems right sharpshot - $5 to some extent undercuts the existing agencies who have spent much time and effort and who are already generating sales (and money) for us. Personal choice I suppose, but it seems right not to give this newcomer the same terms given that they are late to the game.
Besides....... all the existing agencies should charge higher prices........
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We've had 15 sales, one at $50 and all the rest at $25.
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My main reason for pricing them higher is that I presume Snap Village will attract customers from Corbis. They are used to paying higher prices.
I am not convinced that microstock prices will continue to increase at the rates they have the past few years. Can SS keep having a 20% raise each year? If prices go too high, downloads might fall and we could end up losing money. Wont new sites be able to gain customers by undercutting the old sites, if they move their prices too high?
Macro sites are lowering their prices and we now have a few midstock sites emerging. Some micro sites are allowing higher prices, similar to the cheapest macro prices. I hope istock does this soon.
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Just checked and I have another download there. I like a 100% increase in sales :) This one sold for $10.
EDIT:- I just checked and it was a subscription sale, still 30 cents is better than nothing.
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You are one ahead of me then sharpshot...... I've still only got one sale...
As for pricing - Getty are now advertising 'web size' RF images for $49, three month use only.
The same size will cost $1 at iStock, no time constraints.
The question is: over the next couple of years will Getty have to reduce prices yet again, or will iStock's price continue to rise?
There is scope for microstock prices to increase by a very large amount.
And I don't think all these new 'small' agencies will have any effect at all on sales at the larger agencies like IS and SS. But that's only my view.
Can you see image buyers leaving IS in droves because prices at Albumo are slightly cheaper?
Nah.......
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My first week at SV and got my first sale.
Their keyword and category system doesn't works great, as many of you have noticed already.
I have also checked the subscription sale, as 30 cents is better than 25 cents in SS!!!
Looking forward for next weeks.
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How many images do you all have on S V? I HAVE UNDER A 100 at the moment.
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only 105 :'(
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I had 16 sales in September and 27 sales in October so far... I do think they'll pull their act together eventually, but oh boy did I have my share of dealing with their glitches!!! However before we complain too much let's remember they are still in "beta". Hopefully version 1.0 will be free of all those annoying bugs.
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This is starting to become interesting. What were the cons about SV? Watermakring?
Regards,
Adelaide
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This is starting to become interesting. What were the cons about SV? Watermakring?
madelaide:
I'm shocked! :o You're not on SnapVillage yet??? ;)
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I'm shocked! :o You're not on SnapVillage yet??? ;)
I may have opened an account there, but I haven't uploaded anything. :D
Regards,
Adelaide
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Elena, are any of those subscription sales?
Personally I have disallowed subscription sales at SV (for the moment). I'll be interested to hear how people fare with subscription versus normal sales.
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Just one subscription sale (in october).
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I think I'm going to pass on uploading all of my files until they come out with FTP, which they say they are working on. Hopefully it won't be too long.
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I guess it gets confusing to buyers when prices may vary so much. It's even confusing for us, when we have different people setting prices so differently for similar images. I had thought of using US$10, but I'm more likely to choose US$5 as my standard.
They don't read my IPTC data, like IS. :-\
Regards,
Adelaide
PS: GeoPappas: I had signed up indeed, but only minutes ago uploaded something.
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I had my first download this week, unfortunately it was a subscription download so nothing to write home about.
I've set my prices at $5 as they're not selling the high-res version of my files. The largest size on offer is the medium-res at 1600 X 1200, not sure why!
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I've had 6 DLs so far - all 30c subscriptions.
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I've only had 3 DLs so far at SV. I haven't uploaded many images yet, it was still pretty buggy, lots of retries.
How long do they get to stay in "beta" with very little changing on the website month over month? Who do they think they are, Google? :-)
Seriously though, some of these deep-pockets companies are molasses-slow at web development, some of these things can be developed, tested and launched in weeks, not months.
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When I view my statement it says three downloads, two subscritions and a standard sale.
When I sort by downloads, one of the subscrition sales does not show. I reported the bug, but you may like to check if it has happen to your portfolio.
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I had my first sale there last week, I priced everything at $5 and have 65 images online.
believe rightly or wrongly that they will gather images first and then promote later.
And as the owner Corbis has Bill Gates as chairman and owner, capital shouldn't be an issue.
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First sale. ;D
Only .30c, but it's a start. Only uploaded 15 images as well.
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Firs sales for me today, 4 subscription sales of similar images. That's a start :)
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I am not allowing subscription sales at SV. Point of principle. SS make good sales for me and they have invested a considerable amount of time and money and effort to get their agency established over the past three years; I see no reason at all why I should suddenly allow SV to sell on the same terms and risk undermining the hard work of SS.
The same goes for credit sales - I have priced everything at $10 which is higher than the established agencies. I make good money at IS, DT and FT and I am not going to slap them in the face by undercutting with a $5 rate at SV.
SV have everything to prove; so far they have been incredibly slow given their background and the money backing them. No - IF they make some sort of effort to get the bugs ironed out, start advertising and actually show they mean business, well that's a different kettle of fish; but for the moment their approach seems half hearted to say the least.
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BTW I wrote to them about the 'snappyness' thing. I noticed that images that had downloads, comments, views etc didn't actually move up the snappyness rating. I also noticed that the 'editors picks' are the same as the 'most snappy'.
Their reply was that umm.....the snappy thing doesn't actually work yet.
This is poor when you consider their claim that 'snappyness works on a unique algorithm'. The uniqueness is actually that it doesn't yet exist........
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I don't like subscription sales either, but with SN, I can at least choose for each image. So my "low value" images are $5 plus subscription, while the rest are 10, 25 and 50 without subscription.
At StockXpert, I've opted out of subscriptions completely, and I consider withdrawing my portfolio from low-selling agencies that sell mainly subscriptions, like Crestock. The headache is DT, which is my third best selling agency, and where it's not possible to opt out.
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I am not allowing subscription sales at SV. Point of principle. SS make good sales for me and they have invested a considerable amount of time and money and effort to get their agency established over the past three years; I see no reason at all why I should suddenly allow SV to sell on the same terms and risk undermining the hard work of SS.
The same goes for credit sales - I have priced everything at $10 which is higher than the established agencies. I make good money at IS, DT and FT and I am not going to slap them in the face by undercutting with a $5 rate at SV.
SV have everything to prove; so far they have been incredibly slow given their background and the money backing them. No - IF they make some sort of effort to get the bugs ironed out, start advertising and actually show they mean business, well that's a different kettle of fish; but for the moment their approach seems half hearted to say the least.
Well said Hatman! I have also decided to opt out of subcription sales wherever I can.
I must admit that the SV website is quite a disapointment. With their backing you would think that they would be able to come up with something that functioned better across all platforms/browsers.
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I have two $5 downloads so far. The shots from my 6MP camera I have set at $5 (medium max size) and my new 10MP camera shots are at $10 (large max size). I'm not opted in for subscriptions but am reconsidering this. Seems to be picking up a bit despite the odd deployment approach.
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Well another sale at SV today - that's two at $10 so far giving $3 per sale.
I have to say that each time I try to upload something to SV the system seems slower and slower, with annoying 'unknown error - please try again later' messages. Given that SV is backed by Corbis the extremely slow entry and development is something of a joke. I get the impression that SV is being run by one of the 'old school' peeps - you know, someone who lives down a well and still believes that microstockers are amateurs who take snaps with cellphones.......
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Hmmm... another one today.
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Well I've now got 500 images at SV and I've stopped uploading to them. There's no news, no development, no changes; it's as if the whole thing has gone to sleep.
Last blog update was more than a month ago.
I've got my toe in the water with my initial portfolio, now I'll step back and see what happens. They really need to show some enthusiasm.
Quite possibly in a couple of years they'll be moving ahead rapidly, but I'd like to see some evidence of that before I upload any more pictures.
I like to think I am a patient and understanding person......
..... but there's a limit to everything........
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I've uploaded 1000+ so far with only $15 in commissions - mostly 30c subscriptions.
At this stage I'm earning more with fewer images on Crestock than with SV.
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with 290 images $.30 for a subscription sale. I am to put SV and LO on hold. Both just a waste of time.
vhpoto
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There is not a whole lot happening at SV at this point. Hopefully things will start to pick up. I`ll give them a few weeks..otherwise i`ll call it quits.
No hope really :-\