MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => Symbiostock => Topic started by: Symbiostock Official on December 30, 2015, 09:34
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The ultimate partner to the Symbiostock project has now been launched - though still in beta, it is fully functional, aggregating all the images across the Symbiostock network.
The Symzio system has been organized for maximum revenue and growth:
1) Firstly, and most importantly, it serves as a one-stop solution for all purchases. Customers do not have to leave the Symzio interface to complete their purchases, making the likelihood of conversion much more likely.
2) Contributors retain 70% of all sales revenue on Symzio - affiliates earn 10%. This gives the engine a small but consistent source of revenue with which to grow through promotions and advertising while passing to contributors a large majority of the earnings (as it should be).
3) Contributors set the price for all their full-sized royalty-free media. All medium sized images are standardized to $1.99 to maximize digital sales, and to attract bloggers who would otherwise pirate images or use freebies.
4) Your contributor profile is the key portal to everything: your Symzio images, your social media, and your independent site. Customers can even contact you through it.
5) With regards to the backend, we've implemented a cutting edge system whereby contributor media is spidered often, changes implemented, and most importantly, all media is sourced directly from your independent site in real-time. Symzio caches very little. If you update a title, or keywords, or a thumbnail for your independent site, Symzio will catch on soon enough. However, on the front end, the search provides results that appear seamless, much like other traditional agencies.
6) No more stress with unreliable reviewers! Once you're approved as a Symzio contributor, you control all your media. Add, delete, or revise it at your leisure.
7) Videographer heaven - no more 1 minute limits. As long as your server can handle it, all videographers can expand their portfolios with longer clips, in any format. Symzio is fully compatible with video: http://www.symzio.com/stock-video-footage/juvenile-grey-butcherbird-sitting-tree-another-young-butcher-bird-lands-branch (http://www.symzio.com/stock-video-footage/juvenile-grey-butcherbird-sitting-tree-another-young-butcher-bird-lands-branch)
8 ) SEO heaven - Symzio has been intricately optimized for maximum search engine stickiness. We've littered the site with algorithms that take your content and dynamically create unique descriptors so that as much of your stuff holds its own in the search results.
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Just imagine the future workflow of the average contributor: create a beautiful set of images. Come home, process them. Upload them once to Symbiostock. They go live on your independent site and soon go live on Symzio automatically. No secondary submissions, no fear of them being rejected. And when you get a $5 sale, you keep $3.50.
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Symzio, along with Symbiostock, provides contributors a complete independent solution: you can host and sell all your media on your own site, and syndicate it with everyone else in Symzio. Best of all, this is all 100% free. Symbiostock costs nothing, and Symzio costs nothing.
You can expand on the base functionality of Symbiostock if you need Video or agency Submissions with optional plugins. But for most of you, the core plugin will work a treat.
This is a fantastic opportunity, and has been developed to give us the chance, as a community, to truly carve a portion of the industry for independents and reduce our dependence on third parties. Here's one of our more traditional stock contributors talking about it: http://picturebreeze.com/symzio-com-a-new-stock-media-agency-idea/ (http://picturebreeze.com/symzio-com-a-new-stock-media-agency-idea/)
I truly believe that we have been unable to break out from under the yoke of third parties because the proper infrastructure was not in place to provide both contributors and customers a competitive edge - with Symzio and Symbiostock, a wide array of contributor sites, all supporting one another is now within our grasp. All we have to do is step forward and take it.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to throw them my way, and thanks for reading. As we are still in beta, we're always open to improving the system - so if you have suggestions on how we can make it better, let us know!
I leave you with some random samples from Symzio to give you an idea how how it looks:
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photos/bird.html (http://www.symzio.com/stock-photos/bird.html)
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/detail-japanese-cherry-blossom-flowers-2 (http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/detail-japanese-cherry-blossom-flowers-2)
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/tourists-los-arcos-caves (http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/tourists-los-arcos-caves)
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approved as contributor?
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how is paying 20% considered 100% free?
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Received a private question from a contributor - yes, both Symbiostock and Symzio fully support editorial content.
The important thing to remember with editorial content is you must mark it as such in your control panel. As we don't screen your media, you have increased responsibilities when it comes to releases and editorial stuff.
This is how an editorial image is marked on Symzio:
http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/entrance-golden-nugget-hotel-and-casino-fremont-street-las-vegas (http://www.symzio.com/stock-photo/entrance-golden-nugget-hotel-and-casino-fremont-street-las-vegas)
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Potential contributors to Symzio should note a few key terms
1. Content is licensed under Symzio's license - contributors do not get to set their own license terms (see Business Practices/your contract)
http://www.symzio.com/support (http://www.symzio.com/support)
And the license
http://www.symzio.com/licensing (http://www.symzio.com/licensing)
2. The contributor terms allow Symzio to close accounts for any or no reason. This is standard for stock agencies, but seems odd considering the tag line on Symzio's home page "Welcome to Symzio, the first completely contributor controlled stock photo, vector and video licensing agency"
http://www.symzio.com/terms (http://www.symzio.com/terms)
There are other references to closure for violation contributor guidelines, but also the following:
"Symzio may, at its own discretion, for any reason whatsoever, close a Contributor's account without notice. If the Contributor's account is closed for a breach of any of our terms, any outstanding royalties will be forfeited.
Symzio may, at its own discretion, reinstate Contributor accounts. In this case, Symzio may charge Contributors $250 for reinstatement."
They close the account and then charge $250 to allow it to be opened again? Really?
3. The contributor FAQ talks about the importance of accurate tagging and ensuring editorial content is tagged as such - absolutely reasonable. But it then follows up with a rather vaguely worded condition that you'll have to cough up $250 to get your account back if some audit determines you've made mistakes too often:
"Our team regularly peruses the Symzio engine and if an image that appears to be editorial is found to be missing the tag, we will flag it. If your images are found to be missing editorial tags more than once, your contributor account will be temporarily disabled and you will have to pay the re-inclusion fee for reinstatement."
And who gets to decide if the editorial tag should be there? If there are to be such draconian penalties, there need to be detailed guidelines as to what the Symzio agency's standards are for requiring an editorial tag. Vague handwaving about "appears to be editorial" just doesn't cut it.
Using "contributor controlled" as a marketing gimmick and having terms like most agencies that leave the contributor largely powerless seems to me to be contradictory.
Read the agreements very carefully to be sure you can live with them before participating.
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See, it's through contributions like these that Symzio becomes more and more robust:
"Our team regularly peruses the Symzio engine and if an image that appears to be editorial is found to be missing the tag, we will flag it and notify you. If we are mistaken, no harm done. If it is missing the editorial tag, you will be encouraged to check your entire collection to ensure everything else is accurately tagged. If your images are found to be missing editorial tags more than once, your contributor account will be temporarily disabled and you will have to pay the re-inclusion fee for reinstatement."
FAQ has been updated to reflect the mechanism more thoroughly - thanks Jo!
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See, it's through contributions like these that Symzio becomes more and more robust:
"Our team regularly peruses the Symzio engine and if an image that appears to be editorial is found to be missing the tag, we will flag it and notify you. If we are mistaken, no harm done. If it is missing the editorial tag, you will be encouraged to check your entire collection to ensure everything else is accurately tagged. If your images are found to be missing editorial tags more than once, your contributor account will be temporarily disabled and you will have to pay the re-inclusion fee for reinstatement."
FAQ has been updated to reflect the mechanism more thoroughly - thanks Jo!
begging the question - WHO decides whether an image is editorial or not? each agency has different rules for what they consider editorial
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Hi, i have a my website and iy was creat with ktools... it work with Symzio???
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i just creat my Symbiostock page, which file did i upload if i want to upload a vector? just the eps? or the jpg and the raster hi res jpg? or a zip file with both? i upload the eps and the jpg, but only see the eps file, with out any metadata and no preview and the raster with the metadata, but isnīt a vector, i want to sell vector, what iīm do wrong?
please help!
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I am glad to see that Symbiostock is on track again evolving and potentially changing the currently barren landscape of microstock (well, "barren" for contributors at least) into greener pastures.
In his Microstock Diaries blog Lee Torrens recently summarized the difficulties and pitfalls of selling direct (www.microstockdiaries.com/pricing-strategies-for-selling-direct.html (http://www.microstockdiaries.com/pricing-strategies-for-selling-direct.html)). His conclusion: a direct sales website is not for everyone. Well, not for me. He got that right. I have no illusions.
So why am I still maintaining my (legacy) Symbiostock website and why have I started working on migrating to Robin's new Symbiostock WP plugin? The answer is that I see a third way to success in selling direct that Lee completely ignored: a community driven effort. Done right it could work, maybe not for everyone but for many of us. And many of us will be needed to make it work.
IMO old Symbiostock has been a big push in the right direction. However, it had its share of flaws and never reached critical mass to become worthwhile for most of us who tried, including myself. Since Robin picked it up this spring he has worked on ironing out the flaws. For instance, by combining Symbiostock with wooCommerce he created a licensing/payment/download environment that is on par with today's internet shopping standards. The quirks of old Symbio in this area are history.
Maybe even more important Robin tries a different approach on community building. Creating Symzio is IMO now at heart of the community building/networking aspect of Symbiostock. Without it Symbio will fail for most of us because Lee is right in his analysis. With old Symbiostock every Symbiostocker, while being part of the network, was on her/his own. IMO it didn't fly partly because it created too much of a chaos of different pricing schedules, licensing terms, login/register requirements etc to be trustworthy for most image buyers. Symzio clearly aims at resolving this issue. It greatly simplifies searching, selecting, and buying images with unified license terms from various participating Symbiostockers. At the same time it leaves every Symbiostocker the freedom to do with the same images checked-in into Symzio and/or other images on his/her site as pleased. While Symzio acts like an agent it is much more than that by linking in and out every single participating Symbio site creating the SEO juice the community will need to succeed. Robin can explain the details much better than I, but this is the bigger picture I see.
However, I understand that for Robin running Symzio like an agent comes at the price of added responsibilities and legal liabilities. He simply has to protect his back. As always with such "fine print" there are worries and valid concerns for him as well as us (potential) contributors. Not much different from all the other agents. I hope and trust for now that "contributor controlled" also means that nothing of this is written in stone but open to reason and discussion as Symzio/Symbiostock continues to grow and evolve.
As it stands now I want to be part of Symzio and I hope to meet you there all as fellow Symbiostockers. Let's prove Lee Torrens wrong!
@Ana: I am no vector guy and can't help, but I am sure you will get answers on the Symbiostock forum: http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/ (http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/).
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Hey ana,
If you are uploading a vector, just upload the EPS. Symbiostock will generate a thumbnail for you. However, everything runs via the processor which you must run manually or on a schedule through your operating system:
http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/ (http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/)
If you do not run this after uploading media, your media won't show up. When you upload media, it is being put in queue. Also, you must have Imagick running on your server to process EPS files.
You also have the option of uploading your own JPEG version of the EPS once the product is created. Just use the 'upload alternate' form on the product edit page.
As Pilens mentioned, if you have other questions, you can throw them over on the Symbiostock forums. Welcome aboard!
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You are absolutely right Pilens - Symio offers a unique opportunity, and we need everyone to work towards it. Not for just the ideal of having control over our media and earning our fair share, but to protect the value of our work for years to come. If we all choose to fight for Symzio's success, through great images and vigilant marketing, we can truly dictate a fairer revenue share industry wide.
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it is the ignoring of any difficult questions and comments that instill distrust in me. if you are a proper agency/tool/platform you address the criticisms as well
and thanks jo for your analyses, some important issues to consider
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Hi, thankyou for your answer! here is an screenshot, the dark squre is my eps and the colorful one is the same image raster jpg, the raster one come with the metadata, the eps is empty. why it happend???? ???
by the way the Imagick PHP Extension is enabled.
Hey ana,
If you are uploading a vector, just upload the EPS. Symbiostock will generate a thumbnail for you. However, everything runs via the processor which you must run manually or on a schedule through your operating system:
[url]http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/[/url] ([url]http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/[/url])
If you do not run this after uploading media, your media won't show up. When you upload media, it is being put in queue. Also, you must have Imagick running on your server to process EPS files.
You also have the option of uploading your own JPEG version of the EPS once the product is created. Just use the 'upload alternate' form on the product edit page.
As Pilens mentioned, if you have other questions, you can throw them over on the Symbiostock forums. Welcome aboard!
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Hi, thankyou for your answer! here is an screenshot, the dark squre is my eps and the colorful one is the same image raster jpg, the raster one come with the metadata, the eps is empty. why it happend???? ???
by the way the Imagick PHP Extension is enabled.
Hey ana,
If you are uploading a vector, just upload the EPS. Symbiostock will generate a thumbnail for you. However, everything runs via the processor which you must run manually or on a schedule through your operating system:
[url]http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/[/url] ([url]http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/[/url])
If you do not run this after uploading media, your media won't show up. When you upload media, it is being put in queue. Also, you must have Imagick running on your server to process EPS files.
You also have the option of uploading your own JPEG version of the EPS once the product is created. Just use the 'upload alternate' form on the product edit page.
As Pilens mentioned, if you have other questions, you can throw them over on the Symbiostock forums. Welcome aboard!
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This is the correct preview (it was generate frome the raster jpg)
Hi, thankyou for your answer! here is an screenshot, the dark squre is my eps and the colorful one is the same image raster jpg, the raster one come with the metadata, the eps is empty. why it happend???? ???
by the way the Imagick PHP Extension is enabled.
Hey ana,
If you are uploading a vector, just upload the EPS. Symbiostock will generate a thumbnail for you. However, everything runs via the processor which you must run manually or on a schedule through your operating system:
[url]http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/[/url] ([url]http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/[/url])
If you do not run this after uploading media, your media won't show up. When you upload media, it is being put in queue. Also, you must have Imagick running on your server to process EPS files.
You also have the option of uploading your own JPEG version of the EPS once the product is created. Just use the 'upload alternate' form on the product edit page.
As Pilens mentioned, if you have other questions, you can throw them over on the Symbiostock forums. Welcome aboard!
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medium file sizes are all $1.99? Is there any site that sells it for cheaper? Confusing pricing if you want to sell your hi resolution image for $50...
If i was selling photos, this would be automatically be a deal breaker for me as this means that I am ok with pricing my file this cheap to the buyer. Further devaluing the price of images to the buyer isn't doing any content developer any good for the longevity of this industry.
At least with the nasty subscriptions model, the buyer had to initially pay a decent amount in monthly fees to get images. This model, you can just buy the images for less than $2. Im not sure what is worse. Maybe I am clueless to where this industry is at currently but i didn't think it would be at these rock bottom prices to try to compete.
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Ana: Try enabling advanced color correction in your settings - some Imagick installs invert the colors of EPS files.
VB inc: The pricing was determined after a lengthy discussion with contributors. The central things to remember are:
1) These are one time use licenses - the only other agency to currently offer these on a mass scale is Canva, and they charge $1 for full sized images.
2) Most agencies pay you about $0.25 for a royalty-free, full sized image. With Symzio, for a medium sized, one-time-use license, you earn over 700% more ($1.80). With Symzio, we are remaining highly competitive and structuring the pricing and licensing in a way where customers pay less and contributors get way, way more.
To match what most contributors earn with agencies, Symzio would have to limit charging customers $0.31 for a full sized, royalty free image.
It seems unbelievable, but that's how much more the revenue share is. It is astronomical when you look at the math - which is all that matters when it comes to your earnings. Volume, and revenue per image.
Thanks for your comments - much appreciated, and I hope this has shed some light on your concerns.
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Robin, the advanced color correction option was enable. See the srceenshot... and my eps are saved as rgb... the other probleme is that all eps uploaded to my site dont have metadata, the raster version is ok but the eps is empty :-( please help me with the metadata too... see screenshot..
Thankyou for your help!!!!
Ana: Try enabling advanced color correction in your settings - some Imagick installs invert the colors of EPS files.
VB inc: The pricing was determined after a lengthy discussion with contributors. The central things to remember are:
1) These are one time use licenses - the only other agency to currently offer these on a mass scale is Canva, and they charge $1 for full sized images.
2) Most agencies pay you about $0.25 for a royalty-free, full sized image. With Symzio, for a medium sized, one-time-use license, you earn over 700% more ($1.80). With Symzio, we are remaining highly competitive and structuring the pricing and licensing in a way where customers pay less and contributors get way, way more.
To match what most contributors earn with agencies, Symzio would have to limit charging customers $0.31 for a full sized, royalty free image.
It seems unbelievable, but that's how much more the revenue share is. It is astronomical when you look at the math - which is all that matters when it comes to your earnings. Volume, and revenue per image.
Thanks for your comments - much appreciated, and I hope this has shed some light on your concerns.
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I see that you are based in Australia. How do you handle VAT for customers in the European Union?
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Robin i just send you PM with my info in the symbiostock forum... thankyou for your help!
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VB inc: The pricing was determined after a lengthy discussion with contributors. The central things to remember are:
1) These are one time use licenses - the only other agency to currently offer these on a mass scale is Canva, and they charge $1 for full sized images.
2) Most agencies pay you about $0.25 for a royalty-free, full sized image. With Symzio, for a medium sized, one-time-use license, you earn over 700% more ($1.80). With Symzio, we are remaining highly competitive and structuring the pricing and licensing in a way where customers pay less and contributors get way, way more.
To match what most contributors earn with agencies, Symzio would have to limit charging customers $0.31 for a full sized, royalty free image.
It seems unbelievable, but that's how much more the revenue share is. It is astronomical when you look at the math - which is all that matters when it comes to your earnings. Volume, and revenue per image.
Thanks for your comments - much appreciated, and I hope this has shed some light on your concerns.
Red by me. Its more important how much the buyer paid for my images as i hope this stock industry to survive this race to dirt cheap prices. I guess you missed my point about buyer perception on what an image is worth to them. To a buyer, these are great prices. And the perception that these prices are so cheap, why would they think these images are as good as prices they need to pay 5 times more for.
I don't know anything about canva, but from the little i know about your project is that it is from a contributor standpoint and not an agency. I guess I can see it as a good marketing strategy to initially sell it at those prices to attract customers but to have it at a set price seems like a bargain bin type site filled with a lot of rubbish no one would pay for in the first place.
This price offering might be putting off the more valuable images helpful to the library. Maybe i am just in denial stage that we got to this stage with prices like these. As Im only a part timer and my only experience with stock is istock, shutterstock, and now fotolia so my view is limited.
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Hi VB
I'm another of the old Symbiostock supporters that have moved to the new plugin and am supporting Symzio. I think you are misunderstanding the pricing here - someone can get a full size JPEG on the other micro-sites under an RF license and use it as many times as they want in as many projects as they want, for ever. Here on Symzio we are selling a single use 800 pixel image suitable for a website for $1.99. Anything larger takes a price as set by the contributor themselves. For simplicity that is a full size JPEG with an RF (multi-use) license.
The individual contributor sites can separately sell different sizes at different prices if they want.
Is everything perfect - no, but at least we are giving it a go as a contributor driven venture.
Steve
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its a crock and wont attract any contributors nor buyers, forgive my pessimism
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Hey ana: I responded to your request on the forum. It appears your EPS files are corrupted in some manner, which may even be because they have metadata stored in them - from what I've read, storing metadata in EPS files may make them unreadable in other software. I'm not 100% on this, but it appears to be the problem.
I see that you are based in Australia. How do you handle VAT for customers in the European Union?
We haven't looked into this yet.
VB Inc: As Steve pointed out, with our one-time-use license, we are effectively creating a new price model that provides a more restrictive license while providing a slightly more competitive price for on demand sales. It blows subscription pricing out of the water.
But all of that is totally irrelevant. Agencies are publicly advertising media for $0.33. Do some searches and you will stumble on graphic ads that clearly state to customers that they can get media for a third of a dollar. We can't curb the effect of that by charging more. By comparison, Symzio looks outright boutique.
I sympathize with the surprise, but it may be beneficial for you to do some market research as a customer to really see how your media is being priced to customers.
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robin claims to have over 200 installs of newsym but symzio still doesn't reflect that
the symbstock.info search yields 50 - 100x or more images from 112 sites totaling 185,000 images (symzio doesnt report either # of sites nor total # of images)
here are some random searches, updated from a few weeks ago
czech republic - still 0
cambodia - 2 images of 'vietnamese coriander'
new york - 2 images -- now 32 images
seattle - still 0
horse - 12 --> about 100 including many with no horse in sight, including some topless
'cowboys', a plate of tuna, etc
tiger - 0 --> 2
blue sky ---> 86 - almost all are spam - sky being a minor element
india - only generic food including multiple images of a pepper
now also spams with dozens of pix of american indians
paris - 30 images - mostly variations of a generic travel poster --> 49 including multiple
images from Germany
italy - 33 images - mostly more generic posters or isolations of zucchini or pasta --> now 160
including about 30 images of a man in a venetian carnival mask
sunset - 40 - again many are spam --> now about 250, but still mostly afternoon lighting,
snapshots, etc
map - 13 - only 2 are actually maps
buddha - 3
calligraphy - 3
mosaic - about 60, very few are actual mosaics
marijuana - still 0
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Steve
The two things are totally different. You can choose to use the plugin and create your own site - great, that is one choice and I've been very happy with its performance.
Then, you can choose to put certain images into Symzio - on a one by one basis if you like. Symzio is a new venture, so of course there are not many images there. Hence the post on this forum to let people know it was starting.
Steve
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it will never have enough images
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Steve
The two things are totally different. You can choose to use the plugin and create your own site - great, that is one choice and I've been very happy with its performance.
Then, you can choose to put certain images into Symzio - on a one by one basis if you like. Symzio is a new venture, so of course there are not many images there. Hence the post on this forum to let people know it was starting.
Steve
understood, but just wanted to inject some reality to counteract the overblown promises of an unreliable narrator of an unproven system; at present there seems to be little reason for any buyer to use symzio --and why, with 200 sites are so few participating?
direct reports of results from those who have joined would led the project a lot more credibility, and converts
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ALL you contributors will be sorry in 12 months time!!!!
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Would consider joining. Any success stories from current users? Any regrets?
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Hi Fotomine
I had two sales last week:
http://www.backyardsilver.com/2015/12/update-on-symbiostock-personal-agency-and-symzio/ (http://www.backyardsilver.com/2015/12/update-on-symbiostock-personal-agency-and-symzio/)
Steve
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Would consider joining. Any success stories from current users? Any regrets?
I encourage you to read a lot of the stuff I've written about the infrastructure that is Symbiostock and Symzio, because that is where the main meat of it is. There is no magic pill to the problem we've been facing. By signing up with Symbiostock and Symzio, and launching your independent site, you're not going to suddenly start getting sales.
What you will get, however, is a strong sense of the powerful infrastructure we've created which we can use to forge long term success in this business. As you explore more and more of what we're all trying to do and how streamlined the whole process is, you'll start understanding that this is a unique opportunity.
The only thing I'm relatively certain of is that based on all the policies, infrastructure, and mechanisms we now have in place with regards to Symbiostock and Symzio, which has been almost a year in the making, if enough contributors passionately do their best to fight for independent success, a noticeable portion of our monthly revenue will permanently come from Symzio and our independent sites, providing an income stability we've long yearned for. All we need is impassioned participation.
I encourage you to read this post I made:
http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/the-big-switch-the-two-responsibilities-of-every-symbiostock-contributor/ (http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/the-big-switch-the-two-responsibilities-of-every-symbiostock-contributor/)
It outlines what every participating member should do to ensure that we don't lose this particularly potent opportunity. Our current members have been spectacular - extremely active in pointing out bugs, pushing the marketing, and debating important mechanisms.
And based on my experiences, if you go through the trouble of launching your independent site, it really is in your best interests to maximize the return you get on your investment. It's all about deciding, right now, if you want to join the fight or sit on the sidelines. You can easily wait for others to do all the work and join when you see revenue coming in - it is up to you to decide what path will provide you the most personal and professional fulfillment.
But just imagine how it will feel when you make your first sale on Symzio, through our own agency - you sell a medium sized image for $1.99 and see $1.80 commission in your account. Then you click over to your affiliate control panel and see an additional $0.19 cents in revenue, because that sale came directly from one of your marketing links.
That is 100% of sales revenue, directly to you. You then flip over to the agencies and see 5 full sized royalty free sales, totaling $1.65 in revenue. Then you ask yourself - "if those sales had come through Symzio, I'd have made $10!". Then look at the entire month -
Agencies: 150 royalty free, full sized images distributed to customers to use indefinitely - your compensation, $49.5.
Symzio: 150 one-time use, medium sized images, distributed to customers to use once - your compensation, $300.
Will the numbers vary? Yes. Are we going to successfully compete with agencies and get all those sales immediately? No. But as I've pointed out on the Symbiostock forums a few times, if even one sale comes to us directly rather than through third parties, we're moving forward by leaps and bounds.
I apologize about this being relatively long, but I wanted to curb any expectations that participation is just signing up - at a minimum, contributors will be encouraged to use social media to promote both their independent sites and Symzio. It's more than just uploading to agencies and sitting back, but the return is so large and valuable that it is nearly inconceivably sweet, given how bad it has been for us for so long.
Thanks for your question, and I hope additional contributors respond to it, sharing their honest thoughts as well. I also hope you are inspired to join in the fight.
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Would consider joining. Any success stories from current users? Any regrets?
IF there are any success stories, they will likely be coming from those who have had a Symbiostock site for years now. I think there were a few people showing some sales, but it had more to do with their ability and opportunity to market their own sites than with the functionality of the Symbiostock software.
I would be interested in seeing actual sales data from those 200 users, too.
Marketing copy about what Symzio is SUPPOSED to do is a little bit different than actual users reporting actual sales. A few sales a week from a couple of people, in my opinion, doesnt justify the time or trouble of setting up the site. Yes, that is taking away sales from the agencies, but each person is concerned about their bottom line...and those who dont have the time to do social media marketing...or dont want to...wont benefit at all.
Once again, as with the original Symbiostock, I believe that someone is going to benefit from this venture, but it isnt going to be the individual photographer. Just my opinion.
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Potential contributors to Symzio should note a few key terms
And who gets to decide if the editorial tag should be there? If there are to be such draconian penalties, there need to be detailed guidelines as to what the Symzio agency's standards are for requiring an editorial tag. Vague handwaving about "appears to be editorial" just doesn't cut it.
Using "contributor controlled" as a marketing gimmick and having terms like most agencies that leave the contributor largely powerless seems to me to be contradictory.
Read the agreements very carefully to be sure you can live with them before participating.
indeed -- thanks very much @Jo Ann for pointing this out. Even if the FAQs may have been updated, this doesn't change much as of this writing.
One doesn't "clarify" stuff like that in some FAQs but one writes proper T&C in the first place! Please have this done properly, @Robin. Unless this is remedied, this is a huge red flag against using Symzio.
-- Cliff
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if 2 sales is a success story then i am ansel adams
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ALL you contributors will be sorry in 12 months time!!!!
I can guarantee you that you're wrong about that. Even if Symzio as central hub agency fails, contributors will still have their own website presenting their best work available for licensing.
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Would consider joining. Any success stories from current users? Any regrets?
If you're a stock contributor anyway, and you're able and willing to set up your own Wordpress website, then it's a no-brainer really. It's like doing the work once but creating 2 sales channels, your own site with 100% revenue, and Symzio with at least 80%. And the community network tools of the Symzio system will even push your own website in a way you could never achieve on your own.
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Sounds pretty good, 1.99 getting 1.80 for Med 1 time use, is it clear to buyers that it's a one time use?
Non simplistiy is istock's downfall and advertising lots gave it its rise in the beginning and before it was sold, it's unique hi quality collection with a happy medium price was what sustained it
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I have never had a problem with sharing some of my royalties with an agency as long as it was fair... To be honest if an agency is a marketing machine I would gladly take 40% ! ... That was my share in my iStock glory days as an exclusive making ave of $900 mo on 400+ portfolio 😎
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Would consider joining. Any success stories from current users? Any regrets?
If you're a stock contributor anyway, and you're able and willing to set up your own Wordpress website, then it's a no-brainer really. It's like doing the work once but creating 2 sales channels, your own site with 100% revenue, and Symzio with at least 80%. And the community network tools of the Symzio system will even push your own website in a way you could never achieve on your own.
Putting together your own website is a huge amount of work, and for most people it simply won't be worth it. It wasn't for me. I could have spent that time creating content for the sites that do sell, even if I get lower royalties from them. If you have some sort of built-in customer base...say, you own a printing shop and can create images that would be printed on your items, so you can direct printing customers to your image store...or if you have a network of potential buyers who already use you for custom work, so you can suggest they also check out your library of stock images...or you're knowledgeable about "black hat" methods to drive traffic to your website...then it might be worth it.
Sadly, it sounds like Symzio still leaves it up to everyone to fend for him or herself when it comes to marketing and getting traffic. In fact, Robin expects you to help out with marketing Symzio as well. More time you could have spent creating content.
If I had it to do again (and I might) I'd create a simple portfolio site for myself with a small sample of my work and ask people to contact me directly about licensing or custom stuff. Then I could set prices depending on the usage.
For what it's worth, I guess I'm one of the "success stories," with a few sales a month. Not enough to even start to make up for all the time it took to create my site, though.
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Shelma1,
That's a really good assessment 😊
It's really tough Without advertising
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Hey Shelma - thanks for your comments - a couple of things:
1) SEO is all about link juice. Basically, it's a type of 'democracy'. That is to say, if search engines gather that lots of different people are 'voting' for a specific site, that site gets boosted in the search engine. The interesting thing is, it is nearly impossible to buy these votes nowadays - agencies rely on big budget advertising to maintain their 'link juice' by being mentioned in blogs and what not as a result of being noticed.
As the independent contributor network is made up of so many different people, if we all did our part to 'vote' for each other and Symzio, it is highly likely that cumulatively, our organic footprint would effectively dwarf the agencies... for free. This is why it is so exciting, and why the contributors that see this potential are so driven towards its success - it's actually very attainable to create an agency that has more organic SEO power than any other agency in the world... if we work together.
2) I don't know about legacy, but the new Symbiostock is plug and play - you could literally have a basic site up and running within about 20 minutes. You should give it a quick try just to get a feel for it and let us know what you think. Designing it may take more time, but that's relatively normal when it comes to design related stuff. The only exception to this time estimate is if your web-host does not support the basic functions required for Symbiostock to run.
KimsCreativeHub: Simplicity was a huge factor in our pricing system. We wanted a reliable low-cost medium size specifically to target digital purchases. Our licenses have the 'one time use' title attached to them, from the product page to the checkout, and we remind end users of the licensing terms pretty much everywhere.
As for 40%, forget that! You deserve at least 80%. It's all your equity, your work.
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The average contributor that is currently not with Symbiostock can likely have an operational Symbiostock site up and running within about 1 hour, including signing up with a web-host and registering a domain name. The domain name would cost about $10, and the host would be perhaps $5-$10.
Then they could set it up basically and start uploading media, which is all done via FTP, processed automatically. Within 24 hours, it is likely they would have over one thousand images on sale on their own independent site. Then they apply to Symzio.
That's it. Within about 24 hours and $20 in costs, you can have your own independent site running and syndicated in Symzio.
Then, just mention your site, Symzio, or one of your peers every now and then in a blog, or on Twitter, or on Facebook.
If everyone did this, I believe sales on Symzio and independent sites would begin to provide a substantial revenue stream for every participating contributor.
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We already did all that, Robin. The SEO thing never really panned out. Signing up with a web host and registering a domain name are a teeny tiny fraction of the amount of time it takes to build a site; it's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. And from what I've heard Google frowns on reciprocal linking, which is a serious problem with this entire idea of hundreds of stock producers linking sites to one another.
But really, one of the reasons Symbiostock failed was from a lack of coordinated marketing. And Symzio offers none, but rather expects us to do it for them. It's a step in the wrong direction, IMO.
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Would consider joining. Any success stories from current users? Any regrets?
If you're a stock contributor anyway, and you're able and willing to set up your own Wordpress website, then it's a no-brainer really. It's like doing the work once but creating 2 sales channels, your own site with 100% revenue, and Symzio with at least 80%. And the community network tools of the Symzio system will even push your own website in a way you could never achieve on your own.
Putting together your own website is a huge amount of work, and for most people it simply won't be worth it. It wasn't for me.
We've discussed all issues the old Symbiostock had (mostly in the Facebook group). One issue was that it really was quirky, hard to handle and not easy to maintain.
These problems are gone. The new Symbiostock plugin is based on WooCommerce as selling platform. The new plugin is way easier to set up and to handle, is more performant and a lot more stable.
The second, even more important core issue was, that Leo as developer and driving force couldn't really gain anything from his efforts toward the project and eventually completely dropped the ball. This problem is gone now, too. Robin is not only a very capable developer but he's also entrepreneur enough to invest his time and work into an enterprise designed to make money at a later point.
I certainly don't agree on everything with Robin or Symzio, but at least there's a clear vision and a strong driving force. And it's one of the best stock selling options available. From a technical, sales, and revenue point of view.
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Would consider joining. Any success stories from current users? Any regrets?
If you're a stock contributor anyway, and you're able and willing to set up your own Wordpress website, then it's a no-brainer really. It's like doing the work once but creating 2 sales channels, your own site with 100% revenue, and Symzio with at least 80%. And the community network tools of the Symzio system will even push your own website in a way you could never achieve on your own.
Putting together your own website is a huge amount of work, and for most people it simply won't be worth it. It wasn't for me.
We've discussed all issues the old Symbiostock had (mostly in the Facebook group). One issue was that it really was quirky, hard to handle and not easy to maintain.
These problems are gone. The new Symbiostock plugin is based on WooCommerce as selling platform. The new plugin is way easier to set up and to handle, is more performant and a lot more stable.
The second, even more important core issue was, that Leo as developer and driving force couldn't really gain anything from his efforts toward the project and eventually completely dropped the ball. This problem is gone now, too. Robin is not only a very capable developer but he's also entrepreneur enough to invest his time and work into an enterprise designed to make money at a later point.
I certainly don't agree on everything with Robin or Symzio, but at least there's a clear vision and a strong driving force. And it's one of the best stock selling options available. From a technical, sales, and revenue point of view.
Redneck is right, I agree 100%.
The chances to succeed with Symbiostock as a community push have never been better. Sure, it is betting a little money and some valuable time on something with no guaranties regarding the individual outcome and for the community as a whole. However, for me it is also a matter of self-respect: Am I willing to accept down to lousy 15% of what buyers pay from my agents without even trying to do it myself without any greedy agents? - My answer is a firm NO!!! - And currently Symbiostock/Symzio is simply the best way to act accordingly.
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I still have my original Symbiostock (SYS) site, although with a new layout of my own choosing (Elegant Themes' Divi) and Woo Commerce (using Leo's grfx setup): http://bestnaturestock.com/ (http://bestnaturestock.com/)
When Robin came out with "new SYS," I understood I couldn't migrate the text I'd written for each image in "old SYS" and would have to redo it all. With 2,000 images/pages of text, that was a deal-breaker for me then, and it still would be.
So I'll ask now: is that still the case or is it now possible to migrate the descriptive text that accompanies each of my images?
Overall, I'm happy with the look and feel of my site, but as a sole proprietor I don't get any benefit from being part of a group. I could see switching if the text carried over.
And I appreciate the feedback from Redneck and others I got to know in the early-SYS days. It's good to hear you're happy with the new SYS.
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Hi Shelma:
1) I just timed myself - it took me 10 minutes to setup a new Symbiostock site on a fresh server. This includes uploading an image, titling it as my store, and choosing a free WooCommerce compatible theme. WordPress already installed, however. It really is that easy.
2) Co-ordinated marketing:
http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/dec2015-what-have-you-done-to-promote-symzio-this-month/ (http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/dec2015-what-have-you-done-to-promote-symzio-this-month/)
Nothing more effective than organic, random backlinks created through relevant channels. Any more co-ordination and Google would think we're trying to game it.
3) Reciprocal linking is highly effective, and very potent when it comes to SEO juice, as long as the links are relevant. The reciprocal linking myth is only based on 'link farms' - thousands of sites spawned just to generate link juice. Nothing to do with us.
I realize you may be burned out from the efforts you put forth with legacy, and am in no position to gauge your apprehension based on that. However, from a purely technical standpoint, we've got your points covered.
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marthamarks, i assume youra graphic designer and how are your sales using the graphic designer plugin?
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Hi Shelma:
1) I just timed myself - it took me 10 minutes to setup a new Symbiostock site on a fresh server. This includes uploading an image, titling it as my store, and choosing a free WooCommerce compatible theme. WordPress already installed, however. It really is that easy.
2) Co-ordinated marketing:
[url]http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/dec2015-what-have-you-done-to-promote-symzio-this-month/[/url] ([url]http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/dec2015-what-have-you-done-to-promote-symzio-this-month/[/url])
Nothing more effective than organic, random backlinks created through relevant channels. Any more co-ordination and Google would think we're trying to game it.
3) Reciprocal linking is highly effective, and very potent when it comes to SEO juice, as long as the links are relevant. The reciprocal linking myth is only based on 'link farms' - thousands of sites spawned just to generate link juice. Nothing to do with us.
I realize you may be burned out from the efforts you put forth with legacy, and am in no position to gauge your apprehension based on that. However, from a purely technical standpoint, we've got your points covered.
1) I've already said simple things like choosing a theme and a name are relatively quick and easy. And that that's the tiny tip of a huge iceberg of work.
2) You're asking everyone to do their own marketing and Symzio's as well, as I pointed out.
3) reciprocal linking did very little for most of us, as I said above.
The trick is getting eyeballs to the sites, and I don't see anything here that's any different than old Symbiostock, other than asking people to do more marketing work while giving you a cut.
Not burned out, just realistic. I make a decent hourly wage creating images for the big sites, and I lose money every hour I work on my own site. Simple mathematics. Best of luck.
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I still have my original Symbiostock (SYS) site, although with a new layout of my own choosing (Elegant Themes' Divi) and Woo Commerce (using Leo's grfx setup): [url]http://bestnaturestock.com/[/url] ([url]http://bestnaturestock.com/[/url])
When Robin came out with "new SYS," I understood I couldn't migrate the text I'd written for each image in "old SYS" and would have to redo it all. With 2,000 images/pages of text, that was a deal-breaker for me then, and it still would be.
So I'll ask now: is that still the case or is it now possible to migrate the descriptive text that accompanies each of my images?
Overall, I'm happy with the look and feel of my site, but as a sole proprietor I don't get any benefit from being part of a group. I could see switching if the text carried over.
And I appreciate from Redneck and others I got to know in the early-SYS days. It's good to hear you're happy with the new SYS.
Hi Martha,
I d on't have a quick answer for you because I'm not familiar with grfx. I know that titles, captions, keywords, release statuses are included in the migration process from old Sysmbiostock theme to the new plugin.
However I believe your case is a little different since you're asking to migrate from grfx.
Two things I'd suggest.
1. I don't know if grfx is a plugin. If so, you could temporarily disable it and then install the Symbiostock plugin to see if it works the way you want it. You can keep your theme.
2. Head over to the Symbiostock forums if you need help or have questions. In fact head over there anyway because there's every day something to learn and to get tips and help, even individual support by Robin or other Symbiostockers. http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/ (http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/)
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The trick is getting eyeballs to the sites, and I don't see anything here that's any different than old Symbiostock, other than asking people to do more marketing work while giving you a cut.
Very important facts are different now.
1. Symzio is acting as a central hub agency fed by individual Symbiostock sites. It's a completely different solution than anything we had before. It's not just a search engine that lists images from/to individual sites. It's a complete agency without the pain of traditional agencies (subscriptions, credits, registrations etc).
2. The Symzio widget which any Symbiostocker may use creates highly relevant outgoing text and image links to Symzio which in return will link back to your site from any contributors profile page. Relevancy is the key here. Example: http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/baby-dog-christmas-tree/ (http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/baby-dog-christmas-tree/) . Look at the links automatically and dynamically created by the Symzio plugin at the bottom. It doesn't get much more relevant. That's what search engines dig. And you even earn affiliate money if the customer finds one of the Symzio widget images more suitable for his project.
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marthamarks, i assume youra graphic designer and how are your sales using the graphic designer plugin?
Nope. Not a graphic designer in any way, shape, or form. I'm a wildlife/nature photographer, and I'm not connected in any way to the grfx network.
My only sales through this site have come since I migrated it to its current format. Not great for sure, but better than zero, which is what I had before.
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Hi Martha,
I d on't have a quick answer for you because I'm not familiar with grfx. I know that titles, captions, keywords, release statuses are included in the migration process from old Sysmbiostock theme to the new plugin.
However I believe your case is a little different since you're asking to migrate from grfx.
Two things I'd suggest.
1. I don't know if grfx is a plugin. If so, you could temporarily disable it and then install the Symbiostock plugin to see if it works the way you want it. You can keep your theme.
2. Head over to the Symbiostock forums if you need help or have questions. In fact head over there anyway because there's every day something to learn and to get tips and help, even individual support by Robin or other Symbiostockers. [url]http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/[/url] ([url]http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/[/url])
Hi Redneck, and thanks for your response. It's great to chat with you again!
I'm not itching to make any moves with my site right now, but if Robin were to tell me the text for each image could transfer to "new SYS," I'd look more seriously at that.
Robin?
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Hi Martha
When you talk about the extra words you put in, do you mean the changes you made to the description in the old site? I transferred all my 4000 or so images from the old Symbio to new, and the bold fonts and also the reference to a graphic about editorial use made its way seamlessly to the new. The transfer was very smooth - it just happened and all my titles, descriptions, categories and keywords came across.
Here is one example of a font change I made in the old site that is now on the new one:
http://www.backyardstockphotos.com/image/martin-luther-king-monument-dc-3/ (http://www.backyardstockphotos.com/image/martin-luther-king-monument-dc-3/)
Steve
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Hi Martha
When you talk about the extra words you put in, do you mean the changes you made to the description in the old site? I transferred all my 4000 or so images from the old Symbio to new, and the bold fonts and also the reference to a graphic about editorial use made its way seamlessly to the new. The transfer was very smooth - it just happened and all my titles, descriptions, categories and keywords came across.
Steve
Steve, thanks for that info. It's great to know you were able to move all your descriptions, keywords, etc, to the new SYS format.
I could consider making this move at some point if it doesn't involve rewriting thousands of descriptions (which is what I was concerned about before).
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Case in point: Ana, who, since the inception of this thread decided to go independent, successfully launched her Symbiostock site and joined Symzio:
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html)
And now her beautiful illustrations are already being promoted by every other Symzio member:
http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/young-woman-riding-boat/ (http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/young-woman-riding-boat/)
The system has been designed to use every member's site as an extension of every other member's media. This way, we, in essence, all share in the cumulative traffic and media that the entire system is connected to. As soon as you join Symzio, your stuff is immediately seen by any customer that is looking for it on any other member's site.
Multiply this effect by a thousand, and you see what I mean when I say "cumulatively, our organic footprint would effectively dwarf the agencies".
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Hi Martha
When you talk about the extra words you put in, do you mean the changes you made to the description in the old site? I transferred all my 4000 or so images from the old Symbio to new, and the bold fonts and also the reference to a graphic about editorial use made its way seamlessly to the new. The transfer was very smooth - it just happened and all my titles, descriptions, categories and keywords came across.
....
when you make the transfer can the old symbio site stay active? for me the biggest problem is thousands of links from my travel website to my legacy site that wouldn't be active anymore
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from symzio faq
Unique work - we have a zero tolerance policy towards duplicates, and are restrictive when it comes to numerous images that are the same subject taken from excessive angles. If contributors notice duplicates in their collections, they should try to purge them immediately. Contributors should pick only the best images from any single setup and disregard the rest.
what does 'zero tolerance' mean? strict definition says 1 strike & you're out! is it like the editorial policy where 2 arbitrary faults can cause deletion from symzio? who decides? current small set of images on symzio already displays many similar (eg, search 'travel')
since symzio crawls the photog's site this means you're restricted in what you can display on your own site? this is much more restrictive than most agencies
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Thankyou Robin for all the help you bring me with my site and use me us an example ;), symbiostock and symzio is new for me and i think is a great tool that give trafic to your website.
let see what happend with sales!!! :)
Case in point: Ana, who, since the inception of this thread decided to go independent, successfully launched her Symbiostock site and joined Symzio:
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url])
And now her beautiful illustrations are already being promoted by every other Symzio member:
[url]http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/young-woman-riding-boat/[/url] ([url]http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/young-woman-riding-boat/[/url])
The system has been designed to use every member's site as an extension of every other member's media. This way, we, in essence, all share in the cumulative traffic and media that the entire system is connected to. As soon as you join Symzio, your stuff is immediately seen by any customer that is looking for it on any other member's site.
Multiply this effect by a thousand, and you see what I mean when I say "cumulatively, our organic footprint would effectively dwarf the agencies".
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earlier robin posts:
Symzio, along with Symbiostock, provides contributors a complete independent solution: you can host and sell all your media on your own site, and syndicate it with everyone else in Symzio. Best of all, this is all 100% free. Symbiostock costs nothing, and Symzio costs nothing.
however, buried in the symzio FAQ is this little timebomb:
Once the Symzio BETA is over, we will consider charging a nominal Stock Inclusion Fee (SIF) based on the number of images a contributor includes in Symzio as a means of self-regulating quality control. The implementation and pricing of any potential SIF will depend on market conditions when the BETA is complete.
of course agencies can change the TOS too, but none charge by # of images. if you don't agree, you can just leave that agency. the big difference here is that symzio is touted as a major advantage of the system, and a photog can devote considerable time to setting up a personal site, only to be bit by a rule change
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wow thanks for digging that up
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earlier robin posts:
. . . buried in the symzio FAQ is this little timebomb:
Once the Symzio BETA is over, we will consider charging a nominal Stock Inclusion Fee (SIF) based on the number of images a contributor includes in Symzio as a means of self-regulating quality control. The implementation and pricing of any potential SIF will depend on market conditions when the BETA is complete.
of course agencies can change the TOS too, but none charge by # of images. if you don't agree, you can just leave that agency. the big difference here is that symzio is touted as a major advantage of the system, and a photog can devote considerable time to setting up a personal site, only to be bit by a rule change
Well spotted Cascoly !
That is not good at all.
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I'm a Legacy Symbiostock Pro user. Greatly neglected my site for a long time (no sales, but I host so many sites, the cost to host my own is negligible to me). I installed a test version of the "new & improved" and unlike the old version, it's not compatible with my web host who uses magikwand instead of imagick.
Ironically, the OLD Symbiostock works just fine on the host. I feel like I lose a LOT of functionality with the new version. No more collections that I can see. No more setting my own pricing. No ability to upload zip files. I uploaded new content (eps, jpg) to my legacy site and it works. Is it perfect? No. But I do have a lot of options with it.
Problems I see with the new version:
1. There is no way to address a user repeatedly using an image. I mean really, prove it?! By one use does that mean one campaign? One client? One product? One print run? Etc.
2. Symzio seems to do a lot of interference for a contributor run project. I'll decide what is editorial and what isn't for my business. It's my liability. I don't want another entity deciding for me.
3. Perceived value is reduced. If I have to pay $20 for an image at Agency X but I can get it for $2 at Symzio, it's only worth $2 for me. And don't kid yourself, designers (most anyhow) do a reverse image search to find the best prices. Many downloaded images are only used once by a downloader, at least in my experience as a designer.
4. I want to control my pricing. I don't want 'set' values or to have to put custom pricing on every image. That's a time waster.
I'll be doing some site tweaking (Currently have a *terrible* slideshow) and then I might do some test AdWords campaigns, some additional FB promotion, some cross promotion, etc.
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earlier robin posts:
Symzio, along with Symbiostock, provides contributors a complete independent solution: you can host and sell all your media on your own site, and syndicate it with everyone else in Symzio. Best of all, this is all 100% free. Symbiostock costs nothing, and Symzio costs nothing.
however, buried in the symzio FAQ is this little timebomb:
Once the Symzio BETA is over, we will consider charging a nominal Stock Inclusion Fee (SIF) based on the number of images a contributor includes in Symzio as a means of self-regulating quality control. The implementation and pricing of any potential SIF will depend on market conditions when the BETA is complete.
of course agencies can change the TOS too, but none charge by # of images. if you don't agree, you can just leave that agency. the big difference here is that symzio is touted as a major advantage of the system, and a photog can devote considerable time to setting up a personal site, only to be bit by a rule change
That is a nasty little bomb. I'm in this to make money, not to lose it to yet another "agency". If it's not an agency and instead is a contributor network, then these terms are definitely more restrictive than I expect when I do the bulk of the marketing, pay for the hosting, etc.
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Hi Shelma:
1) I just timed myself - it took me 10 minutes to setup a new Symbiostock site on a fresh server. This includes uploading an image, titling it as my store, and choosing a free WooCommerce compatible theme. WordPress already installed, however. It really is that easy.
Yep, it really is that easy! I just did it - on a Standalone installation with hosting at GoDaddy. Took me about 15 minutes total to do the install and get it working.
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Hi Dianajo
You have misunderstood the pricing. All pricing and licensing on an individual's site is up to the individual. You can charge one time license or RF, you can make things editorial or not as you see fit. You can avoid having anything to do with Symzio if you want. You can display the Symzio images as an affiliate if you want and not include any of your own images in that system.
Symzio is an optional extra - we are currently debating how best to handle that editorial question on our forum and things change as the community works things out. Pricing on Symzio has one common component - the small web size download at $1.99, but the larger size is priced by the contributor - no control of that price. I chose $49.99 for mine, for instance.
What is different to Leo's efforts is that there is more standardization. If you can't support Imagemagick, then it does support GD, but why should the developer try to meet every possible variant? It diverts attention from other things. So if it doesn't work for you, stay where you are with the old version.
Steve
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Yep, it really is that easy! I just did it - on a Standalone installation with hosting at GoDaddy. Took me about 15 minutes total to do the install and get it working.
Yes, most wordpress themes are easy to install and don't take much time. What takes the time is customizing a site with brand logos, colors, and copy, not to mention the uploading of all of one's photos, seo, etc. And all of that takes WAY more time than 15 minutes. And marketing one's site after all of that setting up also takes a lot of time. Let's be realistic...
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Yes, most wordpress themes are easy to install and don't take much time. What takes the time is customizing a site with brand logos, colors, and copy, not to mention the uploading of all of one's photos, seo, etc. And all of that takes WAY more time than 15 minutes. And marketing one's site after all of that setting up also takes a lot of time. Let's be realistic...
Amen, Cathy. Well said!
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steheap how big is that community? last time i checked i saw tumbleweed
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[quote author=cathyslife
Yes, most wordpress themes are easy to install and don't take much time. What takes the time is customizing a site with brand logos, colors, and copy, not to mention the uploading of all of one's photos, seo, etc. And all of that takes WAY more time than 15 minutes. And marketing one's site after all of that setting up also takes a lot of time. Let's be realistic...
[/quote]
Yes, I agree... it is a big commitment of your time. And it is not for everyone. You could hire someone to do the customizing or do it yourself.
After I got the plugin working, I decided I didn't like my theme, so I bought a new one. I opted for Symbiostock Express. I like it much better than what I had, but it does have a learning curve.
You are right - we need to be realistic. This is not a 15 minute exercise to achieve a PayPal account running over with cash. It does involve work. And commitment. Setting up the plugins was the easy part. Doing all you describe is the real work.
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steheap how big is that community? last time i checked i saw tumbleweed
Despite Robins claims, from this abbreviated post in September, the network doesn't seem to be growing by leaps and bounds.
.... That being said, we are well over 200+ strong. New members are joining the Symzio network on a daily basis....
I was doing some checking, using the Symzio search and found there are about 8 contributors whose results come up when using popular and pretty broad keywords. Between them, they have around 13,500 images. With portfolios ranging from 14 to 4300 images. I only searched Images - not Video or Vectors.
Keywords I searched were: businessman, business, people, food, drink, dog, cat, bird, flower, nature, travel
Symzio as an agency without hundreds of thousands of images, at minimum, will not attract anybody.
Until there are a lot more big name contributors joining the new Symbiostock and reporting substantial and consistent sales this is not going to amount to anything more than the original did.
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The Symzio network, the Symzio agency, and Symbiostock are three very different things. The Symbiostock plugin user base is growing on a daily basis, increasingly so:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/symbiostock/ (https://wordpress.org/plugins/symbiostock/)
The previous Symzio network has been retired and replaced entirely by the agency (as was planned), which was launched very recently, and is still in beta:
http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/symzio-launch/ (http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/symzio-launch/)
Our numbers in that are also increasing, in fact faster than anticipated. Hence the creation of this thread, to encourage even more contributors to join up - which has been pretty successful so far!
The numbers we have with Symzio and the images contained within form a pretty solid base, and everyone is actively marketing it, especially the entire Symbiostock team. So if you do join up, your images will be promoted pretty much everywhere we can, from the Symbiostock Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Symbiostock) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/symbiostock) to the Symzio social media spots (https://twitter.com/symzio), as well as through other promotions we're working on. However, be aware, that you are not included in Symzio just by using Symbiostock. It is a different system altogether that you have to apply to once your Symbiostock site is up and running.
But - we're always looking for positive new contributors to join the effort. We love seeing hugely eclectic media in Symzio's results.
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Everybody is entitled to his opinion.
However, waiting until many others have joined and pushed it, and have reported frequent sales is basically the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise.
Well, that was my opinion.
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how many images and contributors does the agency have now?
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Everybody is entitled to his opinion.
However, waiting until many others have joined and pushed it, and have reported frequent sales is basically the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise.
Well, that was my opinion.
your opinion adds nothing to the conversation when all you do is insult those who are exposing valid concerns
waiting is the only logical choice at this point given robin's refusal to respond to significant issues raised about the TOS which can destroy an independent's work; his arbitrary decision can kick someone off the symzio service based on undefined criteria; plus his continued hype about the # of users when simple searches of symbio show it's barely stocked (and the little that's there is full of spam)
true, symzio & newsym are different but it's robin who continually links them and it's symzio that robin uses to push his claims for fantastic seo without any real data to back it up
when leo started symbiostock, the list of sites, number of images, combined keyword lists and many other stats were available from the beginning so you could make an objective decision about whether to join or not
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waiting is the only logical choice at this point given robin's refusal to respond to significant issues raised about the TOS which can destroy an independent's work; his arbitrary decision can kick someone off the symzio service based on undefined criteria; ...
I think you might be a little paranoid. Are you talking about the potential submission fee or the being kicked-out danger?
It has been explained already that the content of Symzio is almost entirely Symbiostock user controlled. Once you're approved as a contributor it's up to you what appears on Symzio because nobody will select your best work and reject the crappy stuff. So being a Symzio contributor comes with great responsibility, to deliver work that's up to the standards and that's not flooding the system with similars.
Of course there need to be some kind of rules to avoid possible misuse of the system. In other words, if you try to cheat the system, you might get kicked out or fined. That's it.
I can't speak for Robin but why in the world should he demand a fee when contributors deliver high quality content?
Keeping the content on Symzio on a high technical and creative level is in everybody's interest.
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Everybody is entitled to his opinion.
However, waiting until many others have joined and pushed it, and have reported frequent sales is basically the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise.
Well, that was my opinion.
Investing time and money into an unproven company is just bad business, in my opinion, and has nothing to do with laziness and cowardliness, especially for those of us who went around the block with SY the first time around. As of right now, I still have not seen ANYTHING posted about consistent sales (or any sales, for that matter), even from the FIRST symbiostock, and what type of return one can expect on their time and money invested.
There are always going to be some people who feel strongly about a project, as you obviously do about this one, and are willing to invest whatever it takes to get it rolling. But belittling those who aren't in the same position doesn't really accomplish much.
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Everybody is entitled to his opinion.
However, waiting until many others have joined and pushed it, and have reported frequent sales is basically the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise.
Well, that was my opinion.
Sorry, cowardly?! I was an early adopter of Symbiostock with over 5500 images on my site. Kept up with my site until a couple weeks ago when it stopped functioning. I didn't and still don't like the new Symbio's look (very amateurish) so I never converted. Plus I never saw merit in any of the new schemes. It looks like a business plan that is still trying to figure itself out. I wish you luck... but I'll sit this one out.
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Everybody is entitled to his opinion.
However, waiting until many others have joined and pushed it, and have reported frequent sales is basically the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise.
Well, that was my opinion.
You're right, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. My opinion is that I deeply resent your characterization of those who aren't ready to participate in this venture as having "...the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise"
I won't repeat my list of concerns, but so far I've heard only peppy marketing talk and insults to address those concerns.
There's an old expression that you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If you're trying to draw people to the new endeavor, I don't think this is a good way to go about it.
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I didn't and still don't like the new Symbio's look (very amateurish) so I never converted.
Thanks for the good wishes.
Your Symbiostock site looks like you want it to look. You can choose your own theme or you can design a complete new one. Customize it as much as you want. There is no one Symbiostock look.
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Everybody is entitled to his opinion.
However, waiting until many others have joined and pushed it, and have reported frequent sales is basically the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise.
Well, that was my opinion.
You're right, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. My opinion is that I deeply resent your characterization of those who aren't ready to participate in this venture as having "...the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise"
I won't repeat my list of concerns, but so far I've heard only peppy marketing talk and insults to address those concerns.
There's an old expression that you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If you're trying to draw people to the new endeavor, I don't think this is a good way to go about it.
Sorry, I apologize for my snappy remarks.
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so how many images and contributors does the agency have
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I just believe that the character of the owner is a strong indication of how the site will be managed. I'm out for that reason alone. Sounds like he works for FOTOLIA.
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I just believe that the character of the owner is a strong indication of how the site will be managed. I'm out for that reason alone. Sounds like he works for FOTOLIA.
Not some, but all of the characterization of me has been derived from increasing aggression due to the fact that I don't interact with unprofessional or destructive individuals. I have a great deal of experience with public forums and can spot a troll a mile away. I have also learned that there is no specific way to deal with individuals looking to troll you except to ignore them.
For example - without exception, these destructive individuals have repeatedly attempted to coerce responses out of me while simultaneously attacking both the project and myself with incorrect claims - some are wound up in somewhat factual details, but most are fabricated or entirely misrepresented. The end result of me trying to correct such efforts would be for them to then reply with more incorrect characterizations of either myself or the project. This is called a 'black hole', and serves to digress any conversation away from the central purpose it plays. This is the central definition of 'trolling'.
Most importantly, the loudest, most seemingly offended individuals here, have not once constructively pursued attaining untainted information from me via PM or otherwise, while many others have. This denotes, with certainty, that they are here to entertain themselves - not assist other contributors in determining if Symbiostock is something that would benefit or harm them. Early on, I actually PMed one of them, asking for their assistance in examining the project, and they ignored my request, yet continue to critique the project publicly.
Therefore - if you are new to the forum, then you will probably gather that the hate posts have all the same upvotes because angry people generally upvote one another. You will also gather that throughout MSG, the hate posts for pretty much anything generally gather the most upvotes. This is an angry environment that has no one specific cause.
All that being said, I don't form specific opinions as to why these individuals choose to do what they do - obviously they are contributors and are looking to maximize their revenue. But for some reason or another that has taken a backseat to the social satisfaction they derive from lambasting whatever they can on MSG.
Our goal - mine and any contributor eager to see Symzio succeed - has nothing to do with personal vendetta. These individuals only become relevant when they interfere with our ability to progress towards independent success. Thus far, it hasn't posed an issue - however, if you, who I do not know, actually believe I have demonstrated anything but the utmost level of professionalism and consistency towards every single action I have taken and done with regards to Symbiostock since my involvement, you are welcome to privately critique me, and if you are correct, I will publicly clear that up.
Finally, I have a great deal of faith in the silent majority here - a great deal of contributors, with certainty, hesitate to interact on the forums but rather just meander around because they are generally avoiding these few loud, aggressive types. So, I do what I can do - post factual information, avoid the irrational, and answer what legitimate questions I can while sharing our intentions and plans with those interested.
MSG is just one avenue of promotion, and my dedication to the success of independent contributors is asserted by the fact that I continue to, and will continue to, use it as a means of informing professionals on the merits of our efforts irrespective of the attempts of these loud, angry, unwieldy individuals to coerce submission out of others for personal satisfaction.
And now, I can't speak further on the issue, because that would result in a 'black hole'. :) You are welcome to PM me for clarification.
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However, waiting until many others have joined and pushed it, and have reported frequent sales is basically the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise.
I think I share similar sentiments to Pilens - I am actually pissed off, and being pissed off is what has amalgamated in all the work I have done to get this project going. I think what pushed me over the edge was a 4K sale - I got $50, which is a big payout. Then I realize that the agency kept $250. And the poor customer paid $300! I get $50 for my video, 100% my work, while the agency gets $250 - and all that extra money is being paid as a premium by the customer.
It then occurred to me that we could charge far less than agencies ($100), the customer would love it, and we would effectively make nearly twice the amount of money. Even now, when I think about the $250 I almost don't want more sales until Symzio takes off because it will piss me off even more.
All you have to ask yourself is - does that piss you off enough to want to step up to try to make a change? In the end, no one else can answer that for you. All I can do is create an infrastructure that makes it extremely easy for you to pursue that, and encourage you to consider it.
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I read a lot of posts and comments here in MSG about contributors complaining for how bad those microstock agencies are and what have done to them but still they only keep complaining and do nothing. Atleast Symbiostock team and its contributors have different approach in that situation.
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i had some genuine concerns and questions, maybe bluntly wrapped in cynicism, but genuine. robin also ignored jo anns comments, positively shes not a destructive character. still no answer on how many images the agency has. not sure how that question can be perceived as destructive, anyway
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Great response, Robin! +100
I think that - apart from trolling - some of the posts being negative about Symbiostock and Symzio are fueled by disappointed expectations about what a direct image sales site and networking with other similar minded people can achieve in a given period of time. Symbio has inspired high flying hopes, then produced very down to earth sales statistics and led to lots of drama in the fora. As a Symbiostocker from day one I've witnessed it all. It has been a rough ride and it has been very sad at times.
I am grateful for Robin to continue Symbiostock, leading the way and staying cool even here. We don't need more drama. Instead, we need to leave the turbulent past behind and work together steadily building our sites and the Symbiostock community. We need to be prepared for a long haul since there is no low hanging fruit left to pick in this industry. Realistically there won't be any instant success and $$$s pouring in from our Symbiostock sites. Not now and not in the near future. It takes more than just setting up a Wordpress site.
So does this make any business sense, then? Well, did Deactivation Day, deleting (part of) our portfolios, essentially erasing hours of our work spent, in protest against DPC, make any business sense? - No, definitely not in a conventional sense. But it did work, D-Day has been a success, at least in my eyes. Where is that spirit? We need it for Symbiostock as well. Does it really make more business sense to do all the work but earn only down to 15% of the profit? - This is how distorted and strange this industry has become. Let's stop expressing our frustrations and anger with agencies in countless MSG threads and divert that energy into building our Symbiostock sites and contributing to the community. We can make it work!
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Great response, Robin! +100
I think that - apart from trolling - some of the posts being negative about Symbiostock and Symzio are fueled by disappointed expectations about what a direct image sales site and networking with other similar minded people can achieve in a given period of time. Symbio has inspired high flying hopes, then produced very down to earth sales statistics and led to lots of drama in the fora. As a Symbiostocker from day one I've witnessed it all. It has been a rough ride and it has been very sad at times.
I am grateful for Robin to continue Symbiostock, leading the way and staying cool even here. We don't need more drama. Instead, we need to leave the turbulent past behind and work together steadily building our sites and the Symbiostock community. We need to be prepared for a long haul since there is no low hanging fruit left to pick in this industry. Realistically there won't be any instant success and $$$s pouring in from our Symbiostock sites. Not now and not in the near future. It takes more than just setting up a Wordpress site.
So does this make any business sense, then? Well, did Deactivation Day, deleting (part of) our portfolios, essentially erasing hours of our work spent, in protest against DPC, make any business sense? - No, definitely not in a conventional sense. But it did work, D-Day has been a success, at least in my eyes. Where is that spirit? We need it for Symbiostock as well. Does it really make more business sense to do all the work but earn only down to 15% of the profit? - This is how distorted and strange this industry has become. Let's stop expressing our frustrations and anger with agencies in countless MSG threads and divert that energy into building our Symbiostock sites and contributing to the community. We can make it work!
Well said Stephan !
I think I will give the new Symbiostock plugin and Symzio a try in the next few weeks with an entirely new site.
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My point is that we've already seen a sample of your management character. That's enough for me, at least. Everyone else is obviously free to partner with anyone, or any entity, they so choose. I was merely reminding all the cheerleaders (who I could also call trolls) what they were likely getting in to. And mind you all that my post was based on a factual occurrence. Yours is based on hope. Onward.
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I just believe that the character of the owner is a strong indication of how the site will be managed. I'm out for that reason alone. Sounds like he works for FOTOLIA.
Not some, but all of the characterization of me has been derived from increasing aggression due to the fact that I don't interact with unprofessional or destructive individuals. I have a great deal of experience with public forums and can spot a troll a mile away. I have also learned that there is no specific way to deal with individuals looking to troll you except to ignore them.
For example - without exception, these destructive individuals have repeatedly attempted to coerce responses out of me while simultaneously attacking both the project and myself with incorrect claims - some are wound up in somewhat factual details, but most are fabricated or entirely misrepresented. The end result of me trying to correct such efforts would be for them to then reply with more incorrect characterizations of either myself or the project. This is called a 'black hole', and serves to digress any conversation away from the central purpose it plays. This is the central definition of 'trolling'.
Most importantly, the loudest, most seemingly offended individuals here, have not once constructively pursued attaining untainted information from me via PM or otherwise, while many others have. This denotes, with certainty, that they are here to entertain themselves - not assist other contributors in determining if Symbiostock is something that would benefit or harm them. Early on, I actually PMed one of them, asking for their assistance in examining the project, and they ignored my request, yet continue to critique the project publicly.
Therefore - if you are new to the forum, then you will probably gather that the hate posts have all the same upvotes because angry people generally upvote one another. You will also gather that throughout MSG, the hate posts for pretty much anything generally gather the most upvotes. This is an angry environment that has no one specific cause.
All that being said, I don't form specific opinions as to why these individuals choose to do what they do - obviously they are contributors and are looking to maximize their revenue. But for some reason or another that has taken a backseat to the social satisfaction they derive from lambasting whatever they can on MSG.
Our goal - mine and any contributor eager to see Symzio succeed - has nothing to do with personal vendetta. These individuals only become relevant when they interfere with our ability to progress towards independent success. Thus far, it hasn't posed an issue - however, if you, who I do not know, actually believe I have demonstrated anything but the utmost level of professionalism and consistency towards every single action I have taken and done with regards to Symbiostock since my involvement, you are welcome to privately critique me, and if you are correct, I will publicly clear that up.
Finally, I have a great deal of faith in the silent majority here - a great deal of contributors, with certainty, hesitate to interact on the forums but rather just meander around because they are generally avoiding these few loud, aggressive types. So, I do what I can do - post factual information, avoid the irrational, and answer what legitimate questions I can while sharing our intentions and plans with those interested.
MSG is just one avenue of promotion, and my dedication to the success of independent contributors is asserted by the fact that I continue to, and will continue to, use it as a means of informing professionals on the merits of our efforts irrespective of the attempts of these loud, angry, unwieldy individuals to coerce submission out of others for personal satisfaction.
And now, I can't speak further on the issue, because that would result in a 'black hole'. :) You are welcome to PM me for clarification.
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However, waiting until many others have joined and pushed it, and have reported frequent sales is basically the laziest and most cowardly attitude anyone can have toward a new enterprise.
I think I share similar sentiments to Pilens - I am actually pissed off, and being pissed off is what has amalgamated in all the work I have done to get this project going. I think what pushed me over the edge was a 4K sale - I got $50, which is a big payout. Then I realize that the agency kept $250. And the poor customer paid $300! I get $50 for my video, 100% my work, while the agency gets $250 - and all that extra money is being paid as a premium by the customer.
It then occurred to me that we could charge far less than agencies ($100), the customer would love it, and we would effectively make nearly twice the amount of money. Even now, when I think about the $250 I almost don't want more sales until Symzio takes off because it will piss me off even more.
All you have to ask yourself is - does that piss you off enough to want to step up to try to make a change? In the end, no one else can answer that for you. All I can do is create an infrastructure that makes it extremely easy for you to pursue that, and encourage you to consider it.
We don't need more drama. Instead, we need to leave the turbulent past behind and work together steadily building our sites and the Symbiostock community.
And yet, just as in the past, 12 paragraphs of ranting against the "aggressive, loud trolls" gets posted, instead of actual facts and answers to the questions that are legitimately asked. It shouldn't matter to the symbiostock cause whether those questions are asked by "aggressive trolls" or by people who are deemed to be prospective sales. The answers would provide relevant information for anyone and everyone who may be interested.
We all agree there is a problem with agencies...we have all known that for years. People are looking for an intelligent solution with good returns on their time and money. That needs to be proved. Spending another 40+ hours setting up a new (or yet another) personal website without any real hard data and only pep talk from the people who will make the most money from it seems yet another waste of time. Please, prove us naysayers wrong! For me personally, when I can see actual data showing overall increases in sales over the past 2+ years, I will give the idea serious consideration.
Is there a place on the symbiostock forum (FAQs?) that answers any and all of the questions posed by various people here on this forum? If yes, can a link to that information be posted instead of 12 paragraph retorts?
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i agree a lot with what mantis and cathy have to say, still no answer to how many images symzio has. i dont see why that information cant be shared, every agency shares the number of images, why is it a secret with symsio, the only reason i can think of is the number is embarrassing low. for me that figure would indicate the commitment of others to symzio and wehter or not i want to add my port
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People are looking for an intelligent solution with good returns on their time and money. That needs to be proved.
Others need to build the nest for you and then prove that it's nice and comfy?
Nobody needs to prove anything to you. If you want success, stop whining and make it happen, or learn from failure. The chance is there. It's up to you to take it or not.
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People are looking for an intelligent solution with good returns on their time and money. That needs to be proved.
Others need to build the nest for you and then prove that it's nice and comfy?
Nobody needs to prove anything to you. If you want success, stop whining and make it happen, or learn from failure. The chance is there. It's up to you to take it or not.
:)
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So I guess if you put tremendous effort into the original Sym, as 180+ people did, and you're not immediately jumping on the new effort, you're lazy, cowardly, aggressive, loud, a whiner, a troll...what else have you guys called us? I've lost count.
Down in flames.
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redneck it is perfectly normal and very common on this forum to ask if an agency has a good sales record before joining, normally people are happy to answer, for symzio the question seems to be like red cloth to a bull
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I think we said earlier in the post that Symzio had just been launched and that some of the users of the Symbiostock plugin were adding their images to that site. I added mine in December. So of course it doesn't have 100s of thousands of images - it is just getting off the ground. This post was intended to announce that it was starting to see if any readers were interested in finding out more.
Steve
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thanks steheap, so how many images are on the symbistock network, the new one, not the legacy
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Case in point: Ana, who, since the inception of this thread decided to go independent, successfully launched her Symbiostock site and joined Symzio:
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url])
And now her beautiful illustrations are already being promoted by every other Symzio member:
[url]http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/young-woman-riding-boat/[/url] ([url]http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/young-woman-riding-boat/[/url])
The system has been designed to use every member's site as an extension of every other member's media. This way, we, in essence, all share in the cumulative traffic and media that the entire system is connected to. As soon as you join Symzio, your stuff is immediately seen by any customer that is looking for it on any other member's site.
Multiply this effect by a thousand, and you see what I mean when I say "cumulatively, our organic footprint would effectively dwarf the agencies".
Is this Ana that you mention also known as Alexander Yakovlev, because some of her illustrations look exactly like his photographs. (There's more than this)
(http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/modern-dancer-11013242.jpg)
(http://www.design.aroastock.com/wp-content/uploads/_sz/707.jpg)
(http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/dancer-5580136.jpg)
(http://www.design.aroastock.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/young-woman-hip-hop-dancer-illustration-650-623x548.jpg)
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.....
Is there a place on the symbiostock forum (FAQs?) that answers any and all of the questions posed by various people here on this forum? If yes, can a link to that information be posted instead of 12 paragraph retorts?
if you ask the questions we've asked here you'll be banned from the newsym forums
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Thanks for that find Pixart - we're looking into it. If you find anything else, please use the 'Report this product' button available on every product page. We don't check forums every day so that is the quickest way to flag any material on Symzio that may be problematic, and we want to address any possible infringement issues as soon as possible.
As Redneck has clearly stated, one of our biggest goals is ensuring that the quality control in this open system is above par. We strongly encourage all contributors to flag any questionable media with regards to infringement.
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maybe a new tag line for symzio, we set up your site quicker than you can say dmca
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maybe a new tag line for symzio, we set up your site quicker than you can say dmca
In all fairness, the agencies don't a good job of weeding out copyright violators either, so symzio is bound to have the same problem. But then again, it pi$$e$ me off that the agencies make 80%+ of a sale and don't bother to even check those things out. Instead, just as symzio is apparently doing, they rely on free work provided by the contributors to weed out the copyright violators.
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What kind of best match system does your site have? I think the key to success in any type of library is the ability to filter out the rubbish and let relevant images be shown better as buyers don't have to wade through garbage.
I would be more inclined to join this venture if you told me that this is a customized search engine you coded. Not a generic one with minimal or no coding done.
If there is no response, i will probably guess the answer for myself.
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It's a proprietary search system, as is pretty much everything in Symzio except for some front-end libraries. But I can't agree that this makes or breaks any agency. As long as results are relevant, customers prop the most usable images to the top through their purchases.
But minimizing the gaming of the engine is a huge priority and as with Google, the algorithm will keep being tweaked as we progress.
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how many images are in the new symbiostock network?
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Kudos to you, Robin! This is awesome - while I've read conflicting reviews of Symbiostock for the last couple of years and I understand people's concerns as I've experienced many of the same issues myself, my experience with Symbio thus far has been mainly positive. Many thanks for your efforts on the technical side of this in helping to get this platform closer to its huge potential.
I'm looking forward to the new features and benefits to be had once I get a chance to upgrade my site from Legacy, and will definitely be taking advantage of Symzio. Keep up the good work!!
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Thanks Kenny
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robin, how many images are in the new symbiostock network, please?
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robin, how many images are in the new symbiostock network, please?
Why do i have a feeling your response is going to be negative towards whatever answer comes your way? I think this is what he means by trolling...
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robin, how many images are in the new symbiostock network, please?
Why do i have a feeling your response is going to be negative towards whatever answer comes your way? I think this is what he means by trolling...
He has refused to answer legitimate questions and also has a pattern of denigrating artists within his own forums. He is being selective in what he posts in here and in my opinion is reaping what he sows. Be more open and honest and transparent. It's okay to not have a lot of images early on, but there is plenty Robin can do to build trust amongst potential contributors, like answering the questions Joann posed.
For me, I hope he is successful. I do not wish any ill will on his efforts. My passion is driven behind business process design based largely around the voice of the customer in my day job. I design business processes for a living and I can tell you that dodging the hard questions is simply bad business.
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Nobody has really refused anything from what I've read.
I can't and don't want to speak for Robin but I've already explained that Symzio is different than other agencies. The quality of content depends on what Symbiostock users feed to it. This is way more freedom than you can have with any other agency out there. But with freedom comes responsibility. And of course there need to be some rules to make sure this system doesn't get abused by individuals who don't work actively to keep up the standard (too many similars, keyword spam, low quality images etc).
In my personal opinion nobody who's honest and professional, and delivers content that's up or above the quality level of Symzio, needs to be afraid of getting punished. There's simply no reason for that.
But even if someone would get kicked from Symzio, this person would still have his/her own Symbiostock site.
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Nobody has really refused anything from what I've read.
I can't and don't want to speak for Robin but I've already explained that Symzio is different than other agencies. The quality of content depends on what Symbiostock users feed to it. This is way more freedom than you can have with any other agency out there. But with freedom comes responsibility. And of course there need to be some rules to make sure this system doesn't get abused by individuals who don't work actively to keep up the standard (too many similars, keyword spam, low quality images etc).
In my personal opinion nobody who's honest and professional, and delivers content that's up or above the quality level of Symzio, needs to be afraid of getting punished. There's simply no reason for that.
But even if someone would get kicked from Symzio, this person would still have his/her own Symbiostock site.
unfortunately that's NOT what robin has described here -- among other things he has declared 'zero tolerance' for violation of very fuzzy rules. zero tolerance means ONE strike & you're out, and this is a decision robin can make arbitrarily. he has refused to make the policies clear and objective, so anyone promoting symzio is subject to having their efforts destroyed based on what might be a whim or displeasure at an online comment
yes, you'd still have your sym site, but it's robin who's pushing symzio as the way indies will get noticed; people should at least know what the rules & penalties are before spending their time
as far as quality, there are obvious spam keywords, poor quality and other irrelevant material in the small selection already available; again, no response from robin to these documented problems
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Let's give him a break, he's doing what he can to improve Symbiostock and Symzio at the same time. On a daily basis.
As mentioned a couple of times, this is the start of a very new project. Most people understand that not everything can be absolutely perfect from the first minute.
And by the way, do you expect the other CEOs or owners of the agencies you're submitting to to answer any and all of your questions and conspiracy theories?
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Let's give him a break, he's doing what he can to improve Symbiostock and Symzio at the same time. On a daily basis.
As mentioned a couple of times, this is the start of a very new project. Most people understand that not everything can be absolutely perfect from the first minute.
And by the way, do you expect the other CEOs or owners of the agencies you're submitting to to answer any and all of your questions and conspiracy theories?
ROFL!!! 'very new project'???? some of these questions have been ignored since robin first appeared last SPRING!!! hoist on his own petard -- it's robin who keeps announcing how large & wonderful everything is going
re other agencies, the lack of control & response there is EXACTLY what led Leo to create symbiostock in the first place, and robin has constantly repeated how open & cooperative the project is supposed to be
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I'm staying put, I thought the new setup would have adds. This link thing could be done with the current system.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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the fact that no one is here to share the number of images on the new symbiostock its safe to say its not bigger than the legacy and probably a lot smaller still
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Case in point: Ana, who, since the inception of this thread decided to go independent, successfully launched her Symbiostock site and joined Symzio:
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url])
And now her beautiful illustrations are already being promoted by every other Symzio member:
[url]http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/young-woman-riding-boat/[/url] ([url]http://picturebreeze.com/stock/photos/image/young-woman-riding-boat/[/url])
The system has been designed to use every member's site as an extension of every other member's media. This way, we, in essence, all share in the cumulative traffic and media that the entire system is connected to. As soon as you join Symzio, your stuff is immediately seen by any customer that is looking for it on any other member's site.
Multiply this effect by a thousand, and you see what I mean when I say "cumulatively, our organic footprint would effectively dwarf the agencies".
Is this Ana that you mention also known as Alexander Yakovlev, because some of her illustrations look exactly like his photographs. (There's more than this)
([url]http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/modern-dancer-11013242.jpg[/url])
([url]http://www.design.aroastock.com/wp-content/uploads/_sz/707.jpg[/url])
([url]http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/dancer-5580136.jpg[/url])
([url]http://www.design.aroastock.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/young-woman-hip-hop-dancer-illustration-650-623x548.jpg[/url])
illustrations removed but contributor still part of symzio, i guess they do allow copy cats with the agency, just not the infringing images
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Oh, there's more of Yakovlev's than just those 2 in that portfolio. Considering the tone of the collection, I would err on the side that they ALL are violations, not just those 2.
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how many images and contributors does the agency have now?
google search: site:symzio.com/contributor-
Reveals 64, but there are a few duplicate URLs.
images: 30576
contributors: 30
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-1.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-1.html) 2128
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10003.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10003.html) 14
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10001.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10001.html) 106
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10004.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10004.html) 4260
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10011.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10011.html) ?
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10009.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10009.html) 70
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10012.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10012.html) 633
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10014.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10014.html) ?
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10019.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10019.html) 84
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10023.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10023.html) 2668
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10026.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10026.html) 287
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10028.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10028.html) 150
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16313.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16313.html) 2008
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16318.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16318.html) 41
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16312.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16312.html) 5154
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html) 52
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16328.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16328.html) 12
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16324.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16324.html) 930
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16336.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16336.html) 27
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16333.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16333.html) 3921
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16341.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16341.html) 4718
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16352.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16352.html) ?
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16353.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16353.html) ?
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16348.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16348.html) ?
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16356.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16356.html) 20
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16362.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16362.html) 1280
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16363.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16363.html) 331
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16364.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16364.html) 514
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16376.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16376.html) 342
http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16370.html (http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16370.html) 826
images: 30576
contributors: 30
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I have to say, this is a remarkable setup. I haven't gotten a chance to look at it in depth until today.
I remember extensive talk in the early days of the highly radical attempts to network, there was lots of talk about bringing everyone together in one agency.
Here it is now!
Good job Robin. While we've had a few bumps in the road you really delivered.
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I find the images dropping down from the top of the screen disconcerting.
I can't see the total amount of images found for the search, it just says next page, so you're not sure how many next pages there are going to be.
Not wanting to offend. It's my first impressions.
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I think there is room for improvement like you say, but its the first of its type.
I'm admitting its impressive because:
- They distribute a free wordpress plugin that lets you sell direct & connects to Symzio optionally.
- They host sites for people who can't do it alone.
- They aggregate all of it.
- Decent commission.
Admittedly there are a few things that need cleaning, but for so many things done in less than a year, its good. A year from now it will be polished for sure. Any one of them is a full time job, and each element has its own complexity.
Just thought I'd throw a little praise out there. Dodging out now :D
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how many images and contributors does the agency have now?
google search: site:symzio.com/contributor-
Reveals 64, but there are a few duplicate URLs.
images: 30576
contributors: 30
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-1.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-1.html[/url]) 2128
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10003.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10003.html[/url]) 14
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10001.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10001.html[/url]) 106
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10004.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10004.html[/url]) 4260
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10011.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10011.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10009.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10009.html[/url]) 70
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10012.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10012.html[/url]) 633
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10014.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10014.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10019.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10019.html[/url]) 84
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10023.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10023.html[/url]) 2668
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10026.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10026.html[/url]) 287
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10028.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10028.html[/url]) 150
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16313.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16313.html[/url]) 2008
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16318.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16318.html[/url]) 41
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16312.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16312.html[/url]) 5154
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url]) 52
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16328.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16328.html[/url]) 12
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16324.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16324.html[/url]) 930
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16336.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16336.html[/url]) 27
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16333.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16333.html[/url]) 3921
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16341.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16341.html[/url]) 4718
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16352.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16352.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16353.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16353.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16348.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16348.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16356.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16356.html[/url]) 20
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16362.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16362.html[/url]) 1280
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16363.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16363.html[/url]) 331
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16364.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16364.html[/url]) 514
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16376.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16376.html[/url]) 342
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16370.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16370.html[/url]) 826
images: 30576
contributors: 30
didnt expect it to be this low, thanks, no need to spend money and time on this
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What do you expect the Stock Inclusion Fee to be? That's fairly important knowledge to have before uploading hundreds of images.
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What do you expect the Stock Inclusion Fee to be? That's fairly important knowledge to have before uploading hundreds of images.
SIF, brilliant!
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how many images and contributors does the agency have now?
google search: site:symzio.com/contributor-
Reveals 64, but there are a few duplicate URLs.
images: 30576
contributors: 30
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-1.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-1.html[/url]) 2128
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10003.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10003.html[/url]) 14
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10001.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10001.html[/url]) 106
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10004.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10004.html[/url]) 4260
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10011.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10011.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10009.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10009.html[/url]) 70
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10012.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10012.html[/url]) 633
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10014.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10014.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10019.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10019.html[/url]) 84
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10023.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10023.html[/url]) 2668
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10026.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10026.html[/url]) 287
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10028.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-10028.html[/url]) 150
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16313.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16313.html[/url]) 2008
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16318.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16318.html[/url]) 41
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16312.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16312.html[/url]) 5154
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16320.html[/url]) 52
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16328.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16328.html[/url]) 12
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16324.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16324.html[/url]) 930
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16336.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16336.html[/url]) 27
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16333.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16333.html[/url]) 3921
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16341.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16341.html[/url]) 4718
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16352.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16352.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16353.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16353.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16348.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16348.html[/url]) ?
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16356.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16356.html[/url]) 20
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16362.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16362.html[/url]) 1280
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16363.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16363.html[/url]) 331
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16364.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16364.html[/url]) 514
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16376.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16376.html[/url]) 342
[url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16370.html[/url] ([url]http://www.symzio.com/contributor-16370.html[/url]) 826
images: 30576
contributors: 30
didnt expect it to be this low, thanks, no need to spend money and time on this
Just a thought -
In a nearly parallel earth ( watch this movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3479316/ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3479316/) ) Symbiostock was invented before Shutterstock. Thousands upon thousands of people paid an SIF, and the marketing power could not be competed with. People with large portfolios with high-quality work voluntarily paid higher SIF's having a guarantee on proportional returns.
Then 8 years in some crazy microstocker came and created an agency that would be called Shutterstock, a fresh new idea of selling images in large amounts at 32 cents a piece. Original and amazing, but it could never gain traction because the market was already dominated by Symzios in a proverbial race-to-the-top aided by an unstoppable conglomerate of networked independent sites.
We, however, are living in a very disjointed sad version of earth where it is not uncommon to see the strangest of all paradoxes, a Starbucks across from a Starbucks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENGUYeiGtNk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENGUYeiGtNk)
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In that parallel world, Getty buy Symzios and their all screwed as well :)
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In the real world everyone goes to the large hardware stores because they know there will be a range of products to chose from that will suit their needs.
People in specialised industries go to specialised outlets for their needs.
Most people avoid the local hardware because they only have two items in anyone category and the brand is some name you've never heard of.
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What do you expect the Stock Inclusion Fee to be? That's fairly important knowledge to have before uploading hundreds of images.
SIF, brilliant!
It doesn't make sense to charge a SIF when they get 30% on each sale.
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What do you expect the Stock Inclusion Fee to be? That's fairly important knowledge to have before uploading hundreds of images.
SIF, brilliant!
It doesn't make sense to charge a SIF when they get 30% on each sale.
It doesn't make sense based on what we know. It doesn't make sense to drive on the left side of the road where I am at.
I find that this subject is even talked about very fascinating. I think its a natural phenomenon at work, like an economic sunrise and sunset if you will. See attached chart.
I of course wouldn't touch this model with a ten foot pole but still its very interesting to witness. We can expect more stuff like this as time goes on. There is no choice.
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^^^ Point being, a vacuum forms. A state perfectly un-ideal. By natures design something has to change.
- Someone must do something stupid.
- or someone must do something intelligent.
- or someone acts in panic.
- or someone acts at the time planned.
- or a revolution.
- or an evolution.
...doesn't matter what.
Any one of these could start something...it doesn't matter what. The forest is completely dry now -- the perfect time for even a small flame... get what I'm saying?
Even in the seeming foolishness and chaos there is a degree of sensibility and order.
The state of the market is perfect for positive change, because as they say, it can't get worse. Can someone prove me wrong?
[*edited for spelling.]
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theres one problem with your theory though. the forest aint dry its soaking wet
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Leo, same processes in real life photography services. We have more requests for free work than normal clients orders. People which have all necessary for life from the state or some commercials, demand other services to be provided for free. But to provide services, normal business should pay!
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theres one problem with your theory though. the forest aint dry its soaking wet
Its possible. ;) You might be an exceptional-top-quality-producer, in which case that is true for you. But for many it is not.
Unfortunately if you don't have exceptional work, one is forced to try other things at this time and take risks they wouldn't otherwise, which is why you see 30 contributors instead of say, 2 or 3.
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Leo, same processes in real life photography services. We have more requests for free work than normal clients orders. People which have all necessary for life from the state or some commercials, demand other services to be provided for free. But to provide services, normal business should pay!
I'm always amazed how that works. I still don't understand it.
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Yes, business - normal one - should be registered and pay to state taxes, social security etc. everybody can continue this list. People, receiving an excursion for free from one company, often tell me why we take money? (photosession on streets for tourists and businesses). And last week we had 4 demands for photography and video of wedding, 6-12 hours on place, for 150-250 eur. and even for free. That could not cover travel and other costs of course and was refused. The last ones explained, that they already paid a lot for registration, for dresses and restaurant. I said i am not related to those, they told they will find a photographer which will understand them.
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Yes, business - normal one - should be registered and pay to state taxes, social security etc. everybody can continue this list. People, receiving an excursion for free from one company, often tell me why we take money? (photosession on streets for tourists and businesses). And last week we had 4 demands for photography and video of wedding, 6-12 hours on place, for 150-250 eur. and even for free. That could not cover travel and other costs of course and was refused. The last ones explained, that they already paid a lot for registration, for dresses and restaurant. I said i am not related to those, they told they will find a photographer which will understand them.
How exactly does one say "can you do this for free?" Do they build it up slowly or just ask outright?
Side note, doing my final assessment of Symzio, such things are probably soon to end... I saw this article on their site, The Prophetic Symzio: http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/the-prophetic-symzio/ (http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/the-prophetic-symzio/) With this guru-style spiritual successor of microstock, I don't think there is much to worry about.
It was nice revisiting this little arena again. Can someone add my activity to the "How have you promoted Symzio today?" thread? http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/dec-182015-what-have-you-done-to-promote-symzio-today/ (http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/dec-182015-what-have-you-done-to-promote-symzio-today/)
Over and out. 8)
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Conversations were usual - they visited website, they told that they liked fresh colors etc etc, then most of them stated that they already know pricing for this market in Belgium and big amount of photogs available. Some of them returned 2-3 times for telling that everybody for them will give all photos taken, all retouched etc. Once a couple wanted an album printed, delivered to their address included in demanded price. Crazy list can be continued, like mails from a british couple, that for reconstruction of wedding they are ready to pay a good price 150 eur and we have to provide a dress, borrowed in shop by us, not them. Lol. One can be tired with examples, i stop :-)
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In the real world everyone goes to the large hardware stores because they know there will be a range of products to chose from that will suit their needs.
People in specialised industries go to specialised outlets for their needs.
Most people avoid the local hardware because they only have two items in anyone category and the brand is some name you've never heard of.
well said!
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What do you expect the Stock Inclusion Fee to be? That's fairly important knowledge to have before uploading hundreds of images.
SIF, brilliant!
It doesn't make sense to charge a SIF when they get 30% on each sale.
It doesn't make sense based on what we know. It doesn't make sense to drive on the left side of the road where I am at.
I find that this subject is even talked about very fascinating. I think its a natural phenomenon at work, like an economic sunrise and sunset if you will. See attached chart.
I of course wouldn't touch this model with a ten foot pole but still its very interesting to witness. We can expect more stuff like this as time goes on. There is no choice.
Sorry, I don't get it. Why is there an upward swing to ideal if the contributors are now at war?