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Amos Struck runs a website focused mainly on image buyers called StockPhotoSecrets – he asked me to do a guest post and I wanted to get across at least a little bit of the background to Symbiostock and how a buyer could find us and use us.
The post can be found here: http://www.stockphotosecrets.com/news/stock-photographers/life-stock-photographer.html
I’m sure Amos would run a longer post specifically about Symbiostock in the near future – I notice he has done comparisons between Stocksy and Shutterstock in terms of images returned from a search. Perhaps we/he could do something like that? One potential issue – if you check out that specific comparison (which uses the keyword “celebration” to find the images), we don’t actually do so well – our images don’t seem to be of the same focus and quality as the Stocksy ones, for instance.
Steve
Great article! OK if I share in on the Symbio Facebook page?
I’m not sure I’d do a side-by-side comparison, because we simply don’t have enough images. IMO, our USP (Unique Selling Point or Proposition) is “fair trade” stock art. The same stuff (and some exclusive stuff) you’ll find at the big agencies, by the same photographers and illustrators, for competitive prices—but you support the artists themselves rather than the big stock houses.
Because (most) designers, art directors, etc. are also concerned about getting fair value for their work and paying people fairly, this seems to hit home with them. (The ads I’ve run on Facebook with the “fair trade” idea get the most attention.)
Good reading! – I think Shelma is right about our USP. Symbiostock as a whole wouldn’t (yet) look too good if compared with one of the big agencies or with a curated collection such as Stocksy. Fair Trade and the content that is exclusively on Symbiostock could be our selling points. – BTW, is there a global Symbiostock search on just exclusive images? If yes it should be easier to be found 😉 and if no 😳 , well, we should have it and promote it ❗
@shelma1 wrote:
IMO, our USP (Unique Selling Point or Proposition) is “fair trade” stock art. The same stuff (and some exclusive stuff) you’ll find at the big agencies, by the same photographers and illustrators, for competitive prices—but you support the artists themselves rather than the big stock houses.
I would also add that there are a lot of Exclusive images on Symbiostock. For example, 48% (or almost half) of my images are Exclusive to my website.
Yes, of course you can link or use it on Facebook or any other site. No problem.
Good point about the comparison – lets just think of another interesting slant for Amos to use on his site.
I’m not against the exclusive search – I have taken a slightly different tack though – I only put editorial and my more complex images on my Symbio site and Alamy. So not exactly exclusive, but definitely not on the micro sites.
Steve
Thats really awesome! Don’t say too much good — it will force me to have to keep the system living up to it!
but my guess is exclusives are well below 5% of the current total — here are a couple checks, based on the most common keywords used:
white 1145 of 68530
food 274 of 21225
blue 785 of 39542
christmas 70 of 7519
animal 695 of 11594so at this point emphasizing exclusives would be counter productive
Mine are, unless I have made any mistakes, 100% exclusive
http://kerioakimaging.com - trying to reopen
http://nail-art-at.kerioak.com - Art and Nail Art@cascoly wrote:
but my guess is exclusives are well below 5% of the current total — here are a couple checks, based on the most common keywords used:
white 1145 of 68530
food 274 of 21225
blue 785 of 39542
christmas 70 of 7519
animal 695 of 11594so at this point emphasizing exclusives would be counter productive
Even if 5% is correct (I have app 12% exclusive images) that still means there are around 11,000 exclusive images on the Symbiostock network. Why not showing them exclusively (pun intended) in dedicated searches on the hub sites? If our exclusive images caught buyers’ attention there would be more incentive for us to upload exclusive content. It’s definitely worth a try…
even with 200,000 images, it’s hard for the network to present a wide choice for buyers
http://cascoly.com/symbio/list.asp?list=401 shows keywords used – within the full network, with over 11,000 unique keywords, the median # of images for a single word keyword search is 120 (ie, more than 50% would produce 120 hits or less.) for 2 word searches, results are much poorer . (it’s actually worse, since I don’t compile stats on keywords used by less than 3 sites). for individual sites, with 200,000 keywords being used, 75% of those keywords are used 25 times or less on any site
at these levels, it’s hard to compete against agencies that will return 1000s of results
doing searches on exclusives would result in NO hits for many searches which would send buyers elsewhere
highlighting exclusives within searches might be a better way to go at present
If I was an image buyer searching for “that” picture that I couldn’t seem to find on Shutterstock & co I would be definitely interested in a (small) heap of 20,000 exclusive images if I can search that heap efficiently. I most definitely wouldn’t want to wade through hundreds of images that I’ve already seen (and dismissed) on Shutterstock & co.
I don’t know how often such a buyer will come to us but I am sure this type of buyer is the last one I want to send away. Just saying…priorities – no argument with the idea, in reality it’s unlikely the buyer will find an exclusive image here when they cant find it among the millions of exclusives on istock
certainly, we should have exclusives marked and searchable, just that it’s low on the list of things to do to make sym a success
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