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Redneck – I believe you when you say you would promote Symzio, but can you explain why Picfair has not succeeded? Why didn’t contributors link to their portfolios on that site? What would make Symzio different to the average contributor? Would it be the communal push towards it? Or are the licenses and revenue share in and of itself sufficient drive to make the average contributor feel very positive towards it?
Honestly, I didn’t even know Picfair until just recently. That’s why I can’t really say what they’re doing right or wrong.
I can only say what I used to love about Symbiostock.
1. I have my own website with total control, not only showcasing but also selling images. Which as a side effect can additionally work as a simple online backup of my stock images.
2. I can potentially include my images without hassle into one global image search engine (or agency or whatever you want to call it) and still keep the majority of the profits.
3. I’m among other contributors that are in the same boat as I am, being fed up by prices and commissions getting lower and lower. That alone is some worth supporting and promoting.Getting Symzio off the ground without the massive investment that Picfair has had is going to be really tough. Contributors may come along, but unless those images are only available on this site (very unlikely), the attraction to buyers will be the price. We can wish it was different but we have no bargaining power to change current realities.
Steve
I truly believe you are wrong about that. I think contributors are waiting for a way to get their stuff out while still being treated fair.
And again, trying to enter the market over lowest possible pricing is NOT the solution. It’s the problem and it will be the downfall sooner or later.
It’ll only be a question of time when the next one comes up offering even lower prices for the same stuff. The key is keeping contributors happy and let the market regulate the sales.<span style=”color: #272727; font-family: ‘Open Sans’, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 28.8px;”>I truly believe you are wrong about that. I think contributors are waiting for a way to get their stuff out while still being treated fair.</span><br style=”box-sizing: border-box; color: #272727; font-family: ‘Open Sans’, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 28.8px;” /><span style=”color: #272727; font-family: ‘Open Sans’, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 28.8px;”>And again, trying to enter the market over lowest possible pricing is NOT the solution. It’s the problem and it will be the downfall sooner or later.</span><br style=”box-sizing: border-box; color: #272727; font-family: ‘Open Sans’, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 28.8px;” /><span style=”color: #272727; font-family: ‘Open Sans’, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 28.8px;”>It’ll only be a question of time when the next one comes up offering even lower prices for the same stuff. The key is keeping contributors happy and let the market regulate the sales</span>
I really hope you are right, to be honest, but I have seen little sign of contributors having any power at all in my time in the industry. There have been periodic attempts to get us to do things together – that removal of images from Fotolia comes to mind (which I joined) – but that made little difference in the end. Perhaps I am part of the problem – although I do separate my images into ones I try to get reasonable commissions on, and those that are just competing with all the rest of the microstock contributors out there. So thinking about it, I would agree with an approach where we had a premium collection which was priced higher and a “normal” collection priced closer to Robin’s suggestion.
Steve
Edit: Don’t know what I did wrong with that quote.
The first image license I sold on my own Symbiostock site (with the old theme) went for US$199. The following months I always had sales ranging from $29 to $99, most of the time for $49 when I adjusted pricing to be not too far away from the majority of contributors.
An image is being bought because a client thinks it’ll help him to reach a specific goal. The price of that image is NOT the reason why he wants to buy it.What I’m trying to say is that there’s a market for all kinds of buyers and all kinds of contributors. Limiting yourself to “cheap – cheaper – the cheapest” is not a good idea because you’ll not only exclude contributors who won’t go that route with you but also potential buyers who are willing to spend good money.
At the end it’ll come down to get as many contributors (with their high quality images) on board as possible. That’s the only way to become successful, IMO.Wow – you are bringing me round – I never got those sort of sales in the old theme – in fact I didn’t get many at my lower prices (which topped out at $20). Were your sold images also available on SS, Dreamstime, Fotolia etc. or unique to your own site?
However in the new system, I have had pretty much zero success to date. So my cheap price isn’t bringing them in – it must be my lousy SEO or my lousy images. I’ll go with the former for now!
Robin – I don’t know what the answer is. Bringing in buyers seems to be key, currently my site gets very few visitors and even fewer willing to buy. What would tempt people to come regularly, see our images high in the search systems (higher than the same image on other agencies) and then be willing to license their chosen image?
Wow – you are bringing me round – I never got those sort of sales in the old theme – in fact I didn’t get many at my lower prices (which topped out at $20). Were your sold images also available on SS, Dreamstime, Fotolia etc. or unique to your own site?
However in the new system, I have had pretty much zero success to date. So my cheap price isn’t bringing them in – it must be my lousy SEO or my lousy images. I’ll go with the former for now!
No, I’m a traditional stock contributor, I don’t do micro stock. I’m working with AGE, Alamy, Corbis, Getty, Westend, Gallery Stock, Offset etc, but I don’t think that’s the reason why images sell for higher or lower prices because I think people found my images because they were searching on Google. The old Symbiostock had excellent link traction between the networking contributors. Well up to the point when Google decided to change the algorithm.
But I still think that many individual sites with good images and backlinks to the global agency/SE is the way to go to create SEO momentum.There are a lot of options – since we’ve developed the engine from scratch, we can do what we want with it. But getting customers and getting sales, and this being permanent is all that matters to me. We seem to have differing views on how to achieve this.
Here are some options:
1) We settle on a set price for each license, and this is re-examined every 6 months based on the consensus of all Symzio members and the Symzio team. This will force some people who want it priced lower to price it higher, and force some people who want it priced higher, lower. This way we are adhering to a somewhat democratic consensus of all Symzio contributors.
2) We keep the current pricing and have a higher tier which are images marked as ‘exclusive’ – this means contributors that do not have the same image on any other agency (except their own independent site) will have these priced higher than others.
3) We offer three tiers of pricing – in your Symzio settings you can then choose which tier you want your images included in. We then carefully organize how these tiers are presented to customers. This is preferable to having a custom price system, as it will provide a majority of contributors some pricing tier that matches while still providing customers a slightly homogeneous pricing system.
4) We settle on a pricing system now that we feel will adequately be competitive for the foreseeable future and advise contributors to only include images they feel fairly match that pricing system in Symzio.
I’m mostly leaning towards #1 as this will create the first ‘fluid’ pricing system that adjusts to market expectations, based on contributors. Additionally, since we do not operate a subscription or credit scheme, we have the freedom to change pricing without having any customer issues since they are all one off purchases. This would actually permit us to increase prices in the future, and we could clearly outline our pricing policies to customers in the FAQ.
Another benefit is if we indeed do not see sales, we can then reduce the cost to become competitive. It also feels like if contributors have a say in the prices, they will also feel compelled to see those prices succeed, and may feel more compelled to promote Symzio. It actually may create a more communal atmosphere than custom pricing would.
The main downside of this is if you are far out of the average, and take photos that cost $4000 to make, it would not be in your best interests to put these photos on Symzio, in which case you would integrate some part of #4 in your plan.
Perhaps we could expand this into a twice-yearly ‘meeting’ where Symzio contributors discuss any changes we would like to see in the system and would take shape in the form of a discussion like this one. What do you guys think?
But I still think that many individual sites with good images and backlinks to the global agency/SE is the way to go to create SEO momentum.
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The more I think about it, the more #1 makes sense – it covers Redneck’s concern about happy contributors because a large majority will be happy with the pricing since it is a result of the large majority’s average.
The flip side is we may miss out on some really great media from some really great contributors that need to price it higher, but if we adhere to their needs Symzio becomes a boutique shop and not a mass market shop. And in the future, once Symzio is getting steady sales, perhaps we can introduce a new ‘specialty tier’ just for these contributors that permits them to sell media at $50 and higher – perhaps offer one off purchases or something, or integrate the exclusive idea. There are actually a lot of options we can explore with regards to higher prices media, but it needs to be clearly separated from the main meat of Symzio’s library.
So how about we stick with #1 and decide on the pricing we want for the average contributor to be happy. Once that is settled and we are moving forward, we then decide how to implement a higher tiered system. Even I may have media that I don’t want to sell at average prices, and would like that option myself.
So how about we stick with #1 and decide on the pricing we want for the average contributor to be happy. Once that is settled and we are moving forward, we then decide how to implement a higher tiered system. Even I may have media that I don’t want to sell at average prices, and would like that option myself.
I don’t think #1 will work because you’ll still make many contributors unhappy. Simply because of different backgrounds they’re coming from. While some hobby shooter from Indonesia might be happy with a $1 sale, I would rather keep the image and not sell it for that price. I don’t think you’ll find a consensus which will keep 99% of the contributors under the same roof.
Why not …
– either pull their own prices from their website when you pull the images OR
– dictate price levels, like Level 1: $1 – $5 – $20, Level 2: $3 – $10 – $50 or so which a contributor has to subscribe toI think we need to have a standard pricing that attracts customers and to keeps them coming back to symzio. Like what I said earlier one-time-use license is good idea for small image sizes and we can have fixed price, we can attract customers from that. And we put full size images in royalty-free license and let the contributors set the price they want. So we can have symzio and contributors set the price
We’ve discussed this internally now at length and have come to think that amazeindesign’s suggestion satisfies all grounds the best. This is what we are thinking:
1) Only one one-time-use license, set at $1.99 for an 800×800 image.
2) A full size, RF Unlimited license, at a price set by the contributor. The contributor will be able to set the global pricing in their Symzio Settings for all three media types (raster, video, vector) separately and then override this on a per image basis as well.
This will allow contributors to control the overall full size pricing of their media while still providing everyone the ability to market to bloggers for low cost one-time-use licenses.
Along with this, since videos do not get resized, we are going to remove the one-time-use licenses entirely from the videos and only have an RF Unlimited license.
For customers, this would be pretty appealing since they would gather that the variation in full size pricing is entirely based on the contributor, and we can also integrate filters in Symzio which allow customers to sort by price etc. And it definitely provides a more cohesive shopping experience since its only the full size media that will vary in pricing.
It also addresses Redneck’s notion about people buying the best image, regardless of price, for what fits – this will generally take place with full size images while the one time use license images will most likely be used more for blogs and what not where ‘anything relevant will do’.
Finally, it will also basically remove piracy completely from the equation and allow contributors to protect their intellectual property by controlling the price of the full size images and vectors – having no control over the price of their full images is something that has certainly hit a sore spot with the current global agency infrastructure.
What do you guys think?
I think it’s a good and very feasible way to go.
Personally I would have liked to offer one-time-use licenses only but that’s not a deal breaker for me. It somehow makes sense to offer one-time-uses for a very low fee and the multiple uses in full size for a fee that the contributor sets.
Nice compromise and good solution. Transparent and understandable.I agree – good for me. The one time license is a great idea, but very hard for any agency to track in reality. It is possibly not even clear that the person licensing the image realizes the restriction, although I agree some of them would.
I’ve just had a long email discussion with a buyer of one of my images from Dreamstime that he later realized had been marked as editorial. He had little idea what that really meant, so getting people to understand licensing and what they can and can’t do can be a challenge.
Steve
Actually, I thought of an issue in making the full size image an RF license. I upload my editorial shots only to the macrostock sites as RM. On my Symbio site I am able to include them because I made all my licenses one use only – a type of RM.
If Symzio was to offer those images as RF, I would have to remove all my editorial RM shots from the new agency. Of course I could do that, but would prefer not to.
So I’m adding my vote to Redneck’s to make the larger file size a one-time use license if possible. Of course we still have no way of checking if people will really use it like that, but it avoids any potential issues with other sites especially when Symzio becomes a big successful agency!
Steve
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