Hi

Just a quick note to everybody. We have worked on the search function lately, and I think you will see that the quality of the images that appear on the first pages are much better than they used to be We are still working on a couple of things (one is trying to avoid series of similar pictures), but we are happy with the changes we have made so far.

For those who are interested we are using  the excellent Solr search engine which is an open source project based on the Lucene Java serach library. It works very well, and we embrace the open-source community here at yaymicro.

Earlier this year YAY started distributing images through a third party sales channel. The first batch of images included in this deal was about 20 000 images from about 20 different photographers. The images have been for sale since late February/early March, and the results so far seem promising. Therefore we have decided to add a further 20 000 of our best images to be sold this way. In order to choose the best images, we invite you to send us suggestions from your own portfolio. Just make a project folder with 100 of your best images and send the public link to contribute@yaymicro.com.

In order to be included in the deal, you must provide at least 100 images of top quality. These images will be reviewed by YAY and possibly the third party involved. If the images in the project folder is considered to be good enough, we will browse your whole portfolio and send you an email telling how many images will be included. This email will also containt further information, as well as a contract.

All images included in the deal will be available through third party sales for a minimum of three years. This might also include distribution on CDs/DVDs. The contributor receives the standard 50 % of YAYs income from these sales. The income will be added directly to your account at YAY on a quarterly basis.

At this time we will not name the third party involved on the blog. This is a measure to keep our competitors at bay. If your images are selected we will of course tell you where and how the images will be sold.

Jan

There’s an ongoing race in the forum among photographers to reach payout. The rules are simple: The first one to reach 30 euros gets fame, glory and something to be proud about. Anyhow, this is a great initiative and we thought we might give the participants (and others) some tips on how to market their portfolio themeselves.There are quite a few good ways for microstock contributors to market their own portfolio and increase sales. The main point of marketing your content is to get it out all over the internet! A little effort on marketing your images can increase your income more than adding new images.

Blogs:

If you have a blog, use it. Blogs are a great marketing tool if used strategically. First of all: Write about and link directly to your portfolio.There are a lot of good microstock blogs out there, but most of them focus a lot on photographers and not on customers. Try to write posts that could be interesting for customers. You can also find other blogs and comment on them, even adding links to your portfolio there.

Try googling for blogs about a specific theme you have great images of and comment there. Remember that blogs are virtually free and have no time limits. The posts you write now can continue to drive traffic to your portfolio years from now, and therefore generate sales.

If you post relevant content, include a call-to-action (ex. link to portfolio) that fits contextually, update regularly and add an rss-feed, your blog can give you a good return on the time invested. And remember: Never spam (don’t post comments like “Nice blog, check out my portfolio at…”).

 Check out Jeremy Wright’s book Blog Marketing.

Facebook:

Facebook has gone from being a news-and-photo-sharing-site for college students, to being both mainstream and big business. With 200 million users, you can’t afford not be there. The problem is how to use it for marketing purposes.Well, use your social network for what it’s worth. Try to get your “friends” interested in what you post.

Upload low-resolution images of your latest shots, and explain the story behind them. Make a group or a page for your portfolio and spread the word. Add links to your portfolio in posts and on your status bar. Try to get the people around you engaged, ask for their comments and tips.

Inside CRM has an extensive list of resources on how to use Facebook as a marketing tool.

 

Twitter:

Twitter is the fastest growing social network on the web, and gives its users a chance to write short messages to everyone that’s interested. Use it for what it’s worth. Write interesting tweets and get potential customers to follow you. Tweet about new images, recommodations - and search for others looking for images that you have and message them. Ask your followers for recommandations and comments on your work.

Toprank has a short article about Twitter and marketing which includes an extensive list of references.

 

Flickr/Photobucket/other photo sites:

Upload images to Flickr and other photo sharing sites. This is a great way for potential customers to see what you can offer. Then link to your portfolio. More and more small publications use Flickr for finding CC (Creative Commons) images. If you can lead these guys to microstock, there are money to be made. Flickr isn’t just a place to upload photos - it’s a huge community, and its got great tools for commenting images, creating groups and easy guides on how to add images to your homepage. Flickr has also been integrated into Yahoo’s image search, which drives a lot of traffic directly to Flickr-images. And I wouldn’t be too afraid of people stealing images - people who can’t afford to use a few euros for an image, isn’t going to buy your images anyway.

Doshdosh has a great article on how to use Flickr to generate traffic.

 

Google Adwords:

Invest in an ad campaign that links directly to your images/portfolio. Adwords is easy to use and you can control exactly how much/little you want to use on ads. If you do it correctly, it can become an impresive sales booster. YAY is working on setting up an extensive Google Ad campaign that will start with the launch of the new site layout.

You should also link to the sites that give you the best commission (YAY!). Also remember that any links to your portfolio will increase YAY’s overall visibility, which again will lead to more traffic and increased sales. Since the commission photographers get at YAY is far better than other sites, it is better to market your portfolio here than on other sites that represent you.

Microstockinsider has an article with more hints and tips on how to market your images.

The winner of the competition in the forum will have his/her pictures on the front-page and be used in marketing material YAY sends to its customers!

So, what are you waiting for? Go market your images Good luck!

Jan

Yay! Finally, after months of delay (due to the change in CTO), we’re ready with a new site improvement!

Today we release the test server for public viewing and testing. We’ll keep the test server open, so if you want to follow the next upgrades and changes you can use the same link later on! (check it out on dtest.yaymicro.com)

In the future we’ll have small, but frequent changes to the site - and we have planned many improvements in 2009.

 

Views

First of all - the most requested feature from our photographers have been views. And yes, this upgrade includes views! We have placed the views in your portfolios, and you can check it out now if you visit our test server. As customers in general are not interested in views, and it creates an imbalance in image exposure, we have not included views on the search result page.

We noticed that some photographers have a much more exposed portfolio than others, and we’ll try to make it easier for photographers to promote their portfolios. We’ll also work on our search algorithm, as we’re not satisfied with the relevance ranking and lack of shuffle when many images got the same properties.

 

Usability

The main focus in this release has been on customer usability and search engine optimization.

We have removed noise from the front, price and preview page and we’ve also improved the cart page. In the next release we’ll continue with improving the payment page and the flow of activities from arriving on the site till check-out.

In addition to removing noise we’ve made Call-to-Action buttons on many of the pages. This will help customer understand what the next step is on the site. (You shouldn’t have to look for the Buy-button.) We want the customers to search & buy images. The blog, forum and other pages are useful resources for returning customers, subscribers, photographers etc., but when in focus as it was on the old version of our site it became to distracting.  Also, it’s no longer possible to perform empty searches, as this generated confusion for the customers.

Our experience the last couple of months is that it’s difficult to communicate the difference in price for creative and editorial images, and the sale for editorial images has been much lower than the sale of creative images. The price for editorial images is therefore reduced, and is now the same as for creative images. This makes it’s easy to communicate our prices, and the customer won’t get confused or annoyed when one image costs more than another.

 

Language

The site is fully translated to Norwegian. Soon we’ll release a Chinese version as well. Other languages are planned - and if you have any suggestions on what countries/languages could be a potential good market for YAY we’ll appreciate the feedback! It’s fairly easy to translate the site to other languages as most of the programming is in place now after the initial translation.

We have included several search languages, namely Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish and German. These are automatically translated with the help of the Google Translate API, so if you get any strange results - or no results - e-mail us and we’ll adjust the search.

 

Other improvements

New pages for price, FAQ (coming soon), photographers and prices. You’ll find the links at the bottom of the pages.

New links / new structure at the top of the site.

Improved preview site with a C2A-button, easier to search with image keywords, show/hide information related to the image.

Improved cart with a C2A-button, less noise, new lay out, easier to check out.

Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the whole site.

Customers get high-res images on subscription.

Some of the changes might take some time getting used to, but the overall experience of surfing the YAY-site has in our opinion improved a great deal!

 

Feedback

As mentioned the test site will be kept open for the public. If you want to see what’s coming next, and join the discussion about changes, use it as much as you like. I’ll start a thread in the forum where we can discuss what’s going on. I would love feedback, and I’ll try to listen as much as possible to all our users. Of course, sometimes we’ll have to make some decisions that might not fly with everyone, but at least we’ll do our very best to explain our reasons.

 

Thats all for now, have a great weekend

Linda & Bjorn

Finally, after months of planning and developing, we are very close to launch the next site update (hopefully next week!). This time we have focused a lot on simplicity and usability. We learned from the research we did before making the upcoming changes that customers aren’t really as tech-savvy as we believed. They want a site that is easy. Really easy. And that is exactly what we are going to give them. There will be less links, easier navigation and actually buying an image requires fewer clicks.

We will also add a set of new features, including a new subscription model where customers can buy a yearly subscription. This will be the best offer available for customers that use images sporadically. This is a segment, believe it or not, that hasn’t been served properly by microstock agencies. The size of subscription downloads will also be increased to large.  We have also added the long-awaited views-counter.

Our new CTO, Bjorn, has been quite busy the last few weeks organizing the update, and we are quite happy with the progress we are seeing. A lot of new ideas have also been added to our list of upcoming features.

But the good news doesn’t stop there. We have also worked hard on raising more funds to do a more extensive marketing campaign. This has finally paid off, and during the next few months you will see a steady increase in marketing.

We will post a link to out test-server here within the next few days where you can get a sneak preview of the update.

Jan

Many of our photographers and artists are wondering what kind of images we at YAY want, and what kind of images our customers buy. We can’t really point to any specific trends different from the stock industry generally - a variety of images sell at YAY. But we do have some customer requests, and I would also like to show you a few random 6-7 images sold at YAY today.

Our customers have requested more images of people being active in their community - such as school, church, volunteer work, family life, neighbors, outdoors activity, sports and hobbies. We’ve also been asked for different tourist destinations, - and for a a larger variety within objects, animals and people. It is also important that you keyword your images correctly - give the animals and places correct names, both english and latin - and you can also include local names.  And try to capture online trends: Images with people surfing the Internet - and visiting pages like Twitter, Facebook, The Pirate Bay and other popular sites. You can also take variation of these images, take them with young / old models, man / female, one person, two, couple, friends, group and so on. Other good photos would be images showing the consequences of the financial crisis - such as an empty fridge, house for sale, unemployment, people living on a budget etc.

Linda

A few of the images sold at YAY today:

Little yellow chick by lanalanglois

Sé de Lisboa by Jule_Berlin

The first spring flowers close up by AlexKhrom

Number figures by Ivonnewierink

Black Sand by Kertez

Newborn baby by travismanley

Happy young women by stepanov

At YAY we are operating with three different sizes for download using credits. The reason for not adding additional sizes is that we want to keep it as simple as possible for customers. An interesting fact is that all these sizes are almost equally popular. Of all the credit downloads that has been made from YAY the total count for the different sizes now say:

Small - 33,8 %
Medium - 33,3 %
Large - 32,9 %

Subscription downloads, which all are in medium, account for 17.8 % of all downloads. A priority for us in 2009 is to increase the number of subscriptions. This will also increase sales for photographers, because customers using subscriptions are, of obvious reasons, very loyal to the site they have subscriptions on. YAY also pays the best commission to photographers on subscriptions (€1 per download) in the whole microstock industry. So an increased number of subs will indeed profit all of us.

One idea we have been working on is to scrap the limitations customers have on sizes when download images via subs. Today YAY is limiting the size of sub downloads to medium, which we think is much more fair to the photographers. Other sites, however, do not have this limitation. The feedback we have gotten from some customers, mostly printed magazines and designers, are that they want subscriptions where they can download the file in the original size. We do believe this will increase the number of customers who use subscriptions. What do you think?

Jan

In less than a year photographers and illustrators have uploaded more than 500 000 images and illustrations to our site! Every week thousands of new images are uploaded & submitted, and we continue to grow in a steady pace. None of this would be possible without the trust and help from our users, and we at YAY would like to say a big THANK YOU!

This wonderful valentine illustration was uploaded in the beginning of February (not surprisingly), and was image number 500 000 uploaded to YAY! The illustration is made by BlackVay, congratulations!

At YAY we are working hard to make sure that it will be worth the time and effort to upload to us. We are targeting the customers in several ways: direct marketing & ads, meetings & phone calls. Sales are now steadily increasing! Our focus is also on developing the site and the design to improve the usability and overall customer experience. In just a few weeks we are ready to show you some of the features we are working on!

Linda   

PS!  Follow us on Twitter & get more information!

We’ve recently had some problems with uploading and I thought I’d just try to explain why this happened. I’m not a tech-guru, so you’ll have to excuse me if this is not 100 % correct.

The first issue started Januar 15th, was temporarily fixed for a few days, before returning, and then finally fixed on January 21st. This error had the unfortunate effect that people uploading using the web-interface all got an import failure stating “The file supplied wasn’t recognized”. The reason for this was a memory leakage in our system, which meant that the system used lots of memory which it basically just filled with junk. When this was discovered our system used over 26 GB of memory. We have now solved this issue, increased the memory available to the system and added additional swap files.

The second error started on February 3rd. What happend was that images that were approved did not get added the users portfolio or were made available for search. Neither we nor the photographer got any error messages about this. So, thank you for contacting us when you noticed something was wrong! The reason for this was a problem with allocation between distributed database-servers. This was caused by the fact that our system logs every query, and suddenly Google decided to run a ridiculous amount of queries which resulted in the systems log-files to get filled faster than our logrotating-system could handle. This has now been fixed. Google has promised to decrease the amount of queries, and we have decreased the rotation periode for logs.

If you uploaded images between February 2rd 08:00 am and Februar 4th 6:00 pm, some of your images might have not been added to the database. You can check this by logging in, clicking “portfolio” and see how many images are in your portfolio. Then compare this to how many images are listed under “Number of images” under “Sale statistics”. If these two numbers differ, please contact us and we’ll do our best to locate your images.

Jan

 

The combination of Intellectual property and the availability provided by the Internet is a difficult situation. The music, film and software industry have been fighting a war against piracy (copyright infringement) for years.

Image agencies are always working to reduce the illegal use of images among businesses, and in most countries the results are good, as fewer businesses use images without licensing. But, as the number of businesses with unlicensed images has decreased, there has been a large growth of unlicensed image use on private blogs. The question is how agencies and artists can reduce the illegal use of images in the vast number of blogs. 

A watermark on the images is the first step for an agency or an artist to reduce theft. But when the image is sold to a customer, and the customer uses the image online, the watermark is removed. Most images used on blogs today appear to have been taken from a customer’s site, such as an online newspaper. Digital, invisible watermarks could prevent some of the theft; still it would be difficult to trace the borrowers from the customers with an automatic scan. In addition it is difficult to follow up on the illegal use. 

In online discussions people have suggested that image agencies should take legal action against individuals. The problem with legal actions, as I see it, is that the images are not re-distributed, they are “only” displayed. The decrease in value is difficult to establish, and the image itself represents only a loss of a small amount of money. In addition, the “Goliath and David”-situation might seriously hurt the brand and reputation of the agency. The software industry normally sends a bill directly to the company that has been using pirated software. This might be a solution, but it will be a difficult process to claim money from individuals - often with anonymous blogs.

A third possible solution might be to provide more information. 

The bloggers, and others, need to know that it’s never OK to “borrow” or steal an image, even if you use a byline and give credit to the photographer. I’ve seen people arguing that using an image without a license isn’t stealing, because the image is still there, and the photographer/agency can still sell it, they (the “borrower”) can’t afford to pay for the image and the use is for a non-commercial purpose. Wouldn’t it be great if we all could “borrow” the stuff we really want, but can’t afford? The problem is that non-commercial use still exposes the image to the public, reducing the images’ value for potentially paying customers. If an image is published on several blogs a customer might reconsider using it as a part of their web design. Exposure also reduces the price the customer is willing to pay for an image. Why should a customer pay for use of an image if images are used for free by others?

 If you can’t afford to pay for images there are low-price sites as YAY (known as microstock agencies), free sites and you can find images with a creative commons licenses. 

What do you think? Should images be free of charge for personal use on blogs? What is the best way to reduce the number of image thefts?

 

Linda