Hello everybody,

Let's sort everything out. We're certainly not thieves, and we're not enemy of all contributors nor we're sharing your files for free on Twitter (was that serious?).

1. We have strong duplicate detection. It's not perfect but it does a pretty good job. So my guess it that 95% of the files are recognized as dupes and the rest is either new or somehow more compressed than it is on the other site.

2. Violators:  We take everything pretty seriously and even though it may seem like we don't know the buyer's size of shoes, we do know buyers e-mail address and more importantly payment details via PayPal or Credit Card, so it's pretty secure. Does anyone of you think that other sites are any more secure where you can basically fill in any made up personal info and hotmail address if you so choose to do so?

3. The content we're getting from FT and DT is treated very seriously. We don't publish anything without watermarks and we don't even release hi-res files until it's sold. Also, no FT or DT image is sold via subscription on Pixmac everything is pay as you go.

4. Guys, you should be able to choose on FT and DT to opt-out third party distributors. That's what we've been told.

Finally. Yes we're here to make money � we�re a business, but obviously not without you on our side. Is there really someone who thinks that by stealing and violating rights we will grow and make significant sales without being spotted? Honestly? Also, there is no need to be offensive � we are also people not �them�.  We welcome any feedback and advice on reasonable ideas that we can implement (as we already did many times)

Thank you.

And thanks to everyone  who sees Pixmac as a serious business and have supported us so far.


Vitezslav Valka, CEO & Simon Raybould, Director of Sales & Marketing � North America.


Note from Simon � Cheesy?  I take offence to that�..hold on, let me just change my ipod over from Michael Bolton to Celine Dion.

The world keeps turning (and I keep getting dizzy)

One last serious note � www.pixmac.com [nofollow] is a pretty good site (we hope) for users. We
genuinly believe it�s a worthwhile tool in a designers toolbox.

When I go to watch ^^^ that video, it says it has been blocked in my country on copyright grounds.

Quote from: Pixie on August 11, 2010, 14:13

Hello everybody,

...
4. ...That's what we've been told.
...

We can not opt out on Fotolia.
Patrick.

With all due respect, if a reseller (agency) has contracts with Fotolia and "you have been told" that "we should be able to opt-out" but we cannot, then, I believe, it's fair to ask questions and get nervous about our content and the way it is being handled.

I don't think you would feel comfortable if your bank tells you that you should have money in the account but your online statement shows otherwise.

I cannot find a third party opt-out on Fotolia in my profile settings either. So, now what do we do? Believe you because "you have been told" or blame Fotolia because they don't offer an opt-out despite you told us so?

I'm not implying that you are doing anything that would hurt us contributors but since everybody here is running a business of some sort we all would like to have this sorted out clearly for everyone involved.

is there a way we can see how many images of one's in pixmac?

and is there a way to know which sales of dreamstime are from pixmac.

i would like to know how many pictures of my dreamstime and fotolia portfolio are in pixmac.

any advantage to upload directly to pixmac?

I found out one can click their own contributor's name on pixmac, so i only see my partial portfolio, all from fotolia.

so where is my portfolio from dreamstime?

I found out one can click their own contributor's name on pixmac, so i only see my partial portfolio, all from fotolia.

so where is my portfolio from dreamstime?

Can you send over your nickname or links to DT, FT and PX portfolios? I'm curious myself... Thx.

1. On Fotolia you should be able to see "Sold via third party channel" or something like that. I hope it's still there. This was discussed in some Fotolia forum thread about a year a go.

Yes, it does show something like that. But with FT's gazillion different partners there is no way of knowing where such a sale originated from.
I personally had that happen exactly once, and this obviously was from Pixmac (see below for explanation).

2. I don't think you'll be able to see it on Dreamstime. But I'll ask Serban...

No, nothing can be seen on DT. It shows up like any other sale. I had one at Pixmac for my DT portfolio, that showed up at DT as "sold with 2010 credits".

3. We take all the images that FT and DT offers via their API. We update that every day (every 24 hours) and there's no way how to choose which images we take and which not. So if it's sent over API we have it. In some cases the updating may be broken, so there might be delays in the sync. But if you spot any significant differences and if they have any logic in it, just let me know, because I want to have complete data not a portion of that. If you upload to DT and FT at the same time, part of the images might be set as duplicates, but together it should be the same amount of images. If not let's investigate the case and fine the cure.

Ok, now to how you find your own pics on Pixmac.
Do a search (on Pixmac.com) for any of your topics / pics using less common keywords. Take a look if  you can find one of your pics, then click on it. (I could easily find the same pic twice with such a search, one is from DT, the other from FT).
The detail page has your name with the distributing agency added to it as a link below the pic (e.g.  Dirkr  (dreamstime)).
Click on that link, it will show all your files on pixmac from that agency, together with the number of sales (for me one on each agency) and a list of best sellers (so I could easily identify the sold pictures - the one of FT matched the one where I got the special sales notice on FT for).

In my case that results in 628 pics from DT (where I have 832 online) and 609 from FT (where I have 634 online).
This shows, that there are a lot of duplicates (explanation might be, that I keyword in German for FT and in English for DT - if the duplication detection relies on keywords it must fail  )
In addition (if you look closer) both prices and sizes are different for the same file from FT or DT

4. You'll be in our subscription (which most of you don't like) and you'll be in our API chain of partners as eg. http://www.ccvision.de/de/microstock/ but currently our focus is to generate serious sales. As we've started with paying for uploads as any other new agency did and found out that we were not able to satisfy contributors later on with sales.

So our general target now is make the fastest site in the market (we're almost there). Make it easy for the buyers (I'm sure we are already leaders in this). Make the site localised for several markets (we have 15 people locally already in several countries). All that together with some other ideas that we're launching soon should make you guys a bit more satisfied. Because that's what I've been doing for those two years (just check the forums here for my nickname and you'll see what has changed during that time)...


Vita

In general I would welcome your effort to generate more sales. And I am not totally against the concept of distributing files I have already online to partner agencies.
What troubles me is the lack of control I have over this distributions (not really your problem, but maybe you can talk to FT and DT about that). Ideally I would like to have a list of all available partners with their exact conditions and an opt-out possibility on a case by case basis.
With FT I get nothing (no information, no opt-out), with DT close to nothing (no information, just a global opt-out).
That certainly is bad.

And one more thing: You are giving prices on your website (for direct purchase without use of credits) which are well above the FT / DT prices (e.g. the smallest size is advertised at $3.88). If these are sold, I will still just get an XS download at Fotolia, netting me �0.28. That is less than 10%.

So in light of all of this, would you recommend taking down all our pictures on Pixmac as distributed from FT / DT and uploading directly to Pixmac? And if so, what would be the conditions (couldn't find that easily on your site)?

I might start uploading to pixmac again.  Might as well give them a chance and I would rather sell direct through them.  I don't like some of the things they have done in the past, like the crazy cheap subs but they seem to learn from their mistakes.

^^^It just lets you post a link on twitter to the watermarked image on pixmac.  Nothing sinister, other sites do the same.  Probably wont generate many sales, I still don't quite get twitter but have been doing a bit of twitting lately

In general I would welcome your effort to generate more sales. And I am not totally against the concept of distributing files I have already online to partner agencies.
What troubles me is the lack of control I have over this distributions (not really your problem, but maybe you can talk to FT and DT about that). Ideally I would like to have a list of all available partners with their exact conditions and an opt-out possibility on a case by case basis.
With FT I get nothing (no information, no opt-out), with DT close to nothing (no information, just a global opt-out).
That certainly is bad.

And I certainly have no problem with sites generating more sales, but the part bolded is the exact reason I don't opt in to partner programs. None of the sites seem willing to disclose this information, as if we have no right to it!

Quote from: zager on Today at 01:50
4. You'll be in our subscription (which most of you don't like) and you'll be in our API chain of partners as eg. http://www.ccvision.de/de/microstock/ but currently our focus is to generate serious sales. As we've started with paying for uploads as any other new agency did and found out that we were not able to satisfy contributors later on with sales.

And the chain goes on and on, and now there is no control. By the time my image gets sold at the end of the chain, my commission is what...one penny? I don't think so. We can't even get the top micros to help out with copyright infringement, how can we possibly keep control when we don't even know all the sites our images are at?

Quote from: dirkr on August 12, 2010, 02:22

In general I would welcome your effort to generate more sales. And I am not totally against the concept of distributing files I have already online to partner agencies.
What troubles me is the lack of control I have over this distributions (not really your problem, but maybe you can talk to FT and DT about that). Ideally I would like to have a list of all available partners with their exact conditions and an opt-out possibility on a case by case basis.
With FT I get nothing (no information, no opt-out), with DT close to nothing (no information, just a global opt-out).
That certainly is bad.

And I certainly have no problem with sites generating more sales, but the part bolded is the exact reason I don't opt in to partner programs. None of the sites seem willing to disclose this information, as if we have no right to it!

Quote

Quote from: zager on Today at 01:50
4. You'll be in our subscription (which most of you don't like) and you'll be in our API chain of partners as eg. http://www.ccvision.de/de/microstock/ but currently our focus is to generate serious sales. As we've started with paying for uploads as any other new agency did and found out that we were not able to satisfy contributors later on with sales.

And the chain goes on and on, and now there is no control. By the time my image gets sold at the end of the chain, my commission is what...one penny? I don't think so. We can't even get the top micros to help out with copyright infringement, how can we possibly keep control when we don't even know all the sites our images are at?

Agree very much so with every point. These are MY images and I want to keep control over them, not see them showing up on all sorts of sites i know nothing about, keeping my fingers crossed they'll only rip me off a little.

I only opted out of the DT alliances program yesterday (Fotolia was gone already), but NONE of my pictures showed up on Pixmac (i searched profoundly), so thats something that needs checking.
I do appreciate you Pixmac guys chiming in here to clear things out and definitely will consider uploading my portfolio directly, but no way i'll be doing it through sketchy partner programs, and it will also depend on the transparency of Pixmac's alliances.

Control and reselling issue

My opinion on this is simple: Fotolia and Dreamstime are fair businesses that want to make serious money. If they have any partners that don't make money or are doing anything suspicious they're terminating that partnerships because it's not only making you contributors angry, but also them. It's simple as that I think, but I'm usually optimistic and idealistic guy.

Pixmac has to and I'm sure all the other channels of FT and DT have to fully respect the terms and conditions of the original site. So this means you're legally covered in the same way.

As for the control, I completely understand that Fotolia and Dreamstime don't show so much clear info about Pixmac or any other resellers, because contributors would be able to go to those agencies directly and that's not helping either FT and DT. So even that I understand their behavior, I agree that it's not open and clear to you guys. I can promise to keep that in mind and if anything comes to my head (as it did with the one stop idea that's now being copied by other agencies) I'll be making everything possible to have it implemented. But still we're small David and they are Goliathes.

But the question is obviously right. Should I as a contributor get more sales and be more afraid of what's happening inside the agencies or should I build up my own site and try to market my images on my own? Both options have pros and cons.

Portfolios differences

Guys Dirkr and mtkang, this is really strange. I'm going to find out what's behind that, because we should have everything. I'm sending the info to our dev team and will wait for their findings.

And we're doing the duplicates detection based on the small thumbs. So no keyword should harm that. It's some University technology that compares visual data and matches duplicates.

We're taking the prices and sizes from the API and what I've seen was that the set of sizes sometimes don't match to set of sizes on the actual Fotolia/Dreamstime site. I think it's because they have some API partners that need to have exact set of sizes, so any change in API sizes would cause a problem.

As for the prices, you should get your standard revenue as if the image was sold on FT or DT. With the OneStop sales you get also the revenue as if it was sold for less, because what we do is we give the price difference to the customer as a free coupon to buy a credit pack. The idea is: "You can taste Pixmac and if you like it you can get the same price as the credit pack customers get."

We don't change contrast or saturation of the files we get from FT and DT but we make them a bit more colorful and sharp if they're in our direct collection (3-5%). My opinion is that shining apple sells better than the others. It shouldn't be much but for the results I hope it helps.

Contributor credits don't expire

The expiration was changed a few weeks ago for contributors. And yes there's a minimum of $0.10 fee to all contributors if it's sold via subscription. But be sure that our subscription is not too much popular as it only has 230k+ images.

Thank you Sharpshot, Rubyroo and Artemis

Guys, this is really something to thank you for! It's been busy two years here at Pixmac and I'm the one who was fighting a lot to make Pixmac the best site ever and you don't even know how hard it sometimes is. I wish I can tell you everything. But anyway, I'll be here as long as I can and I'll do my best to change the old rule that: "Contributor is never satisfied" to "Contributor likes what Pixmac does" (yes I'm idealistic). Honestly, thank you! If you ever feel bad, write an email to [email protected] or send a DM to http://twitter.com/pixmac and I'll be listening.