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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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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?
Steve – your points are extremely valid, and we were internally discussing the possibility of providing contributors three tiers to choose from for their pricing. We could figure out what those tiers should be together, and then organize the pricing on Symzio accordingly to minimize customer confusion.
But I believe you are correct about the ‘confusion’ arising out of wondering why one image is priced higher than another – it is part of the opportunity cost I am talking about when I say there are obvious detractors to offering variable pricing. But if contributors are promoting Symzio like crazy, it may offset this to some extent.
Redneck is correct that we can minimize confusion by trying to organize the media in ways so that customers know that contributors have set the prices differently, and even allow them to filter media by price. However, this will not eliminate the confusion you mentioned and will possibly make us lose some sales and/or customers.
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?
Happy contributors are very important, and our ultimate goal. Contributors will be happy when they get sales. They will also be happy, as you suggested, if they are able to have more control over pricing.
Realistically – what percentage of contributors do you feel would go out of their way to promote Symzio if we integrated more control over pricing?
And secondly, do you believe that positive effect would result in more sales for contributors versus the marketing hook we have with low cost, one time use licenses?
After considering and answering those questions, also consider this – we are a very small team with limited resources and will continue to be this way based on the very small amount of revenue we will be netting out of Symzio sales. If we don’t have competitive pricing, we will basically be nearly completely reliant on the community to assist in promoting Symzio.
Do you think that this would be a safe reliance? Are contributors ready to embrace something new and invest passion towards its success?
What would you do different if Symzio integrated variable pricing?
I think the subscription plans are precisely where all the problems arise, because they force customers to pay more and blur the amount of money contributors receive. Thanks for your feedback – much appreciated.
Very good point – so regardless of the license available, the reality is that people can download the full size image and pirate it, and that is an ongoing issue. However, with other agencies that have subscriptions, the cost for this is quite low – they can get your images for about 25 cents. Don’t you think such endeavors would be significantly reduced if these guys had to pay $6 an image?
I mean, if you have 600 vectors, that would translate to a $3600 investment that they would probably never see even close to the same return on.
I think that at $5.99 for the full size, it would make it nearly impossible for free sites to realistically get their hands on a large number of your images for that reason. What do you think?
Old male lion in the grass in Southern Africa https://t.co/yrnuPbt7yf via @symzio
— Symzio (@Symzio) December 17, 2015
Posted by Symzio on Thursday, December 17, 2015
Hey Imago,
We’ve added that feature to Symbiostock and after testing it out will release it shortly. Thanks for sharing your needs!
Good eye and thanks for the suggestion
Also added a next page link next to it so it is clear there are more
I had actually fixed this based on another person’s note, but it seems to have been reverted somehow. I’ve changed it so it now says ‘Displaying X Results’.
Participated in discussions on photography forum with my Symzio contributor profile linked to my forum profile x 5
The video and submitter plugins are already released – we just haven’t publicized that yet as we’re still working out some stuff with pricing and also with the Symzio beta. You can see it via the shop link at the top.
As for sitemap – the good news is you don’t need to worry about Symbiostock in that regard. You can use any SEO tool that WordPress supports for that, which will be far superior and larger in scope than what the original plugin could have provided.
One of the most popular ones is called Yoast SEO – another one is add meta tags. I am not an expert on which one is best, so I’d suggest researching as you may be married to whichever one you end up using.
And don’t worry about questions! Our goal is to help you get situated, so it’s all welcome.
Glad it worked – as for the processor, here is some documentation on it:
http://www.symbiostock.org/docs/setting-up-the-schedulerimage-processor/
Basically, it never runs on its own because it is a ‘real’ cron job. The way WordPress works is it has a makeshift cron job that gets triggered when visitors visit your site – the reason this won’t work very well for Symbiostock is it does some heavy lifting, and it would slow down your visitor’s experience if we did it that way.
So you need to add the trigger (the code is in your Settings) to your control panel, and make it run once a minute.