Now the real fun begins

After the recent interview I have with Andy from StockPhotoTalk, I have received and contacted many of the major microstock agencies. I have worked out better downloaded and partnerships with Dreamstime, 123RF, StockXpert, LuckyOliver, and Fotolia.

WEW!

Things are start to go really well, the image database now has 600,000 images from the different agencies. I am hoping to have 2 million in by the end of September. Wish me luck!

June of Fire

This has certainly been a busy month for me. We have been contacted by a few different agencies about listing their images. We have worked out a great partnership with LuckyOliver which I am pretty proud of. LuckyOliver has been one of my favorite "new finds". Their focus is truly a community site and they seem very skilled at building a brand.

Growth

The Image database is now over 500k images and I will be increasing the speed with which I let it grow. I have tried to be careful this far because I believe that "junk in / junk out" gets magnified in a database. I hope to see 1 million images by August.

NY Times mention Fotolia and iStock as Corbis competitors

The New York Times wrote a large article about Bill Gate's Corbis Images. They mentioned microstock and its entrance as a challenge to the stock photography community. As Imagetrail will hopefully someday prove, the results of microstock photography are a little more than "amatuer or semi-professional". In my opinion much of what is found on microstock site is more professional. The interfaces are often harder to deal with, but they also are improving.

Time will tell whether microstock will conquer, or just co-exist. There will always be different needs and different markets in stock imagery.

"What Corbis did not foresee was the rise of so-called microstock agencies like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. These sites take advantage of the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing, or turning to the online masses for free or low-cost submissions. Thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers armed with high-quality digital cameras and a copy of Photoshop contribute photographs to microstock sites, which often charge $1 to $5 an image."

Read the article @ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/10corbis.html

Its all about the marketing

Imagetrail has now been online for over six months! Things are growing, but not fast enough. We are in the process of contacting more agencies about listing their images, but the biggest need is marketing.

We have just started the seo push for the website and trying to get ourselves into Google and Yahoo in a strong way. We are also submitting the site to various web directories, such as the Directory of Global Information and the Photarium blog directory .

We are buying clicks through Google and Overture and having good success with spreading the word.

Seperating the Search Engine Worlds

We have in the past combined the "recent searches" and "top searches" for Imagetrail and SafePix (the family friendly photo search). We will be shortly seperating the two list to prevent to much duplicate content and also prevent things like "sexy images" form showing up on SafePix top list where "family conversation" would be more appropriate.

Progress and Painful Changes

Everything Changes

Since I have started working on this website I have had frequent changes in my interface with the individual stock image agencies. Some agencies have remained relatively constant. StockXpert makes few adjustments to their site and has worked rather consitantly. Dreamstime and Fotolia on the other hand seems always to be shifting. Because of the specialized image search robot requird to run this site, it is difficult to keep things working. However, I must say that while changes in the agencies are kind of annoying, they are generally good for the end consumer.

Popular Image Searches

Some recently popular searches have been for church monastery photos and (not surprisingly) easter images. There has also been a surge in people looking for fireworks. July 4th is not for another 3 months! Maybe summer in general brings out these images.

Image Categories

We (I can officially say we now) have started work on a image categories page. This page will serve two purposes:
1) To help to wayward searcher find something cool to look at.
Sometimes you need a few prompts in order to start your searches. A quick glance at this page and you should be on your way.
2) To help the search engines know what we have here.
We have notices that the search engines are sending people to images that we have talked about. Soo... we decided to talk some more in a massive way.

If you can think of a major category that we have missed, please let us know.

The New and The Strange

As usual I keep my eye on the search trends. For one to see what types of photos people are buying (the photographer in me) and secondly, just for the fun of it.

This week saw a huge surge in Iraq images and other war type images. This is no large surprise with the war continue to take center stage in the US and all over the world. On the other hand, a large amount of users were very interested in piano playing photos and cow milking photos. Hmm.... I hope this is all not just one really strange person.