Update- Buyers can now add to cart without registering

This will make it easier for potential buyers to use the site. They will have to register before they finally checkout but there is not a push now for them to sign up. They are able to casually browse and then add to cart as they please.

Also we cleaned out a lot of the bugs last night in the commenting and messaging areas so you should notice a nice improvement.

And finally, you should have the pagination back in your studios. When we moved the My Network feature to the live site, the pagination of the comment section was screwing up with the pagination of the media files section so that is fixed.

Your opinion is needed - Investor's David vs. the Goliath argument

As you know, we are very open here at Cutcaster and want everyone to know what is going on, have a say in what takes place and take into account what you guys think. With that said, you may know from talking with me that we are looking to raise some money to take Cutcaster to the Next Level. I am talking the Big Leagues.

I had an email from an investor, who I really came to respect and could help Cutcaster out a bunch, in which he asked,

"Though I like the digital asset space a lot, I just can't seem to get
comfortable with how you build and maintain a business in the face of
lots of other competitors, who are well funded and established.

Thoughts?"


Since you are all familiar with Cutcaster, me and how we operate, plus you know what it takes for a new agency to compete and ultimately succeed, I would like to include what you guys think with my answer because you are as much a part of the team as we are and the money will help us all. I have my own ideas and answers to these questions but how do you think we can work together to compete and succeed? How do companies like iStockphoto, when they started, compete with an established public company like Getty for business? How did Google compete and win against companies like AOL, Lycos and Excite when they were growing up? What are the keys to growing our community and marketplace in your minds?

I am open to the good, the bad and the ugly side of what you guys think our chances are and how we can succeed in the face of such Goliath obstacles. It can and will be done but only if we work together.

If you want to email me your thoughts you can do that or please post them so we can get a discussion going and everyone can participate.

Simon Says- Cutcaster friending, messaging and commenting goes live

Simon Cowell gave our new releases two thumbs up and was seen here rejoicing with John.

Why is he so excited?

Well, we have just released some new features which should help make our community stronger and more enjoyable.

You can now create a network of friends and contacts on Cutcaster, send messages back and forth between members and comment on your friends studio pages. This all takes place in your studio area under the My Network Place. If you can think of a better name, shoot it over. I was thinking Cutcaster Cool Kids. hahaha. No but what do you guys think is a good name.

1. Friending- You can now link to your friends or your favorite portfolios.

2. Messaging- You can now send messages back and forth between your friends and contacts. Its a great way to stay in touch, send private messages and ask people for more information on how they shot a certain image or get details about someones background and work.

3. Commenting- You can now comment on people's studio page. This can be used to comment on someones portfolio, say what's up, supply constructive critisism or let the world know you bid on someones photo. This comments then become links back your studio so please don't spam people's comments area which I know you won't please keep these comments above the belt and PG-13. We believe in the goodness of people and this will be used to help and communicate with one another in a fun and helpful way.

As always we need your help crushing out the dreaded bugs which sometimes creep into our work and make things go funky. If you see any of these tiny critters that upset your user experience, please give us a holler. We will squash them immediately.


UPDATE- The forums are coming, the forums are coming. We have it set up and are about to get it linked up to on the live site but you can see the Cutcaster Cooler forum here. If you are already registered at Cutcaster you are free to use the Cutcaster Cooler aka our forum. No need to re-sign up.

Most Popular Photos

We want to see your most popular photos, illustrations and images. There is really not an exact formula for this but could be in terms of views, downloads, compliments from your peers or ones that made your kids and close family give you a high five for snapping.

To help us at Cutcaster and to show off a bit (all in good fun), I'd like it if you would post a link in the comments to either your most popular photo on any site you belong to (doesn't have to be Cutcaster but it could be) or post a link to other web pages or portfolios that show the most popular photos on the different sites. This is for a few different reasons which I will blog about in the next few days but it is a test to help us all out. Lets see all those popular images and photos.

Cutcaster Forums are here

Now you can be heard....by everyone and get to know the community better. We have just released our first version of our Cutcaster forums so we can all chill and talk at the Cutcaster Cooler as we are going to call it. Anyone who has signed up for the site can contribute and we hope you guys will use it to communicate with one another and also with us here at Cutcaster.

Let us know if you want to add any other categories to the Cutcaster Cooler.

Site sluggishnes- We are working on it

This has been moved to a top priority for us and will be getting faster and faster over the coming days to week. If anyone has any feedback on things we can do to get the site running faster I would love any suggestions. Please email me at john AT cutcaster DOT com. We are working on a few solutions that will definitely help with serving up the pages faster and coming back with faster search results but like always I am always interested in learning more and hearing what you guys think could make the site move faster. It's better for all of us so please post below or email me. It is much appreciated.

Also you can try this free plugin for Firefox to help with the speed when browsing the site: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/.

The plugin increases page load time for example by using a few connections at once to download a page. Once you have downloaded, set it to 'Turbocharged' in the options. Hopefully you'll see a big difference on our site and others.

We have been asked for these type of images

Do you have these types of images?

1. youth culture, kids hanging out, kids playing sports or music together, kids at school,
2. families and kids (not too staged they said),
3. active seniors, riding bikes, going for walks, playing sports, enjoying life
4. business and technology and
5. still life

Please upload them or ask questions here if you have any for the buyer. I will make sure they respond with some guidance.

Public ClipFolders are fixed

Public ClipFolders (our form of a lightbox) are fixed and released now on the live site. There was a lot of valuable input that went into getting this right so I want to thank Jeff (absolute rock star with the feedback), April, Henrik, Dennis and Lope who did an awesome job.

ClipFolders are meant for you to organize your images and use it as a tool to showcase similar images and be able to send them to clients for feedback. Let us know if there are features that you would like added to them.

In addition we will feature a ClipFolder once a week or longer depending on how people use them. If you have a ClipFolder that you want to show off let us know. It doesn't have to include just your own stock photos or images but can be a mixture of other peoples' photos and your own or just others. It's up to you but you can be creative organizing them. Henrik Lehnerer is the first to be featured for his hard work so click here to see his fractal collection.

We are also going to be building out the search capabilities for Clipfolders. Right now you can just browse them from the public view page for clipfolders found here.

Thanks for all your input and glad to get this out so you guys can put it through the ringer and good use.

UPDATE- Maybe I spoke a bit too soon about them being fixed. Almost fixed. I have reports of someone losing images from their studio after they added in images to a public clipfolder so be careful. Also it appears to be moving very slow which we will fix asap. Let me know if you guys see anything else.

Design is Kinky makes us Kinky

We love it. If you haven't seen their site it's worth a quick peek.

Unleash The Prize Fibtolia - The Unpaid Contest

Are you kidding me?

Fotolia announced a competition over two months ago called "Unleashing your Creativity" with the understanding that "The winning designer will receive an approximate retail value (“ARV”) of $5000 (USD) in cash and prizes. In addition the winning design will be used in Fotolia’s global advertising campaigns."

Entrants had to submit designs from March 14, 2008 to May 9, 2008 12:01 AM EST. According to Fibtolia, "The Winner will be announced May 20, 2008 at the How Design Conference in Boston, MA." Then inexplicably, Fibtolia, over two months after the first announcement of the competition and two weeks after the winner should have been awarded the prize or an answer, they announce on June 4th, there weren't enough entries so no one got any money.

Well... that never happened.

"We regret to inform our fellow Fotolians that the Unleash Your Creativity Contest did not receive enough eligible submissions to judge and award a winner. We appreciate the efforts of our sponsor and those that did submit an entry. It is our hope to run another contest in the future with increased participation."

Boring and sleazy. So Fibtolia gets a bunch of new signs ups, sells content to people who contributed to the contest (good for contributors who sold content to those who used it in the contest) and gets a bunch of new content uploaded to the site and ideas for it's global advertising campaign. We ask them. Did you even get one submission?

I normally would never write poorly about another site but this example goes to the heart of what we don't want to create with Cutcaster.

We want to build and nurture an open and fair dialogue and environment for all members.

We want to do what we say we will.

We will always treat people the way we would want to be treated if we were members on their site.

We want to keep our word to our members.

These are truths and things we swear by at Cutcaster. Open and fair.

I say, even if there was only one entry that person should win by default. I am surprised I hadn't heard more about it or there wasn't an uproar. Did I miss the shouting? That will never happen here at Cutcaster and there would have been an "Unleashing" of a prize or a much bigger explanation as to what happened. 3 sentences isn't fair.

I say, Unleash the cash and keep your word or it's time to add another check against Fibtolia.

Interview with DesignShack

Thanks to DesignShack for posting their interview about Cutcaster. If you get a moment, check it out. It's very quiet over there with no comments. hahaha

Image Titles - How important are they?

So you are sitting there trying to think about what to title your newest photo. You want it to be seen by potential buyers but how important is the title and what are some good rules of thumb to go by when selecting a good title. Dennis spoke about the description a few weeks back in a brilliantly written post and now I will do my best to help you with the title.

1. At Cutcaster, the title you give your image is turned into the page title for search engine reasons. It is so important. The page title is a very powerful source of information for all search engines and is a way for potential buyers to find your image from the many others that are out there.

Names like "I can see you", "flower" or "time to go" all sound pretty good but don't help you getting found. For a lot of reasons, its important to be more logical, direct and specific when we title/name our images if they are going to be found and sold.

Try this test. Type in a search request on Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSN and put yourself into the position of a potential buyer. Most buyers from the ones we spoke with told us that they will specify the subject (machine, pizza, dog, etc) and then most likely an action (dog eating pizza, referee blowing a whistle. Try this and see what comes up.
Because you don't have time to check all the links that pop up for one of those searches you might be more specific and search for an image of a "yellow lab eating pepperoni pizza." hahaha. I don't know what but you get the picture or will be able to find one similar the more direct you are. Google places a lot of emphasis on the keywords in your page titles when ranking listings and that is why we added them to the site so buyers can organically find your awesome work. So pick descriptive and direct image titles!

Some pointers to help you because not everyone is an expert including me:

1. Try to use 3-7 descriptive words for your image title

2. Try to avoid non-searchable words. For example after all, about, an, also, and, another, any, are, as, at, be, because, been, before, being, between, both, but.... etc.

3. Don't include key words such as "stock image", "stock photo", "picture of" etc. We will do it on the back end for you.

4. 80 characters is a good number and about the max you want to go up to for an image title.

5. Do NOT add in symbols to the titles because google won't recognize them for SEO purposes and it sometimes breaks our pages ;-(. Here are some examples: ^, !, *, &, /, &, # etc

Request Referral Account Payouts

You can now request your referral account payouts from your mystudio section now. Just click on referral or transaction button in your studio to request a payout once you have hit $20.

Also, I have noticed that a lot of people are using the invite a friend function. That is great and an easy way to get credit for telling your friends about an awesome new service, make a little bit of money and help us out here at Cutcaster. So thanks in advance.

Need help using the Uploader

Click here or email us at upload AT cutcaster DOT com and ask us for the FTP instructions.

These instructions should help you move through the five tabs in the upload area.

Categorizing your Work

I know a lot of people don't like to categorize their files for a number of reasons but this is one of the filtering tools that we will offer to buyers for searching. We need your help categorizing your content so it falls into at least one of the below fields. You can choose up to 5 for one media file. If there are any fields that I am missing please let us know and we can add it if there is popular demand for it.

Abstract Imagery and Textures
Animals/Wildlife
Animation 2D
Animation 3D
Art
Backgrounds/Texture
Buildings/Landmarks
Business/Finance
Church and Ministry
Commercial
Concept
Creative
Editorial
Education
Elements and Effects
Food and Drink
Healthcare
Health and Beauty
Holidays
Industrials
Lifestyle
Motion Backgrounds
Music/Entertainment
Nature - General
Objects
People
Religion
Scenics (Nature)
Scenics (Urban)
Scenics (Other)
Science
Science and Medicine
Signs/symbols
Sports/Recreation
Technology
Transportation
VJ loops
World
Travel
Other

You can find these categories under the advanced search link in the search area.

To change your media files details in your studio page, click on the "e" underneath the thumbnail of the file you want to edit. This will take you to the edit page.

If you have any suggestions for us and ways we could do search and the editing of details please let us know.

Requesting Payouts in the MyStudio page

It's time to gettttt paiiidddddddddd!!!

The "MyPayout" area is up and running in the MyStudio section under the "Transactions" tab. There you can request a payout either through PayPal or Moneybookers or by check but the others are more preferable but only after your account reaches $20. Let us know what you think and if you see any issues with it updating. And hopefully you guys will be using this feature a lottt...

More changes to come very soon like the Cutcaster Cooler "our forum," adding friends so we have some cool circles, sending messages, updating the ClipFolders, uploading vectors, offering RM images, creating a new pricing calculator, a new watermark and getting video back. Can't wait and we are very close to releasing all of these within the next week. Please keep all the feedback coming and its really helping to shape up the site and make it better for everyone.

There are also a few other exciting things that will be popping up which we will tell you as we roll them out but that is a secret for now ;-)

And remember to use your affiliate links so we can start to grow even more. We need everyones help inviting both buyers and sellers. This is a nice way to make extra money and can be found in your studio area.

I'm very happy with the progress and some of the amazing emails I have been getting from people. It makes me very happy and proud to be a part of all your lives. Thanks for all the reinforcement.

John

Footage and Photo Request- Do you have this content?

We just had a request for this type of footage. Do you guys have anything like this or know anyone that does.

This is a list of the footage required with some comments next to them, and anything close or resembling will do just fine.

1 Politicians (Presidents) Shaking hands with other dignitaries European leaders
2 Barack Obama Making a speech
3 Movie star Being interviewed Any US actor
4 Movie star walking down the red carpet Preferably female
5 Fashion show / Catwalk
6 Plane/space shuttle take off Either one
7 People dancing African or Brazilian or Arabic Only one
8 Crowd of people walking on the street Hong Kong or New York Either one
9 Sports action Golf or Tennis or Rugby Only one
10 Sports star being interviewed World famous
11 Palace or Hotel lobby Inside shot
12 Traffic Motorcycle shot
13 War footage Tank firing / bomb explosion Either one
14 Soldiers in Iraq giving candy to children
15 Landmark Shots of Hong Kong / Milan / Paris / New Delhi / Lebanon / Buenos Aires
16 Electronic screens / Wall street financial screens Either one
17 Chef Cooking / Kitchen action / food flame
18 Robotics / Futuristic cars Either one
19 Boat / Yacht race

Cheers!

Using Paypal and Moneybookers to get paid

We have three ways of paying out users of which two, Paypal and Moneybookers, I will outline below. The other option is payout by check.




The Paypal solution of payment is used on the Cutcaster web site for three reasons:

To allow users to buy images or photos by using their Paypal account

To pay commissions to photographers who earn money selling photos through Cutcaster

To allow users to get paid cash from affiliation revenue.


In these three cases, customers and photographers must have a Paypal account. Below we will outline how to open a Paypal account.

Paypal is a free solution, which allows users to transfer money to anyone with an email address or securely purchase items from internet sites (for example, purchase any photographs from Cutcaster). In addition, Paypal customers may receive payments to their Paypal account (This could include commission payments to photographers or money earned from referring buyers and sellers to Cutcaster). At anytime, Paypal customers may transfer money to their regular bank account without any Paypal fees for sums of more than $100 and a $1 fee if less than $100.

Paypal is a subsidiary of eBay, one of largest companies on the Internet.

To create a Paypal account, click on your country below to get started:

If you are American: Paypal US

If you are Canadian: Paypal Canada

or Paypal Worldwide

For those countries not approved under Paypal you should sign up for a Moneybookers account.

Depending on your country, you can send and receive funds via checks, bank accounts and even credit cards. Fees are outlined here.

Register in Money booker

Moneybookers is available in many languages among them English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and many more. Registration only takes but a few minutes. Money booker is a British company based in London used by more than 1.5 millions people.

[MoneyBookers.com]

Get paid money via Paypal or Moneybookers

At Cutcaster, you can easily get your payouts using Paypal or Moneybookers. You must click the "Transactions” tab in the Mystudio area and then click on the "My Payouts" section. Your account must contain at least 20 dollars to request a payout. You must register with Paypal or Moneybookers before getting paid out. As soon as money has arrived to your account you will be notified by email from Paypal or Moneybookers.

Be sure the email address entered in the registration page at Cutcaster.com matches exactly to your email address in your Paypal and Moneybooker's account.

Radio Silence until Sunday

I am off for the weekend to a good friends wedding to there may be a bit of silence. If you need immediate help you can email victoria AT cutcaster DOT com or justin AT cutcaster DOT com and for technical issues email Lope AT cutcaster DOT com. I will have limited access to email but will be checking in if you need any help from me.

Have a great rest of the week and be back on Sunday.

John

Update:
Missed my flight in Atlanta. Ughhhh. Long story so I am around for tomorrow if anyone needs any help.

It is Not Required, but Your Description May be Priceless!

One of our dedicated members Dennis Thomsen brought up the issue of describing our images in the Cutcaster marketplace to us and we felt that Dennis, as a former photo journalist and newspaper editor, would be an ideal person to share his experience as to why describing your images is so important for image buyers and those that want to sell their images.

Below is a little post he wrote about the best way to describe your content and why it is so important. Enjoy and please add any comments at the end. Thank you so much Dennis for passing on some education to all of us.


Like many of our members, I like to check out the Cutcaster collection to see what is being submitted, and to look for holes in the collection. I've also been checking out the new and improved search engine (more changes coming according to John). My examination of the collection led to this guest blog. The goal is to share with the Cutcaster community what this former photo-journalist and newspaper editor views as a big concern if our images (and Cutcaster) are going to get serious consideration from buyers.

Is a picture always worth a thousand words? Photographers and artists would like to think this is the case, but it is not always true. We are in the business of marketing our images, and buyers are looking for images which fit their needs. Do they care about descriptions (captions)? The answer from most buyers is YES! Descriptive captions are part of the marketing information buyers use in the decision making process.

When we go through the Cutcaster image submission process we are required to title, keyword and price our images. It is optional whether we describe (caption) images. In fact, we can leave this field blank if we so choose. What I've observed is many image descriptions are too short, lacking detail, or completely missing. If our goal is to sell our images or increase our sales, this may be a big mistake.

Many high end buyers we hope Cutcaster will attract in the upcoming marketing and advertising campaign need what is referred to as the "five W's and H" in the descriptions. This information, the who, what, when, where, why, and how, of an image should not be ignored when you go through the upload process. Few images can stand alone. Those descriptions (captions) provide details buyers need in the decison process. It may help your sales figures if you review your photo descriptions with an eye toward checking and editing for present tense, active verbs, and the five Ws. Captioning is not always easy and it can be time consuming. It is a skill that develops with practice, just like keywording!

If you want to learn more about this photo caption (description) process, there is plenty of help available on the internet. You might want to check out some of these sites for caption writing basics:

"What Makes a Good Caption?" which is a good starting primer -

http://www.notrain-nogain.org/train/res/Write/caps.asp

Photo Caption Checklist site which provides more captioning thoughts

http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/content/318.cfm

and the following site is also worth visiting - Writing Photo Captions which summarizes the AP stylebook guidelines:

http://mysite.verizon.net/res8dhka/mcpaul/caps.html

The above are a great starting point if you are new to captioning or want to work on improving your image descriptions. Books have been written on this subject. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Hope you find something useful here and your comments are welcome.

Check out images belonging to Dennis here:
http://www.cutcaster.com/studio/pub/739083431

Free Images on the homepage

We are going to be offering a few images and photos each week as free images/photos and will be linking to the person's studio who offers them. This is to help us attract buyers to the site from the search engines.

Is there anyone who is interested in offering some of their images as freebies and help us out? We would be really grateful and are open to any ideas people have to reciprocate your good deed.

Please email webmaster AT cutcaster DOT com if you are interested.

Thanks