Update on Symbiostock personal agency and Symzio

My previous posts on building my own stock agency website using the new Symbiostock plugin for wordpress explain the background, and so this post is an update on progress with the project. I have been keen to maintain my own agency, partly from vanity, and partly to give me a way of selling my own photographs directly to users at prices that I think are fair. The developer of the plugin, Robin, has now created an agency that pulls all the independent websites together into one larger site that can be marketed and gain traction as the leading independent source of stock photographs, vector illustrations and videos (including 4K). This site is known as Symzio. The linkage of the various sites together should give us an edge in Google searches, but unlike previous attempts at this, all the financial transactions and image delivery will take place on the Symzio site. The contributors get 80% unless they happened to have referred the buyer, in which case we get the full purchase price.

Symzio is live, but still in Beta as we all load our images.

Pricing has been simplified to give just a small blog/web image at $1.99 for a single use, and then an extended full size RF download (suitable for all uses) which can be priced by the contributor. I have chosen $49.99 for this size with the rights to use on products for resale etc. Adding photos is easy – as I upload them to my own symbiostock site, I can automatically choose to have them also go to Symzio, or choose image by image. In my case, because I have most of my editorial shots on Alamy and Corbis as RM, I cannot offer those under the RF license and so am withdrawing those in a bulk edit in my own site at the moment prior to full launch.

In the meantime, my own site has been pretty successful this past week with two sales. One, with an extended license for use as the cover of a college year book was licensed for $35:

Extended License sale for Year Book Cover

The second, a few days later was licensed at the smaller size for $1.99:

Crazy wine

In both cases, the buyers found my site on a Google search, which is encouraging. I then found that I wasn’t properly completing the various “meta” fields in Yoast SEO, and so I was hampering my search results, so with that now in place, I’m looking for more sales in the coming year!

So far so good with both Symbiostock and Symzio – the system is working very smoothly, the forum is helpful and not at all antagonistic, and issues are rapidly fixed when they are found.

If you are interested, please check out the plugin (which is free) and even check out my hosting company if you like!