New Stock Photography Site Beta - Some Invites For Photography Review Members

[lawrencedudley]

Hi Guys,

We've just (literally in the last half an hour) launched a limited beta of Pixelfetch.com which is a new stock photography site designed to shake up the stock photography industry.

We felt that traditional microstock sites have stagnated a bit recently - they don't keep up with trends across the internet at all and they're pretty clunky and old-fashioned and their user interfaces are horrible.

Pixelfetch is built on some pretty awesome technology and while it's very much in beta (you can't buy any images on the site for another few weeks yet), we've got a ridiculously long roadmap of features that will push stock sales up (earning you more money).

At the moment we're just looking to have a database of photographs online that we can test with and launch new features from - we're currently in soft launch mode and will be having a hard launch in a few weeks time. As beta users you'll benefit from being the only people with photos on the site when we hard launch into public mode, which should gain you extra exposure.

Your help testing the system and uploading photos is much appreciated, and we'll think of a suitable thank you to all of you who do sign up in the next few weeks as a sign of our gratitude.

Stay tuned, this is going to be big

To register please use the following link:

http://www.pixelfetch.com/users/regi...tographyreview

There's 50 invites allocated to this site so snap them up while you can or you'll miss out.

For those of you who sign up it should be a pretty exciting few weeks with new features being added every day or two and you'll get to play a large part in helping to shape what will, with any luck, become a one-stop shop for stock photographs.

Kind Regards and thanks for your time,

Lawrence Dudley
Director - Pixelfetch

Any questions about Pixelfetch should be directed at support@pixelfetch.com - we look forward to answering any questions or suggestions, feedback or anything else you might have for us.

[Photo-John]

Thanks for sharing the news with us. I hope you plan to be part of this community and this isn't just a drive-by post. The new site is a microstock site? What do you have to offer that established microstock sites like istock don't already have?

[lawrencedudley]

Hi John,

Thanks for the post - in answer to your question, quite a bit.

As stated in the post above, we've started this project on the basis that stock photography is pretty stagnant. Everyone sells images, in pretty much the same way.

We're still selling images, but we want to put our own twist on things.

One of the features that we think will work really well is that we are essentially giving the images in our library away for free to bloggers. This sounds insane but it actually makes a lot of sense:

We're currently busy writing plugins for popular blogging engines which will let non-commercial bloggers (there is an approval process for this) to use our watermarked images for free. All of the images used on blogs across the net are backlinked to pixelfetch. Many backlinks = Higher google pageranks for your images, hence more sales.

The other awesome thing about the above feature is that it lets blogs incorporate free photographs (great for bloggers!) and it means that all of a sudden your images are being marketed to hundreds of targeted potential buyers. Our thinking on it is that people will insert images that relate to what they're writing about, and the people reading these blogs will be interested in purchasing related imagery. All the images on blogs are hyperlinked to the buy pages for those particular images.

It's a big step, I know, and it's pretty out there compared to what other sites do but it's interesting nonetheless and we firmly believe that it's a concept that could work very well.

The other things we are developing are intelligent search algorithms, which learn from the way people interact with search results to provide more relevant results the next time a search is made. It's all a bit complicated but it's neat and will mean that the good stuff will float on the top and the not so good stuff will sink to the bottom of the pile.

We're also working on incorporating other services into the library, such as being able to provide design templates, flyer/poster designs etc, just based on a colour scheme and a logo and some keywords, incorporating images from our library.

There's a lot of "end products" that we can offer which boost the value of photographs and will hence drive sales.

We're also working on creating a buyer/photographer marketplace, with a kind of reverse ebay functionality. It's pretty complex and you'll find out more as it gets completed but we feel sure that you're going to find it as cool as we do.

The other thing we are working hard on is having a very slick UI. The website is nowhere near a finished state as of yet - sections don't work yet and features are incomplete, as we are just trying to build up some sort of catalogue at the moment, but if you have a play with the upload page you'll love it - and that's a good kind of indicator for the kind of design and usability ethos that's going into the rest of the site.

It's early days yet and we have a long road ahead of us but we're confident we have a better product than the competition, both for buyers as well as photographers.

Any other questions feel free to let us know - we don't always check every forum but if you've left a post here you'd like us to respond to in full feel free to contact us at support@pixelfetch.com and we'll get back ASAP.

Thanks for your time,

Kind Regards,

Lawrence Dudley

[Photo-John]

Thanks for the quick reply! I understand the free photos for bloggers strategy and I like it. I think it's a great marketing strategy both for exposure and for Google indexing. Now that you've really got my attention I'll have to take a look. Maybe, once it's all up and running, we can even do an article