There’s another online marketplace for buying and selling stock photographs in town, and its name is ClusterShot. Don’t look for it to bring any major innovations in the space, of which Getty Images-owned iStockphoto is arguably the dominant force, but feel free to check it out if you agree that there it needs a bit more competition (also check out our earlier review of Adography, another contender).
Like Adography, the quality bar is intentionally set quite low. Basically, anyone is free to upload images, even amateurs willing to contribute crappy photos of their pets. It’s free of charge, and you can choose for yourself which photos you want to put up for sale at which price point (either fixed or based on offers). The startup takes care of the rest of the process and keeps a 12% administrative fee off any transaction as a commission. Outgoing payments are handled through PayPal so users are required to have an account for registration.
ClusterShot gives users the ability to tag and edit photos that are uploaded to the system, but only lets them choose one license, which is a Royalty Free License which warrants the buyer the right to use the image in almost any way it would like. There are three ways users can add photos to their account: by uploading them through an online interface (single files or ZIP), adding an image RSS feed or by linking directly to their Flickr account thanks to the use of a commercial API key.
Currently, the web service has signed up about 1,000 users who have uploaded 100 photos each on average. The company claims that sales are starting to pick despite the fact that the service is entirely bootstrapped and little to no attention has been giving to promoting the site so far.
ClusterShot is one of the ventures of Canadian web development company silverorange, which counts Digg’s creative director and co-founder of Pownce Daniel Burka among its co-founders and partners.
Cool website. Now web designers needn’t worry about images. Yet, iStockPhoto fares well than this according to me.
yes look pretty cool and interesting.
Just another site again. Lets see how it fares. “Currently, the web service has signed up about 1,000 users who have uploaded 100 photos each on average. The company claims that sales are starting to pick despite the fact that the service is entirely bootstrapped and little to no attention has been giving to promoting the site so far.” – Wonder if they would get anyone visiting them if promotion goes on soooo well.
Great! I need somewhere to grab good photos…
sleek website
Ummmm, I’ll have to give them a shot!
Cute, I wonder how they plan to compete with the big boys like istock and shutterstock.
If Ginipic will add them, they might pick up.
Http://www.ginipic.com
looks pretty cool and different.
Not everyone is looking for studio shot professional photos to buy. I remember searching istockphoto for several hours for an amateur shot. You can realize that all web companies out there are using istockphoto and those photos look to formal and not natural.
Crappy photos work in some occasions…
I just wish people would use the correct spelling of “iStockphoto” – no capital “P” especially when Crunchbase profile has it right.
Fixed. By the way, it’s CrunchBase with a capital B
The last time I had the need of looking for royalty free images I googled and clicked on the first link that was presented – What I intend is even when bootstrapped if proper emphasis is given to search optimization, people can still find them and they can still do business.
I also realized the importance of domain names that are catchy and easy to remember.
Love the site layout… and the low intermediary commision
From previous dealings with this company, I wouldn’t trust them to pay the 12%.
@Chris: Why the distrust?
And they don’t pay 12% but 88%…
Chris,
Did you bring this issue up with us at ClusterShot?
We’ve looked through our records and can’t find any money owed or missed transactions. Perhaps there was a support issue that slipped through the cracks? Whatever the issue was that caused you to distrust us so much please let me know (info at clustershot dot com) and I’ll be sure to make it right.
We’re still in early beta and doing our best. We’re not perfect though.
Other companies are also launching in the extremely competitive photography space. With giants like Getty dominating stock photography, opportunities are appearing in niches.
Snapizzi aims at event and portrait photographers, but amateurs too. Unique tagging technology simplifies capturing, managing and selling event and portrait photos online.
Snapizzi was featured in Layers Magazine after this year’s Photoshop World:
http://www.laye...-tutorials.html
Don’t forget Veer’s entrance into this space: http://www.veer...ts/marketplace/
Speaking as a designer, there aren’t too many photos on this site I would consider for any current projects.
Would Clustershot get one iota of a mention if it wasn’t for the Digg pedigree?
no they wouldn’t jason.
i tried contacting them about uploading my portfolio and never heard back a word and its been over three months. i have also heard that sales are on life support and none have been spoken about. we will see but i would not hold my breath from my dealings with them.
with 10000 images you are not going to find a lot of relevant content and IS has over 5 mm images.
i have a question for dan and no disrepect.
how do you expect to compete against more established and better funded companies then CS? and how will you survive on just 12%? i am most interested in your first answer.
Hi Peter,
No disrespect taken. We expect criticism and complaints. Also, if you’re the same Peter who complained about not receiving a response that is quite possible. I’m doing my best to respond to everyone but occasionally emails do get by and sometimes they make it to the wrong folder. Please email me your concerns (info at clustershot dot com) and I will do my best to help you out.
As for our sales being on life-support. Yeah, of course. We’re a new site. At the time this article was written we had less than a 1000 users and 100,000 images (you were missing a zero). Sales aren’t strong at that amount of users/images/exposure. We never expected them to be. There are real sales happening though. At this point that’s a success in our books.
It’s important to point out that ClusterShot isn’t on life-support. It’s a side business of silveorange (www.silverorange.com), which has been around for 10 years. We’re dedicated to seeing it through for as long as we can.
How do we plan to compete with the more established and funded giants? We’re not really concerned with that. We wanted to build a site/system that filled a need we had for selling our own photos and allow others to use it. We thought the way photos were sold was outdated so we built our own way. We’ll continue to make it better. What the competition does isn’t something we can control.
I won’t lie,12% is a number we just made up. It sounded good. This is an experiment. We can’t know the economics of it yet. Hopefully we’ll end up making too much money and have to lower the fee.
Dan James, you sound like a reasonable guy with realistic expectations. All the best, man!
Good initiative, even if it were just to keep iStockPhoto prices in check. iStockPhoto is great, but I do not like the practice of reducing the value of your credits after you bought them. Yes I signed the terms and conditions, but that does not mean I like them.
Interesting. Will have to check this out.
Signed up for the service, but got this error message after authenticating my Flickrstream and trying to add these photos.
“Error
Sorry, there was a problem loading the page you requested.”
Hi Thomas, it looks like you’re too awesome for our system and we were not prepared for such a large Flickr import.
We are working to improve the error notifications and we have increased our Flickr request timeout to handle large accounts.
This should now be fixed if you would like to try again.
OK someone is gonna get their asses sued off.
Do a search for Lego. Nice logos. If you’re just throwing a site up with images for license, you’d better at least understand what you can & can’t sell. Reputable sites like iStock & Veer’s Image Market don’t have pictures of Lego. Why? You can’t sell it with a royalty-free license.
Images of the Eiffel Tower at night? Same deal. iPods & iPhones? Expect a call from Apple’s lawyers shortly.
http://www.clus...hana/photo11995
$20 for an image that can’t legally be sold as royalty free.
Looking at the license agreement, these images aren’t model released either. Yikes.
And sadly this isn’t gonna keep iStock’s prices in check. They seem of very low quality, and the good ones I found seem to be more expensive than iStock.
Right, if that is your real name.
ClusterShot is a facilitator of photo sales. You are licensing the image from the photographer, not from ClusterShot so the responsibility of trademark issues, copyright, etc is with the photographer.
That said we do need to be prudent. Our policy is to remove any blatant and obvious violations as they are noticed, brought up, or reported. We’ve either removed or are in the process of reviewing the trademark violations that you’ve mentioned. Thank you for bringing them to our attention and making the site better as a result.
Regarding model releases, that is also between the buyer and the photographer. We will be building tools to better facilitate that communication between the buyer and seller in the future.
Sounds so sexual…
Demotix.com is also in this space (all be it a subset of this space), it was featured in tech crunch UK.
http://uk.techc...picture-agency/
wow great I need somewhere to download good photograph
Um…isn’t this what Cutcaster has been doing for the last year? It’s eerily similar, especially with the marketplace idea to bid for content. Not sure what the difference is.
What attracted me to ClusterShot.com is that they take only a 12 percent commission for sales of your stock photos, very easy to upload, you can link integrate your own web site to clustershot. That’s what I have done with a new website bidphotos.com advertising my services as a real estate and product photographer.