Symzio – a few weeks in, over 20,000 stock images already

Symzio – a few weeks in, over 20,000 stock images already

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The independent spirit has been alive in a vacuum for years now. Professional artists, from illustrators to photographers, have lived for a while, trying to balance a distinct and personal interest in their visual specialty, while at the same time constantly being squeezed by the very agencies that claim to have their best interests in mind.

From earning tens of dollars, to dollars, all the way down to meager cents now, contributors all across the globe have accepted an uncertain future where the value of their hard work is now at an unsustainable low. A majority of the full size, royalty-free images you see and purchase through these massive agencies, glorious as they may look, offer their creators, generally, a quarter of a dollar in revenue per download.

This is not an underestimation – you can approach just about any contributor who sells photographs through a large microstock agency, and they will not only express their deep dissatisfaction in the revenue they are earning, but you will sense an inherent fear towards how things are going.

The key word here is unsustainable. Through competition between agencies that has caused the artist to take the brunt of the discounting, these companies have prospered beyond measure – hundreds of millions of dollars squeezed out as the transaction cost between customers and artists. Where affiliates generally earn somewhere between 10-30% for referrals, these agencies retain an obscene 85% in most cases.

Symzio is here to change all of that. Symzio was created by contributors for contributors. It allows contributors to control, manage, and even host all of their own media. It encourages contributors to have their own independent footprint so they will never be reliant on any one group to reach customers. Most importantly, it retains only 30% of the revenue, used almost exclusively to market its members and cover costs.

Is Symzio going to be the solution everyone has been looking for? Not overnight. Competition is fierce, and advertising is expensive. Symzio depends almost entirely on a grassroots movement by both contributors and customers who are passionate about visual media. This isn’t just about profit anymore – the very existence of creative minds and their ability to continue expressing that creativity is in jeopardy.

We’re working every day to make Symzio a reliable mechanism for artists and customers to find each other in a fair and sustainable environment – help us out by spreading the word. Tweet about us, share a page, and promote independent artists all around the world.

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