Photo by Terex

Christmas time is here. Year 2009 has reached its end. For Pixmac the year 2009 was a huge succes in microstock! And Vitezslav Valka, CEO of the company is glad to explain the most interesting and challenging parts of the story.

First of all: People

Well, I’m a guy that cares about life satisfaction more than money. And I must say that Pixmac gives me more positive energy than any other company before. We have really a great set of people at Pixmac. Various specialities and various nationalities is what gives me a lesson every day. I’m really happy to have those ladies and gentlemen on board, because without that we can’t meet my first requirement for a successful company: A great customer support.

All that is impossible without this bunch of people: Lucie Navratilova, Michal Prynych, Martin Talavasek, Martin Vlcko, Ondrej Valka & Ondrej Raska.

It’s always about relationship. In personal life same as in business. And at Pixmac, we’re doing our best to have same quality of relationship with customers as we have inside the company. We’re open and positive. Hopefully you feel that too.

Second: New features

We’ve started with reselling of Fotolia photos in 2008 along with our collection. That was our first non-conventional idea in microstock. But as we’re trying to be better every day, we weren’t satisfied with one advantage only. So we’ve added Celebrity content. Actually it was first introduction of traditional celebrity photos to microstock pricing. That was late 2008. In the year 2009, we’ve solved a few more thoughts from our wildest microstock dreams. Let’s look into the backstage of Pixmac. We’re proud of:

• One Stop Shopping – the easiest way to purchase photo online
• 10 million photos for one money – the greatest number in the industry
• Dreamstime – joined the collection
• Image Source – first traditional agency at Pixmac
• Yuri Arcurs – joined Pixmac collection

Third: New countries and challenges

But it’s not about features only. In this international world, not everybody speaks English and it’s not just PayPal and Credit Card what rules the world of payments. The world is sliced to many small parts and cultures. And that’s our biggest challenge at Pixmac. To learn those cultures and to serve them in the right way as a local friend. I must say, it’s difficult job. About ten times more difficult, that what I thought in the beginning. But, we made it! We’re successful in finding new territories.

We’ve started with English site in September 2008 at www.pixmac.com and then our beloved Czech version came in beginning of 2009. Right after that we’ve started all the other versions such as Finnish, Russian, Spanish, Brasilian, German, Dutch, Polish and Austrian. We’ve also experimented with French and Italian languages as we’re playing with UK English site. Some of those languages have also their own Twitter account: Finnish, British English and American. Well, that’s a lot of work for the first year. But we made it together with all the great people in the team:

• Merja Leppinen – lady that introduced Corbis to Finland
• Ania Menzel – loving mother from Poland
• Andrej Iurlov – photographer that lives in Prague is doing Russian Pixmac
• Cathy Mason – has left FedEx to join Pixmac US
• Fernando Cortes – our guy in Argentina
• Daniel Wiedemann – skilled microstocker that does Brasilian Pixmac
• Istvan Loerincz – Austrian Territory Manager speaks Hungarian & German
• Kiran Birring – our fresh & skilled representative in United Kingdom
• Frenk Kaufmann and his lady – Dutch version captains

Well and that’s just the beginning. Because we’re already working on few more territories to explore.

Contests & giveaways

We did a lot of contests over the internet and in the offline world. And also a lot of giveaways. Some of them on our site, some  via Twitter and Facebook. And you may bet on us, that we’re going to make it in 2010 too! Watch twitter.com/pixmac and join our Facebook page, because only there you can be informed about what’s happening inside Pixmac.

Prizes

As a proof of our quality assurance we’ve received Internet Effectiveness Awards 09: The Prize For Innovation and we also were silver at WebExpo 2009. And that’s not all. We’re now working on TRUSTe seal on our site and Verisign certification to become a trusted partner to anyone.

Future

For the future we already have few features in the oven. Oh, do you feel the Christmas spirit? Ok, there are some secrets that may be told only in Christmas time. The first one is iSyndica. We’re going to fully support the great service that helps photographers every day. We’re going to enhance all the scripts we have on site, either jQuery or HTML/CSS. All that is fast, but may be even faster. And we know how to do it. And we’re going to support visual similarity search with a great university help.

Thank you!

And for those that are still reading this blog post there is a one last message: “Thank you for being with us, you’re certainly one of those great people that is interested in Pixmac and that helps us become one of the greatest stock photo agency out there.” Thank you and I wish you peaceful Christmas and successful year 2010!

This idea came up from our research that most buyers are searching for just one picture first. Usually they realise later that Pixmac is so easy that they can use it twice or more times! The second thing is most users don’t have time. When they’re in a hurry and they don’t have time to learn how the credit system works. Or perhaps they don’t have the time to register at Pixmac. And finally they don’t wanna purchase more credits just because they may not use them in the future.

Our solution? One Stop Shopping.

You can just search for picture you need, click the download button, pay the price and that’s it! Your project and your life is saved. We’ve saved some electricity, you can take more time to watch the wildlife out of your office window. And if you want a better price, then credits are there for you!

Lee Torrens says: “I LOVE your one-stop-shopping idea! It has always been a missing element of microstock agencies so I’m very glad to see you leading the way with this. I imagine there’s a minor loss of leads through not collecting email addresses, but as the market reaches further toward less sophisticated buyers, I expect this easy transaction style will be particularly handy. Great work!” – More about Lee at Microstock Diaries

It is as easy as 1-2-3

You’ll need 3 minutes to have the picture on your disk.

1. Search for the desired picture in the Pixmac stock photo gallery and click on it.
2. Choose the required size and click on Download.
3. Pay for the picture via PayPal or Credit Card. That is it!

1) You will no longer need the special FTP username. Please use the same nickname and password as you use to log onto the website.
2) There will be two directories on your FTP account. These will be ‘creative’, for creative pictures and ‘editorial’ for editorial pictures. Please make sure you upload your picture to the correct directory.
3) You will no longer be able to create your own directories.

We hope these changes will make it even easier to upload your pictures. If you would like more information, or have any problems uploading by FTP, please contact us at customersupport@pixmac.com .

Also, we haven’t forgot to update our current English version of Pixmac. A lot of things were polished and enhanced for easier customer use.

Zoom pictures
Our zooming system is really cool now. The displaying of 100% quality pictures takes just split seconds.

Using PayPal to pay by credit card
We have added the possibility to pay by credit card using PayPal.

Search for similar pictures
Pixmac has a new tool which could be very helpful for searching pictures. How does it work? Choose pictures which you like and add them to the lightbox. Open the lightbox and mark images which you want to search for similar pictures. Choose “Search for similar pictures“ from “Action“ select box and Pixmac will find similar photos.

We receive many emails from you. Thanks for your comments and suggestions which will help us better serve our customers. Many customers have emailed that it would be helpful if they could upload editorial photos on Pixmac. So, listen carefully! In a few weeks it will be possible to upload editorial content to the Pixmac celebrity section.

Two months ago we started our cheapest subscription rate ever. We are very happy to report it is going very well and Pixmac is growing.

In the near future we are planning many new functions and improvements. Stay connected for further updates on how Pixmac is working to be the best site for your photo needs. Pixmac is now on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

We’re also participating in developing a new celebrity portal. Want to know what Paris Hilton or Brad Pitt did yesterday? Read Everyceleb.com every day!

We’ve also added great new functions for you! So now Pixmac is even easier for you to use.

Multiple operations

We’ve improved multiple operations for photographers. Now it’s really simple to work with multiple photos, add releases or a title to them.

Public lightboxes

Have you found beautiful photos and you want to show them to your friends? We’ve made public lightboxes for you. How does it work? It’s easy. Create a new lightbox and add your favorite pictures to it. Choose the “Show lightbox URL” option. Copy the URL and send it to your friends.

Zoom photos

Now you can zoom photos from Pixmac collection. Just click on the photo to zoom to 100%. Perfect for those who want to check the quality of the original.

Czech version

Pixmac launches Pixmac in Czech this week. In the near future we are planning to launch also other language versions. Almost done is Russian, German, Spanish, Portugese, Italian.

And one last thing. Because of our contract with Fotolia we had to lower the commision for non-exclusive rights to 30% and to 40% for exclusive rights for new photographers coming to Pixmac.