Announcement: We just released a major product update
After launching the alpha version of our marketplace earlier this year we're excited to announce the first major product update.
Coming off the conclusion of our token sale last month, we are more focused than ever on bringing our vision to life and kickstarting our economy. Our latest product update is part of our ongoing effort to release the tokens in the best possible position, and paves the way for a more exciting news coming in the next few weeks.
Curious what has changed? Here's a quick overview of our recent update:
Creators onboarding
When we launched our dashboard for creators and began receiving photo submissions, we were astonished by the volume of talented creators that decided to share their work with us. While we'd like to give everyone a shot at joining us on our journey, we decided to focus on professional photographers with existing experience and sales in the stock photography industry. This will help establish us as a marketplace leader early on, and provide an inventory that's not only large and diverse but meets the expectations of our pickiest customers.
Our dashboard and image uploader received glowing feedback from photographers, but also some helpful criticism. One of the biggest concerns was the need for a fast, efficient bulk uploader - one that can handle thousands of images at once, saving photographers valuable time, and go beyond the slow pace of manual uploading via the web. Working with our beloved content partners, we developed and launched two advanced options to upload content to Wemark.
Streamlined upload by FTP
For content producers with large photo libraries, FTP has historically been one of the most popular methods to submit their content. It's most commonly used when there's a need to transfer multiple images at once, or images that are too large to email. After testing FTP access with a few of our early content partners, we developed a streamlined and scalable solution to quickly onboard the top content producers and their massive photo collections. We will test the new system with a few selected photographers, and then open it to more approved creators that have already gone through the initial screening.
Effortless upload via API
We discovered that some of our content partners maintain their own API, quickly providing access to their entire photo collection. To support this, we created a standardized integration manager which enables us to connect with many different APIs of different partners. This helps us automatically receive new content, keeping our inventory fresh, relevant and up-to-date, often with little to no additional effort from partners
Wemark goes mobile
Our marketplace now fully supports mobile devices. Although many users prefer to browse images on their desktop, it's crucial that customers, content producers, and other interested users will be able to experience the platform on-the-go.
The new mobile version of our marketplace includes all the important parts of our platform:
Search and browse images
Full image details, pricing, and metadata
License images, send payments and access licensed content (once tokens are released for transfer)
Account details and basic actions
Purchase history and the option to redownload previously licensed photos
Down the road, we plan for mobile to be a more significant part of our product. This includes dedicated apps for Android and iPhone, with a focus on allowing our contributors to manage their content and more easily track their licenses.
Our marketplace now fully supports mobile devices. Although many users prefer to browse images on their desktop, it's crucial that customers, content producers, and other interested users will be able to experience the platform on-the-go.
The new mobile version of our marketplace includes all the important parts of our platform:
- Search and browse images
- Full image details, pricing, and metadata
- License images, send payments and access licensed content (once tokens are released for transfer)
- Account details and basic actions
- Purchase history and the option to redownload previously licensed photos
Down the road, we plan for mobile to be a more significant part of our product. This includes dedicated apps for Android and iPhone, with a focus on allowing our contributors to manage their content and more easily track their licenses.
User experience
We gathered some very useful feedback from our community after launching the first version of our marketplace, which has helped us quickly implement improvements to Wemark's UX. To succeed in our mission, our user experience must be near perfect, so we'll continue rolling out improvements as we collect enough data and feedback.
We made a number of significant changes this round - here are three features we want to highlight:
- License history - you can now access your entire license history and see which images you licensed and when you licensed them. You can also quickly redownload any images you previously licensed.
- Shareable image pages - until now, it was virtually impossible to share a Wemark image with a friend or colleague, and we quickly realized that this was incredibly frustrating, and posed a potential barrier to image sales. Thanks to our recent update, each image now has its own dedicated URL, so you can easily share it with anyone.
- Faster and more convenient content browsing - one of the biggest factors we need to address when thinking about Wemark's user experience is how quickly customers can find the content they're looking for. To improve this, we redesigned the search results layout to feature more photos on every scroll, require fewer clicks to see more photos and increase the speed of the entire search engine. We'll continue to reevaluate and improved this functionality - it's one of the most important features to ensure a seamless user experience.
More content, more diversity
In addition to our much needed tech-related advancements, we've continued onboarding new content partners into the platform, ingesting their content and indexing it to be visible in our search engine. This will help make the collection much more diverse and inclusive, with a broad range of styles, locations, and categories. There are currently 155,000 photos available on the platform and many more will be uploaded over the next weeks.
We also published our submission guidelines, to help creators better understand the requirements for submitting content to the marketplace.
More is coming!
We're excited to unveil all these important updates and would love to hear your feedback on what's working, what's not, and what areas we should focus on as part of our product development. Stay tuned for an updated technical roadmap and more announcements regarding our plans for the coming months. Our product continues to improve, but we still have a lot of work to do to make our vision a reality and help empower creators all over the world to realize their power and regain control over their work.
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