Veer Marketplace - Phase II

Veer has launched their first newsletter and inside is a tease of a new improved Veer Marketplace. Personally I can't sand their site as a contributor, so this could be very welcomed new. You have to click to many links to get to your pages and their stats are just not very helpful. Expect to see this new roll out later in 2010.

If you are going to be at SXSW in Austin during March 12-16 then swing by the Veer Booth and say hi as they are going to be attending this year. I will not be there, even know Austin is a few hours away from Houston.

Below is the full write up by Brian on the upcoming changes at VEER.

We have a lot planned for Veer in 2010 and want to give our Veer Marketplace contributors a preview of what’s coming up.

We are very pleased with the success of Veer Marketplace since launch, and we appreciate all your support over the past year – it has made a big impact! As a result of the early success of Veer Marketplace and the steady submissions of great content from our contributors, we are excited to say that Veer Marketplace will play an even bigger role in Veer’s business this year.

In 2010, our goal is to make Veer much more appealing to a much bigger, broader group of image buyers. The way we plan to do this is to make Veer simpler to use and more affordable for customers, while continuing to offer high quality content and ramp up marketing efforts.

We are already hard at work behind the scenes to make changes to our web site, products and pricing that we plan to introduce in the spring. These changes include:

• Veer will integrate the Veer Marketplace model and content into the broader Veer web site, making Veer more like Veer Marketplace overall.


• Veer Marketplace content will now be front and center in our search results, along with RF content Veer has from macro photographers and partners. We will streamline our web site so that there is a single search grid (rather than the two separate RM/RF and VMP grids that we currently have).


• We will have a single checkout process for all imagery, type and merchandise (versus the separate Veer and Veer Marketplace checkouts we now have). Customers will be able to purchase everything on Veer with either pre-purchased credits or individually with a credit card.


• We will simplify the customer experience on Veer by only offering easy-to-license royalty-free imagery, including all the imagery from our Veer Marketplace contributors. We will continue to have a wide variety of images from premium-priced images to value-priced images, all offered under the royalty-free licensing model.

Many of you have asked about our marketing efforts for 2010. We are continuing to market Veer extensively, and once these changes are in place, we will substantially increase our marketing activities to spread the word about our simple web site and affordable offering to a much bigger audience. We’ll keep you posted on details of our activities.

Many of you have also asked about improvements to our contributor web site. We are listening and are planning enhancements later in the year once we’ve made these changes to our customer-facing site. Please keep the feedback coming!

What does this mean for you as a Veer Marketplace contributor?
Once we’ve made these changes, Veer will appeal to a much bigger group of customers, and we hope to grow our customer and contributor base dramatically. This will mean more exposure and hopefully sales for your imagery as Veer Marketplace content is featured centrally on Veer.com, and we attract more customers.

There is nothing that you need to do to prepare for these exciting changes, though we’d love you to keep uploading to strengthen your portfolio. We really appreciate all your great work!

We look forward to sharing more details in the coming months, and please post any questions to the forum that you may have.

Cheers,
Brian