Cutcaster August 2008 Newsletter

Dear Cutcaster Family,

There are a number of episodes that have shocked me lately; The opening ceremonies of the Olympics, the fact that it is the middle of August (where has the summer gone?!), and the way that Cutcaster has quadrupled since the last time I sent out a newsletter just a month and a half ago.

What a crazy and exciting time! A number of our users are now getting sales on the site and also receiving bids from interested buyers. If you haven't had a sale yet, don't worry; we are planning a big marketing push for the months of September and October so it is a good time to get more content into the marketplace or organize your old content.

We just passed 38,000 image files uploaded and have had over 15,000 files uploaded since the start of August. That doesn't even include all the video files we are going to release when we bring back video footage. We announced that our goal was to have 100,000 quality uploads by the end of the year. You can bet on the year-end total amount by submitting what you think will be the year-end tally on our blog (www.cutcaster.com/blog) to win a cool prize. 100,000 files is a very doable goal and we are well on our way to accomplishing it!

Since the number of files is growing and we are still a small group of people running Cutcaster from behind the scenes, we need everyone's help titling, describing and keywording their content. Take a quick moment to check out your keywords and make sure that your keywords accurately describe each image. If you need help let us know so we can target your content and organize it better.

Our move over to Amazon's web services platform is complete and I am happy to say that we have increased the speed of the site so things are running much faster at Cutcaster. You will notice a difference when you check out the homepage, and it will only get faster as we continue to work on more ways to speed it up.

Here are a number of new features that we have rolled out over the last month:

1. We added the ability to "friend" contacts on Cutcaster; send site messages to other people who are members of Cutcaster and post comments to each other's pages.
2. The Cutcaster Forum is here and ramping up. Go there and say hello and join in the conversation.
3. We added similar image results to the media details pages so you can find similar content without having to go back to the search areas. This should help buyers find a variety of similar images without having to do multiple searches.
4. Public clipfolders are now available on the site and are our version of lightboxes, which you may have seen on other sites. We added a featured clipfolder to the homepage to help get contributors more exposure and sales.
5. We have added free images to the homepage to attract more buyers to the site and get your work more exposure. Free images at Cutcaster.
6. Exclusive spotlight on the homepage. We need exclusive content and will pay out more for it. Ask us about it. If you have images that you want to test out on our site make them exclusive, you will earn more for them.

We are always listening, so please keep the feedback coming!

In addition, if you want your images and illustrations to be seen by more people, you should read this little post we wrote about getting more interested traffic.

Also submit/add your studio link to search engines like Google and Yahoo, which is a great idea for getting traffic, or you can link to them from your MySpace, Flickr or personal webpage. Remember to use your referral links as well so you get paid more.

Here are some write-ups on content we want:

• Top 14 Best selling categories at Cutcaster
• Smaller and Popular categories we need
• We have been asked for these types of images
• Desired content we need

If you need specific content please let us know and we will put out a request for you.

Hope the rest of August goes as slow as possible and you all enjoy the last bits of summer.

Best,
The Cutcaster Team