MicrostockGroup

I think donding should do his job in public relations with big and many contributors...

Ok... I've just finished reading the replies to this thread. I agree with the sentiments expressed that it may be time to look at different approaches that may be mutually beneficial. Personally I'd be willing to put money into a new venture, but only if it were properly set up and transparent from the outset.

There have been some different approaches outlined which I think are worth fleshing out more.

My own variation would be as follows:
1. to establish a company (or unit trust) made up of interested contributors.
2. The company operates a site by either acquiring an existing site, or developing a site from scratch.
3. The company or Unit trust deeds establish the ground rules for the operation of the company - to me these should include principles such as that an individual contributor be limited to a single share or unit in the company, a mechanism for collection of commissions, a mechanism to provide for funds to market the site, and a mechanism to re-distribute profits back to shareholder contributors in proportion to the sales generated by the individual contributor.
4. New contributors to the site would receive the % commission set without a profit distribution component, unless they subsequently purchase a unit or share in the company, based on a valuation of the unit trust or share at the time - valuations would ordinarily only take place annually due to logistical difficulties.

Any site that is established should have the following principles:
1. Content approval follows a similar mechanism to Alamy.
2. Intelligent Search engine that can learn based on previous successful outcomes.
3. Decent contributor commissions for sales.
4. Site commissions are used for management & operation costs, reserves and remaining profits used for distribution to photographers / shareholders.

If we were to go down this path, or something similar, we need to discuss what the minimum commitments would be for contributors, and have a way of gauging the level of support. Personally I think we'd need the support of at least 500 photographers, ideally more, and a fair percentage of the top 1000 photographers currently on microstock. The real difficulty is with IS exclusive contributors.

Forum login is separate from site login.

About the GOLD collection, I don't see it as what we are discussing here.  It's not microstock at higher prices.  

I have two accounts in FP, one for micro and another for macrostock.  While I may agree with proposed changes, such as the credits-per-size-subs, on the microstock account, this is something I don't agree to do in the macrostock account.  I think the macrostock account should allow RM too (currently RM uploading is unavailable).

In either case, I think there must always be a basic inspection.  SP doesn't have it and we see a lot of crap there.

One idea to discuss with FP or another agency that would team up with us: the coop would take care of inspection.  Were any of you in TotallyPhotos?  Inspection was done maybe only by the members.  The coop images would be uploaded and inspected in a separate application.  There would be rules about quality levels and keywording.  After inspection, the images would be moved to the site's regular collection.  In addition to the contributor's name, there could be some tag or icon for the coop.  We could have some HTML coding exclusive for coop images, to add in our websites, mail to friends & clients.  

A period of 6 months for exclusivity looks good.  This would be a real "premiere" collection - seen there before anywhere else.

@ holgs:

1. Please explain how many money will take setup of new company with aquisition of some already established agency?

2. Shares and similar... You are talking like that will be multibillion business...

3. You wish to do all that with 500-1000 authors?

Personally I think your plan is nice and I'd like to see you to do it with Crestock ;-)
They seems as one of most hurting this business of agencies around. Also if you need vector site for aquisition, I'd suggest VS ;-)

It would be so nice to be true because you need a loooooot of money to do so.

@ Madelaide:

As you mentioned a lot of crap... But, also crap sells. I saw even 'crap' sold on Mostphotos as well as some grainy OOF grass and so on...

There are some standards to be followed in microstock (which is by all photography standards mostly categorized as 'crap')...

There are some standards to be followed in stock photography (which is by nature different than microstock).
So how do you imagine someone will try to sell expensive microstock images under GOLD label if there is someone who will say: 'sorry dude - this image can be included only in micro category'?

RM - it is not a problem at all... Timeframe of licence and say 20x initial price set plus/minus territory and other affecting elements...

By the way you don't really need 2 separate accounts at all... All you need is better UI and your files management with numerous options.

I agree that nothing is mature enough yet. But I believe it will be mature some time in the near future. I am telling all the contributors I know about this forum. We need to be a bigger crowd. A crowd that make real noise, not individual shouting.

1. Companies are relatively easy and quick to set up - the initial costs are for registration of the company, business name etc. - this depends on the jurisdiction that the company is in. A unit trust is a vehicle that operates similarly to a company, but may be more convenient - corporations law was quite a long time ago for me, and my main specialisation is employment law, so I'd have to do a fair bit more research on what would work best.

The way companies operate and the requirements vary country by country. I know many contributors come from the US, but I'm almost sure that wouldn't be the best location to register the company - if you're starting from scratch you may as well set up in the most advantageous place - somewhere with a solid foundation of law, but where intellectual property laws favor stock artists more so than corporation. The main set-up cost as I see it would be to establish the website architecture on a scale that could support the size of agency that a new site would be competing with. In terms of purchasing an agency, I wouldn't rule out purchasing and adapting an agency that has already failed - lucky-oliver springs to mind. Presumably the price for this would be much lower, and the system would already be tested. To make it worthwhile, the site needs to handle photos, vectors and video on day one. It would be absolutely essential to get designers on board and look after them properly.

2. There are plenty of companies that operate and are not multi-billion dollar businesses. I think our primary target would be IS - any approach that looks like a rag-tag rabble (and is) competing against Getty will fail.  EDIT TO ADD: If people are going to be putting money into something then they need to know that they have a share of the asset at the end of the day and aren't just peeing into the wind. If the site becomes successful, then their share of the asset would actually appreciate significantly. Imagine if IS had been set up as a company with initial contributors as the shareholders - we may not have the same problems we do now... or at least the initial shareholders would now be much richer than the are now... as opposed to just a few individuals.

3. The difficulty with a company owned by 500-1000+ people all with equal shares is really in appointing somebody to make executive decisions. This needs to be carefully considered and dealt with explicitly in the document setting up the company. On the other hand, the more contributors there are willing to sign up and put in a share of the initial capital, the greater the chance of success.

To me the attraction of such a site would be that contributors would have a vehicle to really maximise their revenue, and be protected from changes. If successful it would also be a real dis-incentive to contribute material to a competitor. The more I think about it however, the more I think its important that we have the big players on board. If you look at the IS charts, the fist 50 contributors make up over 200,000 files. I suspect that the top 1000 would account for over half the collection, and an even higher % of the sales.

they are , donding, on this other thread
http://www.microstockgroup.com/istockphoto-com/istock-content-to-sell-on-photos-com-and-jupiterunlimited/msg96149/?topicseen#new

check it out.

Wise move Milinz! 

Holgs,
I think it would be better, if we could, to avoid getting into the trouble of setting up a real coop.  We're people from different places of the world.  There must be a minimum of paper to deal with.  Any problems and disagreements would be perhaps a pain to deal with.  I still think it would be easier to team up with an existing agency, if we manage to. 

Sorry, I had to change servers, and it screwed up my accounts. I'm back 

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