Yes, yes, we've already gone over that.  If it was so simple, newbs wouldn't come rushing in here after getting a dslr looking for step by step instructions.

It's not the newbs who ask for help that are eating your lunch.

I would expect, though, that some cycle will run its inevitable course and a new market will develop.  What I think forces this is that the current microstocks have vastly too much cr@p - lousy, repetitious images loaded with spammed keywords -  and going back through it now, to make real value judgements on 10s of millions of images, is prohibitively expensive.  They're trying to force the junk to the rear of the search by all sorts of crazy tweaks to the search rules, "vetta" nonsense and so on -  but they can't accomplish what they really need, and just get tied up in other knots.  That huge collection of junk is just overwhelmig.  Basically, they're hoarders, living in houses full of useless trash that they're unable to deal wth.  This is where crowdsourcing eventually leads.

So there should be opportunity, at some point, for new sites that start fresh and are much more sophisticated about what they take in and how they index it - not to mention how they pay contributors.  

ehh, there we go again... how do you expect images not to be repetitious when they have to as generic as possible to pile up $1 sales? You are cursing the microstock ports for the most basic attribute they need to have. As for being lousy and crap, well imho some of the bestsellers are utter crap as photography or just as 'visual content'. Most buyers have no taste whatsoever, I learned the being a graphic artist. The remember the very first  studio I worked for, a pretty hyped up place with many awards ran by a former wunderkind student of the school I graduated from. He always said when insturctions came in: 'never to give into the clients bad taste or we will be swimming in an ocean a visual sheeitt sooner than you might think'. Well, there's no controll like that in microstock with totally uneducated inspectors only judging by technical merits... and it shows : /

Quote from: stockastic on July 08, 2011, 11:38

I would expect, though, that some cycle will run its inevitable course and a new market will develop.  What I think forces this is that the current microstocks have vastly too much cr@p - lousy, repetitious images loaded with spammed keywords -  and going back through it now, to make real value judgements on 10s of millions of images, is prohibitively expensive.  They're trying to force the junk to the rear of the search by all sorts of crazy tweaks to the search rules, "vetta" nonsense and so on -  but they can't accomplish what they really need, and just get tied up in other knots.  That huge collection of junk is just overwhelmig.  Basically, they're hoarders, living in houses full of useless trash that they're unable to deal wth.  This is where crowdsourcing eventually leads.

So there should be opportunity, at some point, for new sites that start fresh and are much more sophisticated about what they take in and how they index it - not to mention how they pay contributors.  

ehh, there we go again... how do you expect images not to be repetitious when they have to as generic as possible to pile up $1 sales? You are cursing the microstock ports for the most basic attribute they need to have. As for being lousy and crap, well imho some of the bestsellers are utter crap as photography or just as 'visual content'. Most buyers have no taste whatsoever, I learned the being a graphic artist. The remember the very first  studio I worked for, a pretty hyped up place with many awards ran by a former wunderkind student of the school I graduated from. He always said when insturctions came in: 'never to give into the clients bad taste or we will be swimming in an ocean a visual sheeitt sooner than you might think'. Well, there's no controll like that in microstock with totally uneducated inspectors only judging by technical merits... and it shows : /

That's true, but not for all buyers; I don't know about "most".  Just as in any other kind of sales or retailing - one store isn't going to bring in every kind of buyer.  For many buyers, nothing matters but price.  

The microstock market has to be segmented.   Surely some buyers would be interested in sites that gave them vastly better, more relevant search results than what they're getting now.  Delivering better results means the agency has to invest more money in building the database.  They can't continue to rely on user-supplied keywords, and forcing contributors to mash everything through a "controlled vocabulary" on their own is too limiting.  The agency has to invest some time on reviewing the contributor's keywords - and maybe even editing and adding to them, instead of making all of this purely the contributor's responsibility.   They need to become more like booksellers and less like warehouse operators.

I think you're just starting to sound like a one track record.  I can't say I read too much of your posts any more.  They're all just 'bitter complain insult whine repeat'.  Sorry.

Your posts are so negative . You sound like" I love myself  by noon and hate the rest of the world in the afternoon"
 Can you let go of negative energy, listen more Jazz  and relax ?