MicrostockGroup

I was turned off by the sarcasm and ridicule.  Not my idea of characteristics expected of "leaders."

It's a fair guess that most people would be open to joining some sort of microstock association (e.g. microstock.org - click on it and look at the photo for a prophetic chuckle). From my point of view it would be an extremely good idea for leaf to purchase that domain name, then revamp this place into the forum for the organization.

What's turned me off so far is that certain people seem to be under the impression that they can (almost) single-handedly whip up some sort of commercial website, or that they can successfully enter the marketplace with an absolute minimum of venture capital. I'm also put off that the people with the most to say on this are also the ones who hardly sell anything - they seem to blame their lack of income on 'unfair commissions' rather than their inability to make and market commercial imagery.

As to what's missing, I think that to be perhaps one of the earliest goals any organization needs to set: a mission statement.

Ironic, that's the name of IS's new collection , isn't it?

maybe since canada being bilingual ,  they had a french translator  where one is masc (without the e) and the other is fem (with the e) but synonyms.
then again,  coming from IStock, we won't know until they tell us what THEY really mean 

I looked at pre-registered domain names and one company wanted $10000, I would think that one would not be cheap, if you can come up with one that is not registered let me know the name and I will give you a site and some space free of charge, although I cannot offer anything that fancy but if you want a webspace and domain to use as a place to kickstart this, I will donate one and you can have it free of charge:

This is what I will contribute:
www.photographers-collective.com which comes with .co.uk and .net
Preloaded with DNN which gives you a Blog, Articles, Forums, wiki, FAQ etc: many of these can be written to and submitted from your desktop via Live Writer, also you have webmail and 20 email addresses, so emails would go from [email protected]

There is no catch, I am taking another direction and will be looking more at 'Digital Web Logistics' tools, that will act as transport between vendor and customer more than another imaging website, there is room for all idea's and if I can get this working with micro payments for use then I will be back to talk to you.

I registered DigitalWebLogistics .com .net and .org for 2 years total cost $70, so there are still some bargins to be had out there.

David     

perharps the collective could try approaching Photo Shelter as they already had once the model of a working site, AND, they had a similar mission ie. taking on Getty. I recall reading their frontpage agenda and thought, "wow David (no pun intended) taking on Goliath !"

With due respect in reciprocation, with your exemplary pro-active voracious enthusiasm they just might stand the ghost of a chance 

Before it changes, I had to do a screen snapshot of this one. 




Talk about even results? Out of 66 people, it's a dead heat!

Last post as this is off topic.

In a year the Alamy library grew by 50% that is from 10 million to 15 million images, revenue flattened and fell, the market Alamy fits into is shrinking with online content and newspapers squeezing suppliers, many will not last another 5 years and in my opinion many other stock imaging sites will shrink as well as new delivery models come online, Alamy have tried a couple of schemes that were not thought through so the trust to take things forward is lost.

It takes 90 days for Alamy to release the images after deletion, I want to have control over my assets and a new Digital Web Logistics (digital media distrubution) model up and running by late autumn this year.

Regards

David

good ideas, but not sure about Twitter or Facebook with them being so easy to set up or hack,
see latest today on Yahoo news

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/090514/tecnology/net_us_facebook_hackers

That is the concept, but I was struggling to get it across, then I though about a phrase or term that people could relate to and it is Digital Web Logistics via the internet, at the moment you upload to many sites as you say, and let them set the price and sell your assets and only pay you when you have enough sales, they have to pay the bandwidth for you to manage your images, pay for storage, pay someone to look at many images they do not really want, that is some of the costs that cuts the photographers share.

I know I am going on a bit and yeah you have heard it before, but try to think in Vendor - Asset - Store - Customer, and not Photographer - Image - Agency - Customer, these are your assets that you load up to the next best startup website.

This model is good for the photographer and agencies:
1. photographer uploads once and retains control of thier asset until the point of delivery
2: by choosing to submit a small data packet the image data (text packet) is added into a data warehouse,
3: the agents pull the data they are interested in via a large online search engine
5: the engine gets a request for one of your images copies the thumbnail 170px x 170px to a storage zone
6: it will be availiable for a month in that zone
7: the agent now has a smaller set of images to suit thier website to look at
8: Agent has much lower costs as they do not store the full size image just thumbnails
9: Instead of many uploads, rejections for not what we need, you images are working for you
10: You have set the price the agent must pay for the image
11. if you trust the agent you could let the cash build or select instant payment
12: you get the price you set not what the agent sets, they run thier business on the markup they add

Example:
Look at the new model for agents, lets say a wildlife magazine want to add and image stocksite to bring in some more interest and revenue, Agent downloads a toolkit or template, registers to use the service, creates thier pages, goes to the search engine and filters by keyword and price band the images they want, marks the images which can either be an instant addition or the Photographer can request a notification and decide later, within a day the Magazine has a very large gallery of images they need without having to deal with one submission

This will either be a yes or no based on the search engine, I will be uploading 2 million combinations of random keywords as a test, the submit process to the search engine will have an option to submit matched keywords in several languages, this opens up your images to the worldwide market place not just english speaking. 

David
   

Yep unfortunately there doesn't appear to be significant interest from the contributors that matter... let alone any broad support from elsewhere. Don't be fooled - the most important thing here isn't the format of any site, its the participation of contributors. Unless there is broad based support for any "collective", there isn't a collective.