MicrostockGroup

Thanks for picking up and enlarging on that, Adelaide. In any venture of this sort it would be important to keep the quality high. Buyers don't want to wade through a load of rubbish. They'll go elsewhere, and they're spoiled for choice nowadays.

But, with a cooperative venture, who's going to be the judge of quality? It could indeed be a source of conflict. Maybe there would have to be some sort of voting system. But that could be horribly unwieldy with thousands of images ... oh boy!

Other questions that will have to be considered are:

-who keeps the books (ie, looks after and tracks the money)
-who looks after the IT (who pays for this and the start up costs, running costs until profitable)
-how will you correspond (assuming you aren't all in the same location,timezone, meetings could be difficult - Coops are enormally localised)

The other thing that would be considered is how is this going to differ from featurepics which already offers 70%.  Are all costs etc going to be less than 30% or revenue?

I spend far too much time on here already.

  I'd be interested in being involved in this discussion.  My perspective is going to be a little different than most people here.  I've only recently started messing around in the micro stock area, and I'm not really that good at it yet.  My background is in IT, primarily database design and programming and thick client programming (programs that get installed on the actual computer).  It's been years since I've programmed a web page and I know that's all changed.  Just that database aspects of something like this could be very involved.
  Lucky Oliver and Fotolia are the only two sites I've gotten accounts on and LO is the one I've been concentrating one, figure we're both new at this and I really like their informal feel.
  http://www.luckyoliver.com/portfolio/Allen+Stoner

Allen

I'm game, let's go!

Hi all,

I'm new to this site so maybe I'm not as qualified as some of you guys, but this is such an interesting subject....I couldnt resist to say my opinion….

Coming to the point, I believe Madelaide and Batelour are right. Inspection is by far one of the main concerns and in a way it could be really annoying for a photographer to see an image being refused by his own colleagues, whether it’s an association or a cooperative society.

So, my idea is to let the market judge instead of inspectors. Just think: how many of you guys have images in your portfolio that did very well on some agencies but haven’t been even accepted on some other sites?
Further, if you could have your own website, which photos would you publish and sell? your whole portfolio or just the “cream”?
I think that the key to attract buyers to a new place, which certainly shouldnt be a "clone" of some istock or shutterstock, is to offer them the highest standard of quality in the market.
How to do it? Well, in the very first stage, let contributors upload only their best selling images (i.e. images that had a number of sales in a certain period among one or more agencies).
This would help to fill the box with great contents. Customers would save time as they would not go through hundreds of snapshots. In the meanwhile, you wouldn’t need inspectors as others have already done the “dirty” work for you.
In the next stage, i.e. when you got a decent market share and money comes, you can build up a well paid inspector team (not only made by photographers but designers too, which most of the times have a different approach and a very critical eye on what is worthy or not). This would definitely help you to fill the gap between you and traditional microstocks, as you can now deal with fresh ideas without first waiting to see how they do with your competitors.

Clearly, the bad side of this story is:
-Slower growth compared with other agencies (at least in the first stage, but who cares as long as quality is high?);
-Barriers to entry: not all photographers may qualify, or some of them may have just a little bunch of photographs to upload;
-Photographers should work with some other agencies as well (again, who cares? everybody here knows that exclusivity doesn’t pay in the microstock system)

Then, the next step would be price structure...buyers shouldn’t spend more money than they already do for an image and photographers should earn more. BUT HERE WE NEED A MIRACLE!!!

Hey, I wrote a lot!! maybe some of you felt sleeping in the meanwhile….oooops!
Best everything,
Diego

Hey Bryan.

sorry for taking a while to get back to you.  I took a vote of those brainstorming for the microstock coop and the consensus was that - although we value your help and opinions very much, you would also, eventually, be the competition (to some extent - despite the fact that the buyer market is pretty large and diverse).  So to keep our top secret earth shattering ideas for ourselves we thought it best to confer with you outside of the actual 'coop brainstorming area'

Not a problem Leaf...feel free to ping me anytime. While strategy is important, most of it's execution.  Get the team focused- good things happen when there's a clear goal.  The details work themselves out!