Someone will offer us 110% and take 30% of the sale. Impossible? Heck no, competition. We sell for $10 if it sells we get $11 and they get $3. Which looks good but it's really just a math game.

Picfair is already selling on 100%, plus 20% markup. It works.

I think, FAA/pixels could become a much more disruptive player, because with turn of a switch they'll have a collection with several millions of images. Even without any advertising using their existing SEO, if they will sell 1% of that collection, that would bring enough money to fund an advertising campaign, and then the sales could spiral up.
If they go ahead with it, they could seriously impact marginal stock agencies.

In addition, if Dick sells a picture of a tomato for $28 on pixels, and Harry gets 20 cents for his tomato on Thinkstock or other low-paying agency, he will get really pissed off and he'll pull his images from those places.

I've replied to the thread that I'm willing to participate in the beta. It may go nowhere but it'll be interesting to see if he can get something off the ground. Can't see how it could hurt anything given I've already uploaded a portion of my stock portfolio (and just need to exclude those items that require an editorial use only license unless they provide that)

Quote from: rimglow on March 21, 2014, 09:50

No Watermarks! Always a problem.

Aaargh, I can see why they don't like them on 'fine art' offerings, but they should certainly be there, and prominent, on stock.

It's beta. That is just a demonstration page.

The real value in FAA is in not the same old stock photos everyone else sells.  Its the real artwork that has potential to sell on products.  And these are not "one off" deals.  When you decide to bring out a line of products based on an artist, it requires negotiations over multiple products.

This is why there are agencies that deal specifically with art licensing.

I don't think this is out of desperation.  The company is run very efficiently with something like 3 people. Unlike places like CafePress who are having trouble supporting hundreds.

Any biz school consultant would tell him to stick to his companies strengths especially with competition from Getty's prints.com coming online.

Most business consultants understand only conventional, established practices.
They would have never sanctioned Jeff Bezos ambitions when he started Amazon, or even istockphoto and Shutterstock ten years ago.

Pond5 has quality control.  FAA/Pixels does not.

Imagine all of the "great" stock a buyer will have to sort through when rank amateurs who have been rejected from the micros start putting up photos of their feet and those amazing window seat airplane shots.

Will people buy images that haven't been inspected - or even looked at - by an agency?   And no checking of keywords either, so look for rampant keyword spamming.

This isn't like Symbiostock - your high-quality images will be up there side-by-side with boatloads of cr@p that people couldn't get accepted anywhere else. 

Like DF_Studios said - unless the 'stock' is kept totally separate from the 'art', this will ruin FAA from my point of view.   The only buyers I get find my photos by keyword search.  If that search is polluted by tons of keyword-spammed stock, I might as well give up.

The site hasn't been seriously updated in years, and has plenty of exisiting problems.  It's basically a one-man show and now he's off chasing another rainbow.  It's depressing.

There are two parties in a sale.  The buyer and the seller.  A real business would bring in a a bunch of stock buyers and run focus groups to see if the idea had merit. They would also run focus groups among the artists to iron out any potential problems...

Actually I think they've nailed it from the artist perspective. Maybe too much so. They're giving the artists way too much freedom to price images however they want and even write their own license terms.

The result will be zero consistency and uniformity, which buyers want and which they'd find if they did like you suggested and do some research and testing.

They'd also find that buyers don't want a bazillion different price points, and they sure as heck don't want to read a new license every time they download an image. Which they will have to do in this case if everyone can create whatever custom license terms they dream up.

I think this has very little chance of working. It may appeal to artists, but it will be a huge flop with buyers, especially if it is to be aimed at competing with Shutterstock and Getty and possibly attract those kinds of buyers.

They need to narrow the scope a bit. There is room for variable pricing in this business, but not from $1 to $1,000. And none of this "write your own license" insanity.

<a href='http://fineartamerica.com/featured/mouse-of-the-house-mandie-manzano.html' size='20'><img src='http://fineartamerica.com/displayartwork.html?id=5927941&width=250&height=333' alt='Art Prints' title='Art Prints' style='border: none;'>[/url]

Yup as expected "we" are plunging forward.  Despite any objections/concerns raised.  Basically it was conceived, built and now it will be implemented. Make it up as we go along. Let the customer service headache begin.

If Putin ran a company this would be it. ;-)

FAA is one guy.  If he doesn't have help lined up he's going to be swamped by problems selling stock. 

Have you seen the recent threads on the FAA forum about 'missing' images, and images where full-size preview doesn't work?  There's some bug involving the database that's breaking the links to the original JPGs, and it's been going on for quite a while - there are several currently screwed up in my small portfolio, so the damage has to be extensive.  Meanwhile they're going off on this tangent, which to experienced stock sellers makes no sense.

I guess that's enough of my negativity/realism for one day...

  Once the code is done.  That's that.  Time to launch.

He gets a lot done. How many people in IS software department?


BTW, he just mentioned in related FAA thread:
I know what I'm doing. This is going to work. Why? I've got all the time and patience in the world to make it work, and I don't have to treat our sellers like garbage like every other company in the space.
Quite refreshing approach.

I think he's essentially a good guy - but he may not realise the can of worms he's opened up and might drop "his sellers" into.

There are a number of logical errors in his interpretation of the microstock market, and now he's suggesting that anybody who doesn't agree to his understanding of the market is "100% wrong".

The "I'm right, you're wrong" school of management isn't noted for its successes.