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Messages - gwhitton
101
« on: February 21, 2011, 20:04 »
They split subscription sales and regular sales up. Why - I have no clue, probably because of the delayed payment. Subscriptions sales should be easy to spot. Its not intuitive where regular sales are shown, either on the old site or the new one.
A little clearer wording on the menus would make this alot easier.
102
« on: February 21, 2011, 20:00 »
If you have or plan to sell a given image to a micro that charges less than Panther, chose the 30% option.
103
« on: February 21, 2011, 17:42 »
Panther,
On the way to trying to improve the upload mechanism on your website, why did you make navigating the rest of the contributor pages that much more difficult, and painfully slow.
And why do you keep making it so hard to look at sales? Take a page from Dreamstime, and cut your sales report page from 3 pages down to 1.
I have done website design long enough to know, that if you got rid of all the fancy "page loading" ajax, and the collapsible menus, that have now slowed down the load times of the pages, and made it harder to get around - you would have much happier contributors.
Its almost painful not being able to make the changes myself they are so simple.
104
« on: August 19, 2009, 19:50 »
gwhitton,
Wikipedia is evolving. Eventually we may have full confidence that its content is provided by people with appropriate expertise, is peer-reviewed and reliable. While the story about Dan Rather shows value, Wikipedia has also published erroneous and self-serving material that they've struggled to clean up.
With regard to images for web pages - aren't you basically saying that your clients can't afford traditional stock prices, so they deserve to get images for whatever they feel they want to pay? That's how people justified Napster - CD prices were too high, so we 'deserve' free music.
99.9 % of my sales on SS are 25 cent subscriptions, so we got from "$50" to 25 cents very quickly. I hope your customers are happy at this point, but if not, I guess the next stop is zero. The microstock have created a nearly perfect "buyer's market".
Stocktastic, No I am not concluding that I or anyone should have to pay nothing for photographs. And I wasn't the one who determined .25c was the right price to by or sell at. What am saying is that for a glorified thumbnail, $50 is way to much, and simply would not fly in the internet age, when suddenly millions of multi-media websites needed cheap imagery to be practical. But at the same time the internet opened up photographers 1000's if not millions of new clients they couldn't have reached in the past. So there is a trade off, and the microstock explosion is the manifestation of both realities. Nothing is stopping you of course from charging $50 or $100 dollars at the local photo gallery, but as was always the case in the past, 95% of the people will look at a photo on the wall, comment how nice it is and walk on. But at the same time they won't hesitate to buy a photo calendar or a postcard covered with the very same images. Two different markets, it just comes down to whether you are willing to serve both.
105
« on: August 19, 2009, 00:30 »
Stockastic,
About you thoughts on Wikipedia, I do agree something was lost (editorial quality), but at the same time it brought to the market some very powerful things, that its competitors just couldn't match. It allowed everyone on Earth to be an editor...many of whom were willing to add material and review other's material for "free". This has obvious draw backs, but it also has numerous benefits. While not exactly related, the best example of this occurred when a bunch of bloggers were able to nail Dan Rather to the cross when he tried to take down a sitting president with bogus documents. The web and Wikipedia in particular have made it possible for a level of access and transparency that didn't exist 10 years ago. And lastly there is timeliness. With all that free access and help Wikipedia is generally updated with in seconds of something significant can happening on any given subject. I wouldn't be surprised while I was sitting on the shores of Lake Powell taking pictures this summer, someone, somewhere was madly typing away on Wikipedia the second Michael Jackson was rumored to have died. Wikipedia's competitors just can't compete with that...especially when there are so many people willing to do for free, what they would have to pay an army of editors to do (update, and watch the headlines).
That said I think Wikipedia may have lost temporarily some editorial quality, but I think in the end it will get that back and still have many of the advantages it has now over its former competitors.
106
« on: August 19, 2009, 00:12 »
Speaking from both the view point of a buyer and a seller, RF has its place in the market. As a web designer it makes absolutely no sense to pay $50 for a small photo to put on a web page. And my clients don't have $1000's to spend on just images alone...and I doubt I am unique in that regard.
That being said, there is, and will likely always remain a niche out there for the very best photographers, taking photos that nobody else can get, using equipment no else can afford. But the combination of the internet, computers, and high quality digital cameras have leveled the playing field on the lower end of the photography profession, at the same time whole new markets demanding cheap imagery have emerged.
So nothing has really changed, those who find themselves in a niche with a high barrier of entry will make the big bucks, or at least a decent living, and those who don't will get the left overs.
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