Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on March 29, 2019, 04:26
I'd love someone to come up with disruptive innovation to drive prices back up.

I've been reading a lot here and I would like to say that I think there is a way to shake loose the agencies.
The problem has ever been the way of piecing together and maintaining a proper website, the costs and the time. It seems that nobody thinks that this is really feasible, and that joining several websites of this kind at the same hosting place would result into a portal alternative to the agencies.
I followed at a distance the Simbiostock experiment: IMO the basic idea is still appealing, although it think that the way it was technically carried out proved not to be the best.

I'm mainly a web programmer and SEO expert (who loathes the 'social', sorry :-)) and secondly a photographer. As such I couldn't resist the temptation to build my own virtual shop, and eventually I was surprised myself by how little expensive my effort has been, both in terms of money and of time.

I focused on reducing the cost of the hosting by developing a fully automated OFFLINE procedure (on my computer) to prepare the data before uploading them:
-      fully automated .csv files  - including the automation of Excel - to populate the product webpages
-   ftp to upload the files to be sold and the watermarked images to be displayed
-   no manual intervention required
-   no extra costs for a special hosting.

Now after a month's work my fresh new website is taking off satisfactorily. To get started, rather than my favorite shoots I chose a niche that had already proved quite profitable: illustration scanned from old books (I am an avid collector of antique dusty tomes), refurbished and processed.
My investment? All together $171.00 (hosting included) !

If you like the idea, have a look at: https://vintage-nostalgia.com
Or find more details on the subject in my blog here.

Should you feel tempted too, I'll be happy to give you a hand :-)

Compliment for the site! super! very well thought.
Few years ago i made my website to sell images, but few months after I gave up, to much time to care...speaking of difficulties I know what you mean :-)
Compliment also for the endurance.
Are you thinking of any synergy among photographers and/or illustrators on the Shopify platform?
That could be a very good alternative to the agencies.

Hi,

this is my first post here.  I am in the microstock market since some years as contributor with an average of 1500 images per agency .
I read several posts here and at SS forum about a drop of the images sold through SS.
I observed a sensible fall too in my earnings at SS (35-40%) since July 2016 - the trend keeps going - but at the same time I 'm blessed with a remarkable rise of earnings and sales at DT, FT and Istock, and slower but also noteworthy at Alamy with a satisfactory end of the month to compensate SS,  adding something more at the total 

Anyone else with the same experience?