You just have to make something that attracts contributors and offers something that buyers want.

This would seem to suggest something innovative...

I don't understand. Why is everyone here so pessimistic about trying to do something innovative in this industry?

Is there anything innovative that can be done in this industry?

Nothing personal. I read this: http://www.microstockgroup.com/members-only-discussion/shutterstock-rejections-20579/msg0/?topicseen#new

And it seems there are a lot of images rejected, that are good.


Any one else have any thoughts?

I mean, I agree with you that the article is old. There are also a lot of updated articles, with similar information, from not too long ago.

I'm just asking for people's opinions. I'm not sure it's true or not. My initial thought is that making a site like Flickr, but with a marketplace could be huge. Why did Flickr abandon their marketplace plans and make a plan with Getty anyways?

When I stroll through Flickr, I see so much content that is so good. If there was a way to sort through all of it, and license it, I think it could make a lot of money.

These are just my thoughts of course.

So, for example, do you think 500px new market will fail? I look at the content there, and there's a lot of good stuff and a lot of stock (ranked poorly). They recently brought on some new executives from iStock, etc. Do you think their market won't fair well? And why?

@BD.

I realize this. There are several other articles later on that support this.

Do you agree/disagree? How do you think things have changed?

So do agencies currently decide what shows up first in search, etc.?

Any other thoughts?

@Sean Locke Photography

I've read a lot that this is true. Most buyers go to google and then follow an image from there.

@ShadySue


I think iStock accepts far less than 50% of photos. At least, my friends and I were rejected. I was just thinking about the possibility for the company. I do think that it may spread it thin amongst contributors, but it would give many more photographers the chance to sell their work, ie, it would open the floodgates.

I'm just saying that I think that if you made a site like Flickr, with a marketplace. You would get a lot more contributors. You would also get a lot, *a lot* of buyers, just because of how much traffic the site would get.

So, I think it would be useful to have a Flickr/eBay type entity for photography. The users would set their own prices.

I'm relatively new to stock. I've done a bunch of digging around though at many sites, industry analysis, etc. I came across this interesting article, that argues that the licensing market is actually much greater than anyone ever though of: http://www.danheller.com/blog/posts/total-size-of-licensing-market.html. It argues that the licensing market could be as large as 20 billion dollars if a company just accepted most photographers that tried to sell. I tried to sell at several agencies and was rejected. While I know that some of my work is not that great, I think it does hold some commercial value. Does anyone think that if a large social network company like Flickr made a marketplace, that they could make a billion plus dollar company, by just accepting everyone?