It still would be just another site, no images and no customers!

How can we find a new buyer base, a better plan is to forget a new agency, get together and talk to Google, they have the biggest search engine in the world, one that could connect Artists directly With millions of potential Customes, but Google do not index the key attributes we need for such a service.

So get together with google and standardize and setup metadata templates with some international price bands, add some other attributes like Licence Type, Editorial, Commercial, Model Released, Property Released etc:, into a new section of metadata.

Agree a way to upload your images to the web and pay a small fee to Google per asset, Google then send the bots to collect the assets metadata, Google add more search options onto Google images, or create a commercial images page where buyers can filter by attributes and contact you via your own website for a direct sale based on the filters they applied in the search, this could be automated by software as well.

Hands up who needs a new microstock site?

David

I know the answer finally. It isn�t Google cache. My images were removed but the thumbnails and everything else is on the site so far. It is possible to registered from this pages, it is possible to put my images to shop basket and it is possible to purchase them. If you pay, you will receive empty file, because my images were deleted.

You have done your bit and the 6 month deletion period has expired and all physical files should have been deleted from their server and all third parties, I wonder now if it is a breach of their T&C and could be classed as illegal use of your images?

An email to their member services with screenshots, pointing out that this in your opinion now illegal use of your images, ask them to remove the thumbnails within the next 7 days, would be the next step, they would be the ones to deal with the third party as you have no arrangement.

David 

Very Very Valid inputs David. Replying to your skepticism in brief.
1.If you google my name "Sugandha Dubey" my linked in profile can be viewed to validate my professional status.
2. I was the business and content head for the region for three years. Set up the practice in the SAARC region.,
3. mentioned Getty to validate that having worked for the leader in Stock Imagery understand the nuances of the business from the business perspective.

I have looked at your LinkedIn profile, and at http://www.visageimages.com, which will be the market leader and have a head start in the region on your project, now I feel more comfortable that you are not a wannabe that has no real insight into the business side of the industry, as this is a young business 3 years is reasonable.  

4. You would also agree that its silly to post everything i.e business details and other dynamics on this forum. This was just to initiate a conversation and get an insight of the thought process of contributors across the globe. which is y i have mentioned my mail id for those interested to contact me directly interact with me.

I know that it would not be wise to lay all your cards on the table, and you have mentioned the market in India as emerging market that you will be going after, also you mention content and the publishing houses in India, there are already many publishing companies that cut costs and use companies in India to source the assets on thier behalf, rather than having an in-house asset buying resource, these Indian companies source the assets via the existing stock websites and then present the lightboxes back to the publishing houses.
If they have problems finding an image then they use request services like http://www.photographersdirect.com/

5.You will be surprised, but contrary to what you feel, I have got an overwhelming response from contributors who are interested in the project. People are willing to contribute and look forward to the launch of the site.

I am not surprised at this and it is a big problem in this industry, some big artists have the staff and infrustructure to take a chance with a startup, then there are a lot of artists that are not business minded and are happy to find and upload to a startup and complain here later, they just do not value and protect their assets as well as they should, many sole trading contributors have jumped in without doing their homework, invested a lot of time and effort with new agencies, for the agency to fail as it did not understand the market, or it made all the right noises but then overtraded VC was withdrawn and the costs brought them down, or they were just badly run.

If you went into a local manufacturer and said to the owner, I am going to open a stand in the high street, I cannot operate without stock and would like your assets as part of the stock, I will not pay anything for these assets but sell them for you, and when I have sold 100 of your assets I will pay you a percentage of the selling price and your share will be the lowest, this store will be in competition to the stands you already supply and will be targeting many of the same customers, would the manufacturer do business with you.

I am sure that in your business life you would not commit any of your company assets before a full risk assesment, looked at the potential market, worked out a business plan with the possible gains and losses to you as the vendor, including the possible return on investment by working with this agent, and most important a better knowledge of the people you were dealing with, why should any artists be different, some of these points you have now addressed.

6. I already have a bouquet of leading top notch Corbis and Getty contributors already in my panel., people who know me and believe in my project.

This one does not work out as you think especially with a new startup, you may offer an alternative agency to the industry leaders like Corbis and Getty, but the contributors with these and niche agencies are image and similar exclusive, so what are these contributors going to offer your agency, the assets that C & G are not interested in.

I am not anti new agencies, I just see a new agency a month come online without an existing customer base or a business plan to show where the new customer base is coming from, any challenge is meet by 'that is a secret watch this space', and then contributors just uploading without considering the risks, the image library market is already saturated and the pie will not grow until the new markets out there are tapped into, some of these will need a new model rather than an new agency.

I have many other thoughts about this industry: http://digitalweblogistics.wordpress.com/    

David

Where is PhotoShelter and "All of the Above"   

My best seller over sites is an editorial. I personally consider it a snap but it seems to fill a commercial void. The reason is the very restrictive policy lately on Dreamstime and especially ShutterStock that seem to confound editorial with "news".

The CEO of Alamy was asked at the last November meeting why they were trying to take a Commercial Collection into the USA, when 78% of their existing business was editorial, his answer was that the US Editorial and Advertorial markets were already well catered for, and there was little to no room for Alamy to expand into these sectors, maybe the big websites also know the markets well and that some sectors are just not worth going after.

Sometimes just the amount of work and investment needed for expansion, makes options that we think would be good, just not a viable business move for the agencies.  

David      

As the site evolves, those interested and willing to understand my vision can contact me for submissions. My first requirement being Travel Images, in highest resolution possible.

Sugandha

Sugandha,
I thought you was a business man, would you allow your companies assets to be uploaded or transfered to a website that only has a holding page, on the back of a post in a forum, it is way to soon for you to be asking for Hi-Res contributors assets.
  
Sorry but the first requirement is for you to have a website up and running, upload tool or ftp, published and verified contact details, a business model with a unique selling point, a marketing strategy, contributor terms and conditions, buyers terms and conditions, details of prices for buyers and commission rates for contributors.

You may not get Travel Images, in highest resolution possible as they are not niche there are other outlets for these, you should be listing the styles that will give the unique selling point, the ones that you need to fit into the indian markets.

Also you say you have worked for Getty, but you do not say in what capacity, Alamy has its servers and support departments in India to save costs, so there are many there that could say they have 'worked for Alamy', even if they were a department head, inspector or developer, it does not mean that we would then trust them with our assets.

Until then you will not get much support from most of the established contributors, even then unless you have something truly new with a good potential for sales you will be wasting your time.

David      

Edit: hang on is that Microsoft or a third party plugin? can't quite figure it out.

Third party Plug-In for Office, using Google Docs to store the documents.

Search for web content or images and import them into your documents and presentations in one click.

Here: (Bringing the power of Google to Office, watch the video there is an option when selecting images for 'usage rights')
http://www.offisync.com/

Here:
http://offisync.blogspot.com/

David  

Each and every microstock editor / inspector after 1 month of work can distinguish between a 'good' (i.e. sellable) and 'not so good' (i.e. rarely-if-ever sellable) contribution, so you are looking for our competitive advantage in the very wrong place.

David good points,
This thinking is correct and the exact reason for the amount of similar stale images out there, editor / inspectors were AD's, editors, designers etc: so they should know what sold and what styles would sell from their experience but often in their sector, but how in microstock do they keep up with current changing trends in all sectors of the business.

Microstock websites are just libraries and not collections, they only require plenty of diverse assets in each section (category), some will be the asset of the month and get lots of downloads, some will be steady sellers, other are there just make up the numbers and to stack the shelves for browsers and so the library can say they have 5 million assets, it is the same for the library as it is for the authors a percentage game, a small percentage of downloads from a large library, giving a recurring revenue, the only selling points these offer is on price.

To late to jump on the bandwagon, there is already a Microstock library in every district with an ample supply of good assets, with a loyal customer and vendor base, so any new start-up will not be able to compete or find a competitive advantage anywhere, with just a hash of the same old model.

If microstock is the library, then macrostock is the high end bookstore, exclusive, selective, high value, low distribution, the staff and inspectors here need to understand the active market and have insight as to current trends, the customers will put in a request and the stores 'personal shoppers' will select and fulfil a selection of assets for the customer, this information helps in identifying new trends.

With the Vetta collection and other similar offerings the potential of the middle ground, high street, medium volume bookstore will vanish fast, I have spoken to Keith at length and it looks like he is looking to surround himself with good people like inspectors that have a little more insight and vision, the problem as I see it for all new websites is getting the correct suppliers with their assets, and to find any competitive advantage you need to have these people supporting you, if you cannot market your agency and generate interest with the established suppliers how can you market to customer.

Offering a carrot of higher percentages has just been done to death, the initial thought is "wow 50% of no sales how much is that", that is why established artist are asking all new agencies where the customer base is coming from, and what is the unique selling point that will give a competitive advantage before joining, every new offering will still get a large number of assets uploaded, these will have a heavy cost with inspection to rejection ratio's, and may not be the expected content, and a year down the line the agency will close.

Easy uploads, slick websites, high commission, ftp uploads, �by photographers for photographers�, these are no longer attractive to artists, artists are waiting for a website with a unique selling point and a new potential customer base.

I do wish both you and Keith well, but the train has have already left the station.

David

I do wonder, though, how many of the traditional photographers would ever be eligible to contribute to Vetta.  My understanding is that Jonathan and most other of these talented pros have RF commitments already to Trad sites and would never be eligible for istock exclusivity.  Therefore they would be shut out of contributing to Vetta.

Also, by Big Two, do you mean IS and Fotolia (which has its Infinite collection) or did you mean IS and SS?  Does SS have a high end collection in the works?  If so I would love to contribute to it.

Hi PixelBytes,
Thanks for your comments, when I wrote about the traditional artists sitting on the fence, I was thinking about artists not shooting classic micro, not the 'established traditional' artists like Jonathan who's assets are already established with macrosites, but the 'new traditional' artists that do not have a home for their mid range assets, these artists assets are not ready for Getty or Corbis, and they do not support the microstock model in it's current form.

There are not many options between the microstock sites like Istock, and high end like the Getty and Corbis collections, there are many specialist boutique collections with small contributor and customer bases in this market, but currently no real big players, some services like PhotoShelter have tried to fill this gap and failed, artists aiming at this market have very few options to place their assets at the moment, Alamy being 78% editorial over commercial with no markets to grow into are also trying to move into this market with their own commercial collection which includes RF images.

The big two are Getty and Corbis, if we look at Getty they own Istock and have Microstock and traditional Macrostock well covered with little room for new growth, other possible buy-outs would have to small a customer base and many of the same assets and customers, the area they do not have covered is the mid range market, they cannot grow in the mid range market like they did with microstock by acquisition, there are no real big players to purchase, creating a new mid range agency would take to much time and resource.

They already have a vast contributor base with some assets that will fit the mid range market, and they are also aware of the number of artists out there with no markets for their new mid range assets, so the way they have dealt with this is to create collections within their existing microstock models, this will bring some of the mid range assets from existing artists back in house, but also make the model attractive to the new traditional artists.

As much as these microsites are courting existing artists for content, they are running a business so it does not mean that this will remain the case in 18 months time, the artist exclusive model works well for Istock and where they lead other will follow, so there may be many of these mid range collections, some will be by image exclusive invitation not artist exclusive, it will be interesting to see how these collections grow.         

It would be nice to think that this is about offering the artists more options, but it is only about business growth, there is no more scope in the market to grow by acquisition, but there is a smaller mid range market to look at, they already have the staff, infrustructure, model, customers and vendors to make a move into this market.   

David (I do not have a crystal ball these comments are just my thoughts)

Adeptris,

I believe you missed this part, not all links are not working:

Quote from: MK on July 04, 2009, 12:37

Link labels from this last stock agency are different, they look really actively - for example it is possible to add my image to shopping basket.(...) I downloaded the Google Cache Checker for Firefox and it shows me that most of this pages is not Google cache.

Ahhh!
Then it is best to contact the website that you uploaded to, and ask about the agreement or policy with the partner website, were they able to copy the full size image across at any point, if not this may not be such a big problem, if the feed to the partner just allowed a thumbnailand comp transfer then any request for the full sized image should be blocked.

David

This is a Google thing not the stocksite, Google have bots that scrape webpages and create a thumbnail view adding the thumbnail image and the pages metadata to the Google search engine, then when someone does a search it returns the thumbnail and data from Google and not from the stock website.

You say following the link will say that the image is no longer available, contact  Istock member services and explain about the google thumbnails and that the image is deleted from the stocksites database, and see what they reply.

They should be aware of this situation and will likely have a standard reply, I still have Google thumbnails and links against my name for web pages that were deleted two years ago, so it is quite a common thing.

David 

fine points David. however, this is based on historical datas. like the real stock market, such data are never workable.

Puravia,
Thanks for your comments, it is good to get another perspective on trends, my view on things and my opinions are slightly different though, in times of recession people play safe and hanker for the 'good old days', within the toy industry more traditional family games often become good sellers and make a comeback, new games for an existing console often do better than new consoles and games, many people I know are looking to their comfort zones, traditional, country, domestic holidays, home, family life, days out, community events etc:, and they are playing safer with purchases, to me historical data can be a friend in these times.

What is selling well before and now may continue to do so, if I was planning a shoot for thanksgiving October 12th, November 26th or Christmas images 25th December, then I would think about comfort zones and a traditional family theame, steady and traditional images to protect revenue first, then maybe some feel good out the box concept shots, once I have the bread and butter images uploaded.

David (IMHO)