Quote from: Tror on June 15, 2013, 05:12

Maybe Google itself should get a content developer instead of just a SE....whats holding them back?

Liability, model releases, tons and tons of people posting stolen photos.

which is the same reason for sites like Flickr and Instagram not making a dime.

buyers are not forever.

while iStock was sleeping the competitors won their buyers one by one, it costed time and money but now it's too late for the IS management to suddenly make a U-turn.

what where they thinking scre-wing up both loyal buyers and contributors for the last 5 years ?

in microstock both buyers and sellers are a lot more wired to each other than in macro/RM.

designers are often also producers and photographers, if you scr-ew them they will buy elsewhere and sell elsewhere and tell all their friends and clients to do so, simple as that, see why SS is booming and IS is tanking.

 

In the UK, a subscription for just one decent newspaper would cost �30 or $45 per month - without the subscription I'd be looking at �45 or $68 per month. Given the tsunami of free content out there, images and words, its no wonder our sprogs have never bought a newspaper.

Besides which, a lot of the columnists in the UK broadsheets are pompous, overpaid twits - there are very few diamonds amongst the ashes. The tabloids are not worth wiping your....well, you get the picture - or not if you live in Chicago.

yeah but exclusivity still plays a big role.

sometimes there are newspaper doing a big scoop, see The Guardian with the recent NSA scandal and the SCMP with yesterday's exclusive interview with Snowden.

if every week there was a scoop like this newspapers would sell like hotcakes.
and instead it's a dieing industry, only gossip magazines still sell in droves exactly because they've always some exclusive paparazzi news about whatever celebrity of the moment and that's not something freely available anywhere on the web apart on TMZ or crooks like Perez Hilton.

i mean, why buying the cow when the milk is free ?

take Travel photography, in the past you could go in a newsstand and buy National Geographic or read your encyclopedia or buy a travel guide or a travel book, now you have Flickr, 500px, google images, millions of travel sites and blogs and forums with decent and/or very good images and articles.

really any possible travel information you could ever need is just a few clicks away and it's FREE.
if i plan a trip on the weekend i can quickly see how the place looks like and there's someone who blogged about it or entire articles on travel magazines with photos and maps, and then i have Tripadvisor, Hostelworld, AirBnB, and so many other sites to check prices and locations just to get a rough idea.

if even Lonely Planet has been sold twice (first to BBC and then to a small publisher) it's indeed a sign of the times.

all this information was something people was more than ready to pay for until not long ago !
but now it's free and it's spread everywhere, ironically the issue now is the oversupply of information.

years ago a former Lonely Planet author admitted he wrote a whole book just using google, and yes this is the situation and i could certainly do the same with some time and money, who needs to buy a travel guide when there are tons of reviews on hostels, hotels, guesthouse, and resorts ? when maps are free and a lot better than LP or Rough Guides ? when there's a sh-itload of travel forums with actual backpackers discussing in depth any possible thing especially about visas and security alerts ?

so, if nobody pay for it, who's gonna buy travel images in the future ?
and, will there be a steady demand for it or the whole industry will nosedive ?
sure, many places change and need new images but many others still look the same even after 20-30 yrs.
mountains for instance ... rivers .. oceans .. beaches with coconut palms .. market .. people ..

forget about Google Images, after their latest redesign it's dead as a SEO way to get traffic.

i had 8000 images on google images, then suddenly only 1000 were indexed, and now i get barely 60 to 100 visits per day !

well, it's a photo blog i abandoned 2-3 yrs ago but what . .. it was doing fine until 6 months ago, now it's game over, i'll close it down.

so any ideas to bring visitors ? none at the moment, it simply requires too much investment nowadays, especially if your keywords are about travel destinations, it's just impossible to compete with tour operators, travel sites, etc

RF is destined to be worthless, it's the worst possible licence for photographers but great for cheap buyers.

Yep, almost everyone finds money is harder and harder to come by. It's called deflation.

it's going downhill everywhere in the creative markets actually.

and then i recently talked with a few aussies telling me there are jobs in the mines in NW Australia paying up to 15K $ per month + benefits + 1 month of paid holiday !

what ...

With income like that I find it surprising that he pursued the micro's at all.  Perhaps he was scared and decided to test the waters when he saw his income falling, but still.. a bit surprising.

not at all.

the predictions of us "macrosaurs" in 2006 were right, simple as that.

the shocking thing is that even his macro earning are in free fall.

Bingo. And they're conditioning people to get used to that idea. It starts small, with those "send us photos of the snow piling up in your backyard" requests and it gets people into the habit of submitting content to a news organization. Then people won't hesitate to send in the really good stuff when they catch some big event on their phone camera. And they certainly won't ask for a dime in return for the photo or footage, something they used to pay people for.

BBS does that already.

whenever there's a breaking news they add a box at the end of the article asking you "Are you in xxxx ? Send us photos, commments, etc etc and we will publish it ! " ... no mention of payment or any other recompensation, they've a page with "submission guidelines" but i guess it's only for professional freelancers, not for random readers.

Plus it is more difficult, either physiologically or phycholically to read extended prose on the web.

and that's nothing, try reading a 1000 pages ebook on a laptop, i've many great books in PDF but it's a pain in the as-s on a small 13" monitor.

maybe i should try a Kindle or find a cheap deal with a print shop.

but the reason Professional Photojournalists are no longer needed is because the readers of the media can't tell the difference between a good and bad photograph.

My point.
The art of Critical Thinking is one of the victims of the Internet.

there's too much noise on the web and nobody like to read long stuff anymore.

for photos it's even worse, we're flooded by photos, millions, trillions ... and the web is not exactly the best medium to display photos.

there's a world of difference between looking at a good photo printed in A3 format hanging on a wall and looking it 500px large on a laptop.

of course people cant tell ... they're just JPG thumbnails ! and soon they all look the same, dull, and boring.

Apart from that, good agency, run by professional people. Its a great shame its gone this way.

yeah but if they want to target professional buyers they should better use a professional brand name !

what do they expect with a company name like "Graphic LEFTOVERS" ??

am i supposed to buy a decent product or a "leftover", cr-ap, trash ?

What they really want is for readers to supply all the content.  And then pay for it.

actually there's never been shortage of free content even in the past.

what makes the difference is exclusive content and it doesnt come cheap.

i could make a newspaper myself lifting blog articles and random cr-ap found on the net but to make unique i should rewrite from scratch most of it and should all fit in a "format" and an editorial line and this will take a full time editor and a photo editor and a few assistants at least.

you cannot just make an assembly of random content, that's Google News or any other "news aggregator", not a real newspaper, and nobody would pay for it.

i mean, the cost of the content is not what's killing newspapers, there's just no more the critical mass of readers as in the past especially readers willing to pay for all these political news.

if you think paper magazines are dead look at the gossip/tabloid ones, they still sell millions of copies but guess what, they've plenty of exclusive content and exclusive photos and plenty of weird stories you dont find on Reuters/AP/AFP.

and they're very funny in their titles if you have a sense of humour, i would definitely read THE SUN while taking a sh-it.