|
MicrostockGroup Sponsors
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - Xanox
Pages: 1 ... 12 13 14 15 16 [17] 18 19 20 21 22 23
401
« on: May 22, 2013, 10:36 »
from any perspective an agency like that would a foolish idea.
i've plenty of candid shots and i can tell you even as RM they barely pay the bills, it wouldnt be sustainable if i also had to get the MR and good lighting and all, no * way, sorry, there's just not enough demand for it, it's a niche market and it's going to stay that way forever.
402
« on: May 22, 2013, 10:32 »
but it must be said that the real value of things like Tumblr of Flickr isnt in their net $ worth but in what they represent in % of the social media market.
if i buy 10% of the social networks it's gonna be a lot more worthy and expensive than saying i'm buying site xx and yy and zz .
if i also can integrate the whole cr-ap with my other online services (email, webmail, news, chat, forums) that in business terms we've a whole "media giant" and its value becomes hard to quantify for investors, usually it's overvalued as we can see in many real world examples like Yahoo itself.
that's certainly Yahoo's quick money plan in my opinion, that is .. more smoke and mirrors in the face of investors and they will sell out in no more than 2 yrs to AOL or Microsoft.
do you really think Yahoo has any chance of surviving ? of becoming the new Apple or the new Amazon ?
no way, the web has changed big time, and they know it, and they know this is their last change to recoup some face value.
well, if tomorrow they buy AOL that's another story, but to me the future for this sort of "media companies" is bleak, they're really a thing of the past especially because of all their services they never manage to integrate well like in complex monolithic apps like Facebook, only desktop apps could do the job with a unified and fast interface/GUI but then again the fad today is being html5 and OS-agnostic so desktop apps are also a thing of the past, which is BS but the whole market is a pile of BS from any perspective, just think how many rock solid companies you could buy with 1 billion rather than a company like Tumblr that is full of debts and never made a profit so far !
403
« on: May 22, 2013, 10:21 »
very nice layout !
but i rest my case : the Stocky logo doesnt fly.
with that typeface it means nothing, it gives no message, no clear sense of anything and in particular it doesnt feel business in any way.
404
« on: May 21, 2013, 14:52 »
DUDE once for all put in your head that you cannot bury microstock, it won't happen, adapt or quit!
if you are against it why don't you open an agency and do us all a big favor, not talking about the sales you will get us but the less complaining you will do in this forum 
you're missing the point. stock photography exists only as long as photographers can make a living with it. once only a handful or CEOs and shareholders and agency owners can live off photography the party will be over including me and you. i know musicians, journalists, bloggers, and other people living off digital products, now they're all in deep sh-it financially and you can bet we're next on the list. i've many other marketable skills apart stock photography but if possible i want to keep my career as a creative and an artist, and this is no more possible in so many creative fields because of the rock bottom cheap fees paid by major corporations and distributors. those like you defending the microstock model of agencies like Shutterstock are equally responsible for what will be the situation in a few years and you're just shooting yourself in the foot. i've nothing else to say in this discussion .. and after all this is a pro-micro forum of course. bye bye
405
« on: May 21, 2013, 13:55 »
A dead man walking doesnt have a billion to spend
well, there are already skeptics claiming the new M&As by Yahoo are a way to deceive the markets and to look like a healthy and rich company in order to make a good sell out not far from now, maybe to AOL or Microsoft or even to Facebook ! but then again, why they paid Tumblr 1 billion in CASH and not in stocks ? hmm ... ?
406
« on: May 21, 2013, 13:52 »
Definitely waiting to see what strings are attached to the 1 TB offer. They can't just give away the same service that Amazon and others are charging for; it has to be limited in some way (like reliability), or they're claiming the right to sell your photos, or something else they're not being upfront about just yet.
exactly, first they will kill some competition offering a free 1TB of space and then little by little users will be locked in with Flickr + Tumblr and flooded by ads and upsells.
407
« on: May 21, 2013, 10:43 »
@ShadySue : yes, the new layout is like you see it in IE, probably you've some addons in FF blocking the CSS or making a mess, it's the CSS not being correctly loaded the issue in your case.
@cthoman : yes i like it, reminds me of 500px.com actually, but it seems many loyal flickrs are hellbent against the new layout, and of course it will be integrated with Tumblr (bought yesterday by Yahoo for a whopping 1.1 billion $ !) so i think the final outcome will be a sort of social network with banner ads, bells and whistles .. a big sh-it compared to the original Flickr but hey this is 2013 ... Yahoo is a dead man walking, worth a pittance compared to years ago when MS wanted to buy it for 40 billions or so.
408
« on: May 21, 2013, 10:17 »
yeah but these are exceptions, Getty is not the business or selling subs as a core business.
how big is the market for subs ? SS made 160 millions in revenues last year, 50% of that from subs probably, that's 80 millions, not a big deal considering the whole stock market is said to be worth 5-6 billion $.
409
« on: May 21, 2013, 10:03 »
Jon is a computer programmer first and a photographer based on the need to fill his new web application with content/images. He has a B.S., Computer Science 1997 and B.S. Mathematics 1997
he might be a photographer but he'll go down in history as the photographer who killed the value of stock photography thanks to his bulk subs deals. seriously, who's worse ? getty acting as a monopoly or SS selling images for 0.30$ ? kudos to his coding and entrepreneurial skills but i see no reason to see him as a positive figure in our industry, SS is nothing but the Walmart of stock.
410
« on: May 21, 2013, 09:54 »
These might be bulk buyers. The Beeb use TS for generic pics, so that's a negotiating point. Maybe they want celeb pics cheaper than Getty and play them off against each other for the best deal. From two off-board conversations along this lines, I suspect they don't offer discounts to small charities who may only want occasional pics. However, it's always worth asking: policies can change. Also it may be that the OP is a bulk buyer.
never say never, Alamy itself is running a charity, no idea if real or bogus to evade taxes, but certainly they're sensible to the needs of charities and no-profit orgs. i had a few sales on alamy for as low as 2-3$ so there must be someone who's paying a pittance for web-sized images or bulk deals and they were all RM.
411
« on: May 21, 2013, 09:47 »
wow, this gotta be another bombshell for amateur photographers, and it could be damaging the whole biz of ZenFolio, Smugmug, and Photoshelter which are now forced to catch up with storage space. this will set a new standard on online photo storage, if i can get 1TB for free on Flickr why should i pay for a few hundred GBs elsewhere ? Yahoo! adds 1TB of free storage to Flickr in site revamp http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/20/yahoo_updates_flickr_app_and_storage/
412
« on: May 21, 2013, 09:02 »
Not so. I do want 'real', not attractive models in a tidy background, evenly lit. But as a freelance GD I can't usually afford Alamy's pricing and know other freelance designers can't either, even if we pass that cost onto the client. I can't buy RM.
you should email Alamy and ask them what to do, i'm sure they have special prices for these things, as they have super cheap deals with newspapers and other smaller publishers who buy in bulk. an example, for BBC and Daily Mail they managed to sell images for as low as 5$/each.
413
« on: May 21, 2013, 08:55 »
Not so, depending on use.
Alamy, 'food bank' photos only: 8362 results, which from the first page sorted on relevance have many authentic, 'real' photos.
BUT
With MR and PR, only 31, mostly irrelevant other than one set which is available on the micros.
However, it's all moot, as we now know the OP doesn't want 'real', she wants attractive models in a tidy background, evenly lit; just not on a white background grinning inanely at the camera. Big difference.
authenticity comes with a price, that's why it's better suited for RM, there are so many situations where it's impossible to get MR.
414
« on: May 21, 2013, 08:43 »
@Sharpshot :
i've friends in music who indeed had to close the studio because of the unfair pricing on Beatport, iTunes, etc and the cut-throat competition, and they were in business since 1988 !
if you think we're having it bad look at music ... unless you're backed by Sony or UNiversal and you're Daft Punk, Lady Gaga, Tiesto, Skrillex .. you aint make much money no matter if your songs are great and to make things worse the latest fad is Spotify where the fees paid to labels and artists are well below the cheapest subs on SS !
on the other side there's easy money to be made if you're a young DJ, at least for a while because soon it will be saturated and prices will hit rock bottom, it cant last long, and it's crazy that a Tiesto guy can command as much as 200K $ per night in Vegas or Miami and make 20 millions per year making his crowd of pill eaters dance for a couple hours.
but at least they can DJ, what photographers can do instead ? selling prints on the street ?
there's no equivalent to gigs for phographers, photos are "consumed" the moment they're seen, they dont last a few minutes, they dont make you dance.
if you ask me if it's wise to join the stock industry today i will tell you YES but as long as you can produce quantity rather than focus too much on perfection.
your enemy in micro is not quality or QC or whatever, it's how big is your portfolio and how much you can grow it along time to "feed the beast", if you can feed it you're in busines, if you can't your bound to leave the industry sooner or later.
i mean anything can be monetized nowadays, there's people selling any sort of sh-it on RedBubble and other PoD sites .. but to make a living you need a LOT of things on sale, how it will cost you and how long it will takes that's the core issue, but the possibilities are there, i even know people selling on eBay full time and others printing t-shirts for tourists, if they can do it we can probably do it too but there are many ways to skin a cat.
415
« on: May 21, 2013, 00:19 »
Micro is all about quick and easy files that can sell in large quantities, and this is especially true for sub sites.
Anything that's been time consuming or expensive to produce can go elsewhere.
fully agree. the future of micro is ALL about subs and SS is the living proof of that.
416
« on: May 20, 2013, 23:48 »
And no this is not the end of microstock, just a business model adjustment.
The main message I get from this news is "be prepared to change your old ways of thinking and doing things" Ride the wave, instead of being capsized by it.
not the "end", but it's indeed a strong signal ! it's the beginning of a domino effect that could get easily out of hand especially if Yuri will release some data about his sales and earnings on Getty. the problem is, in the actual situation if something is going to change is for the worse, you're deluded if you hope agency have a single good reason to raise our fees. yes, fees are going to get LOWER not higher ! and unless like Yuri you're an agency with a team of dozens of photographers nobody will take you seriously, photographers nowadays are dime a dozen in stock and especially in microstock. there's hardly any "wave" to ride at this point, either you able to produce quantity with good enough quality or you will sink, just a matter of time, and probably you will sink anyways as if you do the math it will be harder and harder to feed the beast and stay afloat, you reach the point where it's just impossible to compete with such an avalanche of new images uploaded every day. you stay afloat for a while because the search algorithms give a premium to images that had more views and zooms and sales, but this can change overnight, they can set to show new images on default, or default to whatever new collection, like now they do on Alamy with "creative" rather than the old Editorial. which is the same we witnessed in web search engines like google or yahoo or bing .. when they have trillions of pages it's impossible to rank high, and they change the algo 2-3 times a year to further mess it up. whatever we're selling now is doomed to be sandboxed and forgotten before or later ... and this is the key factor .. if now the shelf life of an image is up to 2 yrs in the future it can become 6 months or less and then the whole microstock concept will cease to exist apart for a small bunch of the very best seller images. my opinion ? the days are numbered for microstock as a full time career for single photographers, only agencies, "factories", and co-ops will survive. i give it no more than 3 yrs from now. mark my words ! 
417
« on: May 20, 2013, 23:31 »
He had a big fight with Christian in the alamy forum. They were right to ban him.
honestly i don't even remember why they banned me last time, i can't manage to last more than a few dozen message over there, maybe it was christian going overboard with another guy who posts here ? but usually it's because i dare criticize some new alamy features like the recent cut in fees ... despite they run a forum and a corporate blog any possible criticism has never been allowed, they dont even warn you, they just delete the whole thread and ban your account, they've no idea how to run a proper forum and now their new forum is deserted as they finally alienated even their few residents left, at the moment only a bunch of maybe 5-10 users is active and posting every day. which maybe was their plan from the start as the forum has always been a pain in the a-ss for them. they prefer to send people on their FB and twitter pages, where they ban any negative remark as well.
418
« on: May 20, 2013, 23:14 »
@Image Diversity :
you can't have your cake and eat it too.
for the sort of images you need there's not enough demand in microstock to justify the production costs, simple as that, everyone here is telling you the same thing but you just dont get it.
there's plenty of such stuff on sale if you just pay a bit more, search "food bank" on Alamy for instance.
you'll never find what you need as long as you search in the wrong place !
and dont think nobody is shooting candid people, there's a guy in the Alamy forum with 90,000 images on sale, half of them are about candid shots taken around the world, problem is (for you at least) he expects to earn 50-100$ net per image and he's getting it considering he makes 5-600 sales per month with such cr-ap.
but since it's cr-ap you can't find elsewhere buyers have no other choice (i mean serious buyers, BBC, Telegraph, book publishers).
you should just surrender to the reality of stock photography, either drop your no-profit projects or start shooting around with your iPhone, it'll be cheaper and funnier.
as much as it could sound strange to you, for us this is a job and we need to pay the bills.
as for launching an agency or whatever specialized in candid images, sorry there's plenty of agencies like that and they're all with Getty or selling on other RM/RF outlets including Alamy and less known distributors.
best wishes but i'm afraid you ain't go far with your projects, sorry.
419
« on: May 20, 2013, 01:57 »
some of what Xanox posts here is pure drivel, albeit I do think the overall theme he is trying to convey is more accurate than many of you understand. The stock industry is in decline overall from a contributors point of view, and I sadly agree with Xanox that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Xanox obviously comes from an era when stock photography had value, way before the days of microstock and photographers jumping up and down with joy by selling a photo hundreds of times for 0.25c a crack and I totally agree with many of his posts, not all of them, but many of them.
well, it's normal and it was the norm even years ago. only a few readers grasp what i say in photo forums, and they've especially a hard time grasping the big scenario about stock photography as a whole. on the other side i don't deny i like to a bit provocative, after all i wouldnt write if there wasnt some fun to be had ... unfortunately many take it as the final proof i'm a troll but this is telling more about them than about me ! i'm logging off .... BYE BYE !
420
« on: May 20, 2013, 01:56 »
No they don't make look others poor, because they are shrinking, loosing against the competition. If this wasn't the case why did they bother buying istock, and squeezing contributors? Anyway, even if that was the situation, it was the same years and years ago, so why wasn't Yuri wit them already?
the micro industry set a new standard for low prices, we dont know if from now on prices will stay the same or go upwards but they can even go downward another bit as long as contributors dont care, it will be balanced with some more marketing fud and bonus points or whatever but if they can do it they will do it ! so indeed the agencies are here to stay .. 10 yrs for sure, 20 yrs i dont know. but the photographers ? hmm that's another story. even Bloomberg yesterday was telling fresh graduates to make a career as plumbers as they would make more money than starting as white collars. maybe he was drunk or joking but he's not far from reality, sooner or later micro photographer will realize in horror there's more money in a Burger King kitchen then in front of a monitor.
421
« on: May 20, 2013, 01:50 »
maybe the issue here is that microstock is a magnet for cheap-as-s customers that see micros as a godsend for their fly-by-night operations advertised on craigslist for a pittance?
Just because a business doesn't have thousands to spend on stock images, that makes them fly-by-night?
I'm a web developer full-time (microstock is and always has been a part-time thing for me) who makes a living serving small Mom-and-Pop business with small budgets. Microstock allows me to incorporate images into their designs that make their businesses look appealing.
These people don't have design staff and often don't have an advertising budget.
The point is that there are enough of these small businesses to keep me and many more like me feeding our families. I (and other designers/developers near my price-point) would never purchase from macro agencies anyway. It's mircostock or nothing for lots of folks.
well you will read the very same discussions on web design forums. indeed, these clients are fly-by-night, but there's always somebody willing to work for a pittance, students, hobbyists, whatever. nothing will change as long as they can always find some fools making a whole web site including images and all for a few hundreds bucks. if these cheapskates have no budgets they should not even considered as potential clients. simple as that. let them open a free blog on Wordpress or Blogspot with stolen images and good luck, they dont deserve anything else than that.
422
« on: May 20, 2013, 01:39 »
Who knows? maybe this Getty/Yuri business will spark off a new trend?
but why you keep thinking it's Yuri alone, he's an agency now with dozens of photographers under his belt. no idea if they work as full time employees or if they're all contractors but judging from his last interviews he's not even shooting anymore, now he's just the CEO, the boss managing the whole "factory". he has more than 100K images on sale on PeopleImages, but his own ones are maybe no more than 20-30K. in a few years with such an army of photographers working for him he can certainly reach 2-300K images in portfolio, but we dont know if Getty is going to take the whole package or just picking up the best ones, it all depends on their agreement, maybe a slice of the pie will go to Getty RF/RM and the rest will be "dumped" to iStock ? we will see.
423
« on: May 20, 2013, 01:30 »
Silly me, I should just wait for a big fish to come knocking and only work for $1000 per shoot....
i'm glad for you, but don't you feel it's even more unfair to microstockers ? you get your 1000$ and then you buy a dozen micro images for the brochure for how much exactly ? 10$ ? 20$ ? that means no more than 5% of your production costs, no big deal indeed ! this is precisely the point i was trying to make, everyone want to get paid fairly but when it's stock photos turn nobody want to spend more than a few dozens bucks.
424
« on: May 20, 2013, 01:22 »
425
« on: May 20, 2013, 01:19 »
Believe me, the area his house is located at isn't as cheap as you might think!
well, there's an interesting (and a bit apocalyptic) article on today's BBC : Do white people have a future in South Africa? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22554709"Apartheid South Africa looked after white people and nobody else. Now some of its white communities face a level of deprivation, or of violence, which threatens their future in the country. "
Pages: 1 ... 12 13 14 15 16 [17] 18 19 20 21 22 23
|
Sponsors
Microstock Poll Results
Sponsors
|
Show Posts
