They announced a couple of months ago that Pixels.com is now their main domain name, and presumably that's where the marketing will be.  I expect the Fine Art America name to be deemphasized and eventually allowed to fade away.  IMHO, Pixels is a dumb name that already sounds dated; FAA is owned and run by a guy who's design inspiration is apparently AOL from the 90s.  But he wants to shed the "Fine Art" image and sell more t-shirts.

I was selling a couple prints a month through last October, then it completely died.  No idea why, but since any sales I made were via keyword search, I suspect something to do with Google indexing, and maybe the domain change.  FAA has been dilligently working to capture keyword searches and direct them to their promoted sellers ("Collections").  They're no doubt winning that game.

To me, the most interesting thing about this is that SS doesn't feel any pressure to explain what's actually going on. 

Obviously this stuff isn't going through the normal submission and review process.

I think it's dead for a long, long time.  The output media - paper print and LCD screen - aren't going to create any need for more resolution or quality in the foreseeable future.  Subject matter changes slowly.  Clothing and hair styles are already so diverse that it would take a major social change to make everyone's images look dated. 

I suppose the emerging markets of China and India will drive demand.  But no one will make any money shooting photos of everyday life in China.  Prices will only collapse further.

I expect that the whole idea of imagery in advertising will change in ways we can't possibly predict.  The cell phone photo aesthetic is part of that, of course,  and that trend will accelerate, but there will be others.

One big mistake today's agencies made was deciding to let photographers do the keywording.  That left them with 10s of millions of photos with junk keywords and no 'search engine' will be able to straighten that out.   Another big mistake, obviously, was accepting tons of boring, low quality photos, and again, so-called AI is not going to save them.   So we want the micros to come to be seen as places where you waste time wading through boring old junk;  that creates the opportunity for new agencies to offer a better product and compete on something other than price.

     

I just had a sale on Alamy (after nothing for 3 months).   It's for educational use, front cover of a book.  7 dollars, of which I get $3.5.   So if Alamy isn't a microstock today, I don't know what to call it.

A contributor recently started a thread on the FAA forum, suggesting that the maximum file size (25mb) should be increased.   He asked that contributors who agreed with him post "+1"

An admin quickly jumped in with this reply:

"You do know that this is not a democracy and that the size isn't changing, don't you? Good, as long as you realise that......"


Even for FAA,  this is a new low.  And yes I know 25mb is still big enough for prints; it's just the tone of the response that made me angry.  But, the rude and defensive forum administrators actually fit in with the overall dated, unsophisticated look of the site - which is one of the things they're most defensive about.

Sorry, I had to get that off my chest.  I'm really frustrated with clunky, lowbrow online businesses like FAA that think they control the market and will never need to change.   I hope they get some competition in 2016.   

I wonder if some of these sites died, and just never bothered to tell anyone.

Quote from: stockastic on December 23, 2015, 14:10

The very obvious decline in activity on MSG reflects an accelerating loss of interest in microstock.  This should be a red flag to the agencies - except all their execs are in meetings discussing either their stock price, or who might buy their companies.

But you have to realise that with tens of millions of images online they no longer need us very much, they can just keep on selling the old stuff - there's still plenty of new material coming through, anyway. And it's better for the agencies to have the earnings spread more thinly among the suppliers because that means that it takes longer for people to get paid so the money sits in the agency's bank accounts improving their credit rating (or acts as a free bridging loan for the day-to-day expenses).

Yes that summarizes the situation.  The interest has shifted from acquiring good new photos to making big "deals" to "monetize their assets".   They now see their huge archives as assets which they virtually own - because they only need to make token payments to contributors, and no one seems to be pulling out no matter how low those payments go.

At some point in the future, those archives start to look dated and buyers will be getting restless.  But that's the future - not something that people talk about in a company that recently went public, or is being set up for sale.

Why even ask?  IS, or any of the agencies, can always come up with some story about a special 'partner' deal, old credits, one-time discounts, or some other justification for these wonderful Sales You Would Otherwise Not Have Gotten.   We either accept them or close our accounts.   I got out of IS long ago, after the Google Drive giveaway.

Unfortunately the bottom line is that watermarks kill sales of art photos.   You can dispute this all you want, but the guy who owns FAA has the numbers and I believe him.   And big previews sell art.   The only thing you can do is forget about shooting things that people might want on a t-shirt.

Yeah I feel like I probably wasted my time uploading 200 photos.  I've noticed 3 things: 

First, compared to a year ago, the site has a lot more junk.  There is good work there, but also  portfolios of hundreds or thousands of mostly unimpressive  images that don't eve look all like the work of the same person, causing me to wonder if they're stolen.  And other portfolios of groaner snapshots that will never sell, but are nevertheless in the search.  So it looks like the original standards are history.

Second,  the "collected by" hits that I'm getting are mostly from a few contributors who seem to be "collecting" thousands of images at random, maybe thinking that's how we game the system. 

Third, there's very little change in the images that appear on the home page.  And quite a few are from those people madly "collecting" and following everyone.  Hmmm.

I'm thinking  the site hasn't gone anywhere and that the people who started it have lost interest.   Which would be a shame because FAA just desperately needs some serious competition,  from a site showing quality work.

Many of the new 'contributors' this change brings in will get discouraged very quickly and stop submitting; after that they cost SS nothing.

Watch for their next quarterly report to boast about how many new 'contributors' they've signed up.  That's all this is about.