These days you even have Abobe working against creatives with their free Adobe Spark.  It eliminates the need for graphic designers and offers free photos and video to use.  Nothing like a company screwing over its own customer base.

Probably looking for an exit strategy.  Right now all he has is a front end to third party suppliers. 

Another hair brained idea to leverage the contributors art.  Sad thing is it is yet another distraction to an already over stretched, skeleton crew staff.  It took two weeks for a contributor's problem to get solved recently because Sean was "in meetings" for two weeks. 

Licensing on FAA went no where as it had no follow through.  This wacky product with its robotic recharger is not going anywhere fast.  How many will sell?  Couple thousand a most.  And they will come preloaded with a bunch of free stuff that will be find for the typical nerd who buys one.  No one will even bother with it after the novelty wears off after two weeks.

Got one!

Don't forget - Two-thirds of Trump's wives are/were immigrants.

The other common thread is "please add mugs, beach blankets and key chains".  People are so desperate for sales they think that adding Dollar Store crap will make the difference.

There already is CafePress and Zazzle.  What is stopping them from selling there?

After years of uploading and marketing I sell regularly when the site is working.  But there can be big swings.  When ever a new product or new feature is added or the image servers fail, sales tank.

And each new vendor they add has their own quality issues.  Around the holidays there were a lot of complaints about quality on the products.  Adding vendors who just produce poor quality or slow to ship makes the flagship products - prints from pictureframes.com look bad.

Competition? RedBubble, Zazzle, Crated, Society6,CafePress, Displate, Saatchiart, DeviantArt etc.

I find the people who get all upset about the "turning of America into X,Y,Z European country" are usually people who have never traveled. 

You just have to look at the education rates, life expectancy rates, access to health care, and overall satisfaction levels where the US falls far down the list.  Just believing that the US does everything perfectly isn't enough to change reality.

Or better yet, actually leave the country and travel the world to see for yourself.

The difference between a stock site and a POD.   One is for commercial usage.  The other for home use.

Stock sites have customers who purchase large volumes of images.  They do the markeing and take a big cut.

On POD, you are expected to bring in your own customers.  You get a bigger cut but have to work harder.

The thought of Trump in the White House is making the world nervous.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/17/president-trump-sixth-list-major-threats-global-economy-republican-trade-eiu

Of course it has been suggested that Trump told the NY Times off the record that he really isn't going to do half the things he says he would do.

I've only seen one thing from this program.  Someone who claimed to be from Deck The Walls asking me to sign on to the DesignerPrints program (this gives heavy discounts to large volume buyers).

Seems they wanted even more of a discount than the Deck The Walls program.  I had Designer Prints sale last month that netted me $2.50 instead of $20.  But at least it was a sale.

All sales have stopped there since the 13th of the month when a new "enhancement" feature was added and the site stopped functioning with certain browsers.

Why the site makes changes live is beyond me.  Any other site would test offline before going live.

Trump likes to talk about winning all the time.  The problem with winning is there is one winner and the rest are losers. 

Trump wins when he kicks an old lady to the curb to build his casino parking lot.  Trump wins when brings in cheap temporary imported labor for his Florida resort.

I'd rather see a politician speak about empowering people and raising up those who are hurting. 

The anger show at his rallies comes from people who are losing.  What makes them think a self centered, megalomaniac greedy businessman who has built his company around creating gilded play-lands for the rich is going to care about them?

He doesn't care about the middle class - the middle class isn't his customer base.

"Donald Trump would lose handily to Hillary Clinton in a general election for one key reason, former Bush 43 aide Tony Fratto said Thursday.

"In the very best of years, when you have a unified GOP, Republicans have an electoral disadvantage relative to the Democratic candidate; that's pretty clear," Fratto told CNBC's "Squawk Box."
"Trump is not going to bring unity to the party. If it's a contested convention, and it's someone else, that's not going to resolve unity either. So, [with] a divided GOP and a fairly unified Democratic candidate, I don't think this is a hard question," said Fratto, the former deputy White House press secretary and now managing director at consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies."
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/17/strategist-clintontrump-race-wouldnt-even-be-close.html

As far as Bernie is concerned. He's proven that he can't connect with minorities.  A guy from one of the whitest most rural states in the country just doesn't resonate with urban voters.

Trumps newest twist is he is moving from promoting violence at his rallies to threatening to unleash riots on the streets of America if he doesn't get the nomination. 

This is how he operates.  His way or else.

I'm surprised he hasn't promised to make the trains run on time.
.....


http://www.salon.com/2016/03/15/its_already_happening_here_donald_trump_and_americas_creeping_fascism_partner/

The camera manufacturers must be including information in the box.  "This camera will pay for itself!"

You see people on the FAA forums posting three crummy photos and then asking "How can I increase my sales?"

Trump is the George Wallace for 2016.  GW didn't work out so well as a general candidate. 

A two party system works best when there are two strong parties.  Unfortunately the GOPs insistence of fighting lost battles (social change, changing demographics, general progress) and trying to turn back the clocks to the 1930s is a losing strategy.

The exclusive strategy didn't work with the last rich business man they ran - Mitt Romney and the numbers haven't changed.  America didn't become more white, more straight, more male dominated in the past few years but on the surface it appears to have become stupider.

Trump will keep his percentage of uneducated, racist, angry voters but will lose in a landslide in the national election dragging his party down with him.

As it is the GOP only appears viable due to gerrymandering and the use of fear as a governing tactic.  There aren't any actual ideas and they've given up on trying to govern.  At this point they are so weak they are afraid of the supreme court nomination process.

Meanwhile, as with the last election cycle, the media will play along with the notion that the race is tight even though the results are rather well predicted - you can't win by excluding women, minorities, unions, LGBT community etc.  There just aren't enough poorly educated, angry white men to pull it off.

At this point Bernie is done.  Time to start bringing the party in around Hillary to make sure we don't elect our own version of Putin.

" they are extremely expensive items to produce"

So expensive that they can offer 10 eight x tens for a nominal shipping fee of $1.69.

My definition of innovative must be entirely different.  The business model of giving it away for free and then hoping people come back and spend money in the future isn't that new - it was invented by Wimpy back back in 1932 in the original Popeye cartoons.

"i'll gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today"

Makes no sense at all to me.  Comparing a commercial sale to a designer is not the same as selling or giving away artwork to art buyers.

Totally different markets.  The only reason I have some cross over images (images in both stock and fine art) is because of their potential usage for either, but I'm not about to start applying the microstock pricing model to my fine art work.

My wife has back issues and went to a standing office.  I think it helps.

The volume isn't the best but for me the payouts have been better.  $2 - $6 with a few subs throw in the mix.  I seem more likely to get these $2+ commissions these days. 

The only ones I bother with these days is SS and DT.  SS will tosses me a nice $50-$120 sale once in a while which DT never does but lately SS has been crap.  December's earnings on SS was a quarter of a typical month.  This month DT is actually better than SS.

When I first started I was exclusive with DT.  Then when I branched out my sales there fell hard.  But my SS earnings made up for it. 

These days I'm concentrating on fine art anyway and just tossing the obviously stock images over to SS and DT if they aren't good enough for RM agencies.  Looking at my 1099s, microstock is making up such a small percentage of my over all earnings.

I was looking around the site.  Its actually kind of funny to see what pops up as "gallery quality" art - a bunch of stock photos of tomatoes on white for example. 

Then I saw one of my landscapes with these ridiculously low prices:
6.5" x 11" Free
9" x 15" $19
12" x 20" $29
22" x 37" $69
40" x 68" $219

Good news is when you delete an image from Canstock it instantly disappears from FreeArt.

What is the free print any way?  A download?

...

Oh I see:

"Choose your art from millions of images,
and the small size is always free!
($1.99 s&h fee applies. Limit 10 per order.)"

"FreeArt - WHERE THE SMALL SIZE IS ALWAYS FREE!
...and is gallery-level quality!"

I haven't uploaded to them in at least a year.  I'll have to go in and check to make sure I don't have anything worthwhile in my port.

You just know there will be people selling our 8x10s on Ebay, Etsy, on the streets of NYC.

....
I just deleted anything artsy that might actually have a chance attracting this freebie crowd.  What's left is food and white background stuff.

My minimal print sale on FAA is $6.04 and that is on a card.  8x10 - profit is $15 - $20

These shoddy businesses can't seem to function without giveaways.  I guess its easy when you give away other people's work.

The publishing industry is kinda weird.  They pay after the book is actually printed.  All suppliers have to wait until the money starts coming in.  At least that's my experience.

What's a name without branding?  At least Fine Art America told you what you should expect.  Most people know Pixels as a failed movie.

As far as the products, yeah its a whole new ball game when you are up against trademark holders for products.  Fine art gives you leeway with parody and fair use laws.  T-shirts are a whole different animal.

Never sold anything on Crated.  No buyers?

faa seems to think everyone is their competition from snapfish to getty to 500px to cafepress.  No real strategy, just copies everyone and anyone. No focus, just goes off on tangents.  Recently they seem to be trying to attract photographers more than artists.

My guess is the real money is in people buying their own stuff - like snapfish or CVS photolab.

They don't have any curation so that can't go upscale like Saatchi.  So instead they seen to be getting rid of the "fine art" part of their name and going down scale with "pixels" and adding low end products. There are more bad photographers then good ones so the growth is in attracting anyone who just bought a camera.