There has been a lot of postings in this forum about decline in earnings and how agencies are lowering the payouts. As I see it, it is a natural consequence of supply and demand. In short, the stocks of photos are increasing WAY faster than the demand for photos (maybe 10-20 times faster???). As in any other market, prices and earnings will be lower until that balance shifts. Let's face it. It is not going to happen unless the supply is lowered (all contributors suddenly stop uploading just good enough quality (rather unlikely)) or demands increase at least by a factor of 10 (also a bit unlikely).

So what can we do instead? A part of the earning problem is that most common niches are well covered. Buyers don't need "business handshake" number 1.000.001 and it is no longer enough to produce quality better than everyone else as most top niches are already filled with superb quality work.

Generally speaking, I would say these options remain:
1) Discover new niches to fill.
2) Improve visibility of already uploaded material (increase sales).
3) Reduce life-cycle cost per image produced. By cost I mean time and money spent to get the photo online.


The aim of this thread is to start a discussion on what we would like the ultimate stock agency to be like. Hence, to PITCH IDEAS to the bold agency/agencies who are willing to invest time in helping their contributors.
The recent discussion on GL Stock Images in this forum is a good and positive starting point and many ideas were raised. However, I think it got a bit cluttered with discussion on pricing models, bug reports, and whether or not the royalty rate was fair for newcomers.

Let's try to brainstorm and hope that GL Stock Images or another bold agency will pick up some of these ideas!

Some themes (rephrased from above) - feel free to add more:
 1) Research tools for niche discovery. How can the agency help us discover new less obvious niches?
 2) Boosting position on google and other search engines.
Google page rank is hugely important, both for the agency and for contributors - how can push our photos up the list?
 3) Easier workflow. Nothing is more dreadful than an tedious upload procedure. E.g. who need image categories?


PLEASE DON'T START ANOTHER DISCUSSION ON PRICING MODELS, ROYALTY RATES, OR LACK OF INCOME - I think we have this covered. 

Please number your idea Theme X, idea Y. I'll put a poll together once we are done so we can vote on the best ideas.

Ok?!? I'll pitch a few ideas in a couple of follow up postings to allow separate quotes for each of them.

Hi!

I'm interested in knowing what software you are using for post-processing.

This http://www.rkursem.com/poll/view.php?id=314e550f51eea83cb open poll will allow you to add your own.

Thanks!

BR, Rasmus