That excessive greed may lead to blindness was well known in the XI century
 but this knowledge seem to be somewhat lost in the XXI

Read the following strory...
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lang1k1/tale30.htm

Why may the big 6 go under and be replaced by a newcomer in less than one year

After putting my flack vest and helmet on here is why I think this may actually happen.

- Economic pressures are always working. At the moment it is the authors that bear the biggest weight. However the efficiency need will hit the agencies too sooner or later.

- Right now authors are held by the balls by the agencies whose only goal is the make money for themselves.

- In almost every other field an 30% cut will trigger an immediate revolt let alone an 80%.

- What buyers and sellers need is an efficient market. Something like the stock exchange.
They do not need an agency they need a marketplace.
The exchange  makes money by taking a small cut and operating in a very efficient and neutral way.
The exchange could operate at no cost if operated " a la google".
The exchange do not care who or what sells. His only business is to carry the transaction in  the cheapest way.
They have no business in pushing exclusivity, rewarding golds, starts or whatever. They are blind. What sells, sells.

- The reviews are dead.
We have already seen why. Yahoo pretended to control the market with human reviewers.
It was a failure. They were screwed by Google who understood that reviewing was a losing proposition
An algorithm will be devised that will make happy both submitters (with unlimited and immediate acceptance) and buyers (with meaningful searches). Chaff will be automatically pruned by sales and other criteria

- If a credible exchange appears, all authors will flock immediately to it (think about unlimited uploads and 0 commissions) starving the rest. Buyers will pay less and sellers will get more. A win-win

A final note: why this may not happen.
After all the whole market is not so big and may not attract the right  player
In this case the authors will remain in the hands of the few actual medieval barons.
It looks like authors prefer to hang separately than hang together.

Hi All,

 Here is something that you might get a laugh out of. First is a link to a day of micro shooting in our studio captured on a 1ds mark 3 every 5 seconds per frame. You can thank my 1st assistant Ben for the creation and musical choice.

Best,
AVAVA

Hi Avava. Thanks a lot for sharing.
Although it will catch many by surprise it is just history repeating itself.
It is the end of the thousand of coach manufacturers, saddlers, hostler, blacksmiths, etc,  and the beginning of the car industry.

Your industrial approach is here to stay. I am not using industrial in a disparaging way, on the contrary. A Mercedes car is an industrial product and nobody will say that is therefore of low quality. Indeed such a quality for such a price can only be made with an industrial  approach.

The approach will also benefit society as whole due to better productivity, although some of the victims may not agree.

However the approach has somehow  the seed of its own destruction in the sense that with such a productivity there is clearly room only for so many producers. So I foresee bad times for the small fry.

When i started in micro time ago I gave some thought to this problem and tried to figure what were the fields that could be hard or impossible to industrialize. I figured that landscapes could be one since you can hardly make 150 decent shots without repeating yourself too much for geographic constraints. Later however I met a guy who makes just that for a living using an airplane!

So, after seeing your post I have a question for you: what are the fields you think is too hard to industrialize ?
I�ll look carefully at them 

My other job is a software developer and I am updating my skills, so I needed a project to play with, so I have been developing some image software, based on what gets posted in the Alamy forum about the time involved in having to edit the image data once uploaded, I have posted the results with little interest 

Another bit of software is SlideShowPro where you have to create the xml, and edit it if you want to sort images on your pc before uploading, so that is another Idea.

I am also looking at an app to just harvesting and organise my own image keywords, I cannot see why I need thousands of keywords, that is a couple of idea's anyone else got any?

here is the Alamy web part:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zX2iMXkjv80

Here is the backend, what do you think?
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=294fxCSOtsM

David 

Hi, I looked at both videos but are too small and cannot understand what they are about. Maybe it is a kind of front-end to Alamy. If so, it is limited to those that submit there.

I think that there are some posts in this site dealing with management software. To my surprise a lot of people is using Excel. I tried it for a month or so, then realized that was not for me. I revved up to imatch (http://www.photools.com/) which I recommend to those who can stomach the learning curve. Obviously everybody says that their software is easy to use, but few really are.

As for ideas, look at imatch. You may think at a simpler version,  easier to master, for those that have limited needs, or think at imatch on steroids. I find their keywording tools pretty lame although the rest is really top notch. imatch is scriptable, so allow you a few tricks that would be otherwise impossible.

Alexa changed measurement stats:
http://www.alexa.com/site/company/announcement

How odd that the change impacts istock only and not shutterstock and fotolia...

Although Alexa is not the most reliable source on earth, looking at the graph make you think that something happened around July and that they have not recovered yet.
What do you think ?