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Messages - Hobostocker
Pages: 1 ... 4 5 6 7 8 [9] 10 11 12 13 14 ... 29
201
« on: February 24, 2015, 02:19 »
That was my impression as well. To make over $500 a month there I suspect you will need many thousands of images. I just went and calculated from my own earnings last year that I would need 33,000 images to make $500 a month there, so hopefully your images are much better than mine. Of course so far this year I have made almost as much as I did all of last year so you never can tell with Alamy, but I think very large numbers are important.
talking about Travel images, there's a Greenberg guy in the Alamy forum who's got 100K + images on sale and he claims to make 5-6000$ per month net but his stuff is mostly about the USA so that's certainly in higher demand than other countries.
202
« on: February 24, 2015, 02:13 »
as for on-demand streaming :
it will kill the music industry itself because what's the difference between paying to download a few tracks and requiring 2-3 clicks to play back the music when i want compared to 2-3 click on Spotify to listen to the same tracks while paying 10$/month for unlimited access ?
it's exactly the same as long as i have a 3G connection but while the artist will get 0.50$ for each download he's barely earning 0.00001 dollar for each stream played on Spotify and that's a HUGE difference.
no wonder users LOVE streaming, it's a dream come true for them ... but it will kill music if the trend keeps going on and in particular it will kill Indie labels which are the ones actually scouting for talents before they later join the major record companies.
the only ones that will survive are the DJs as they don't play a musical instrument and they "play" somebody else music and have very small production costs ... even a cheap DJ asking 2-300$ per night can still be profitable but this is out of question for a live band or a single musician.
203
« on: February 24, 2015, 02:04 »
as David Byrne point pointed out, there's soooo many artists who are not cut for live shows, and i can say there are also many genres of music that cannot be played live due to the high production costs involved, what's going to happen once the only way to earn money is from streaming and a bunch of digital downloads ?
i can tell you what, they'll all stop playing music and go flipping burgers as producing music is NOT CHEAP nowadays and the cost/benefits scenario is totally stacked against musicians.
204
« on: February 24, 2015, 01:56 »
Excellent post by David Bryne.
He's right though. How will artists be compensated?
they won't. the new paradigm is that producing music is just a hobby unless you're Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Britney Spears, etc as much as fans claim that artists will survive with live gigs this is only true for the top 5% musicians, at best. the Stones are now selling tickets for as much as 350$ bucks but the run of the mill bands are stuck with 20-30$ tickets or even getting paid in beers ... i've a friend of mine who's a songwriter for Sony and other labels, do you think he's getting rich ? NO ! he's got a day job in a music store and plays some gigs with his own local band, the royalties he's earning from downloads/streaming/radio are a pittance since he's just the songwriter and he won't see a single dollar from the gigs and from merchandising while in the meantime the artists playing HIS songs are getting filthy rich. and he's F ing pissed at that, rightfully so, so much that he wants to give up with songwriting. on the other side another of our friends who played with me and with him in the past now runs a studio and is making a decent living recording and mastering local bands as there's no shortage of fools dreaming to become rich and famous playing music and willing to invest 1000s of dollars to produce a professional quality Demo, he also helps these bands with e-commerce sites, merchandising, and more ... that's more money coming in, and he said he often makes more money with merchandising that with the studio which says it all ... so, a very dark sscenario from any perspective if you ask me.
206
« on: February 23, 2015, 10:02 »
Indie labels publishing their MISERABLE payouts from the top streaming music services ... as low as 0.001$ per stream !!
This isn't comparable at all. This was more like if we got 0.001$ every time someone looks at one of our images. (Wow - even I would be rich then!) 
i think we're having it a lot better than musicians overall, it's a lot easier to shoot a photo set than to write a song and producing the final product, not to mention the shelf life of a stock photo can be easily be in the range of 3-5 yrs.
207
« on: February 23, 2015, 10:00 »
I find it hard to believe that David Bryne and Iggy Pop couldn't live off royalties from their songs, unless they did really bad deals on their hits. It must be much harder for less successful musicians but those two should of made enough to never have to work again. I know Iggy Pop had some expensive habits and might of spent it all in his wild days but I bet he had fun doing it 
i think many so called rockstars are totally inflating their real value, and if now streaming is the leading way to sell music i'm not surprised they're feeling the heat and live gigs are their last way left to make some money, problem is that even doing gigs is not exactly enriching artists like in the past, there's a good reason way even the top sellers like ACDC are gigging left and right no stop to make quick bucks while they can.
210
« on: February 23, 2015, 01:30 »
211
« on: February 23, 2015, 01:26 »
You can't compare these type of business models. There is a difference between streaming music and using music for advertising or something like that. Streaming can compared with just viewing an image. So every time when someone see an ad with your picture you receive a small amount.
I can't believe that any music artist would give me the permission to use his song for advertising for just one buck like the dollar photo club do. Touring can be compared with traveling to do shots... so there are here also a lot of photographer which will lose money too.
downloading a song does NOT give you any further permission to use it on movies or videos. that's a whole different ball game, you will need to pay the author a reasonable amount of money, while there's a market for licenced sounds and loops and even entire songs ... they're called Samplers or Sound Banks and they're sold specifically to producers that will use them for commercial purposes .. however i don't think they get rich with that as some as are as cheap as 10$ ... while the industry's top plugins for Film Music cost 1000s of dollars.
212
« on: February 23, 2015, 01:21 »
Doesn't indicate how much they make from people like me who listen to streamed music but will pay for a download if they really like it.
for downloads of an average 1.99$ track on Beatport/Juno/ITunes the artist usually only earns 0.30 to 0.50$ as labels typically get 50-70% of each sale while the platform keeps 30-50% ... on the other side if you own your label you get 50-70% all for yourself but yeah it's still peanuts considering the production costs.
214
« on: February 21, 2015, 23:17 »
We are seeing a knee-jerk reaction to some technology. I pointed out to a friend that we have had model airplanes, radio controlled, with cameras, for fifty years. He started shouting, "but they aren't armed! People will put weapons in these drones..."
YES they will ... because this tech is not cumbersome as the old radio-controlled cr-ap sold in toy stores in the past, drones work out of the box, they're a turn-key solution unlike the old kits requiring hacks and a technical background. the octo-copters on sale now (3-4000$) can pull up as much as 5-6kg of load and they've 15-30 minutes of battery ... that's way more than enough to carry small bombs or remote-controlled weapons.
215
« on: February 21, 2015, 23:11 »
We lose our freedoms, and foreigners are empowered to kill people using technologies paid for by us taxpayers. And some people think that is right. 
flying your drone in my garden or spying on private property is not your "freedom" and thanks god the civil aviation authorities are now pushing for new draconian anti-drone laws. as for technology, what makes you think it's been made or designed in the USA ?? all the first prototypes (including toys) and all the early working models of what is now known as Helicopter were built in Europe. and DJI itself is based in Shenzhen, China.
216
« on: February 20, 2015, 04:40 »
I think that the main business will be the IPO and growing repeat subscriptions. I think that they will be prepared to cannibalize everything else for that.
as much as many here are horrified by subs this is the way News images have been sold for ages on the top News agencies like AP/AFP/Reuters so it's nothing new actually.
217
« on: February 20, 2015, 04:35 »
drones will be soon banned everywhere because people are abusing and misusing these new "toys" ... sadly every time a new technology pops up there's always a bunch of idiots ruining it for everyone  at best, only operators carrying a civil aviation licence or whatever will be allowed to buy and operate drones. i think this new tech is too much underestimated, you can easily kill somebody misusing a drone "just for fun" ... i warmly welcome very strict laws against as-s holes running drones.
218
« on: February 20, 2015, 04:31 »
It should be noted that many, if not most of these sites either currently are, or will soon be (once they get a bit of traffic), affiliates of Shutterstock or iStock, and act basically as lead generators for larger sites. Free sites drive millions and millions of dollars worth of buyers to their affiliated search partner sites in exchange for a revenue kickback.
so further "consolidation" and M&As ? that would be a good news.
219
« on: February 19, 2015, 06:04 »
Oversupply is not a problem for the agencies. It reduces any potential for a pressure on costs. Really the only thing they need to care about at this point is market share. Because it is going to be all about investor sentiment assuming that Getty goes for an IPO exit - and can get there whilst the stock market is still in QE funded bonkers mode.
so why are they pushing higher priced collections ? they're aware they're wasting a lot of talent and opportunities with their actual pricing schemes and that paying peanuts they're only going to get monkeys in return. unfortunately they also face the reality that the demand for mid-stock is not as big to justify any sudden U-turn in their sales strategy.
220
« on: February 18, 2015, 23:53 »
this is not an Istock issue, it's an industry-wide issue.
even if there was a single monolithic agency owning 100% of the market they would face the same problems over time .. oversupply and stagnant demand !
it's a zero sum game because the number of buyers is not increasing and the prices are not going up.
221
« on: February 18, 2015, 23:48 »
it's math.
as their archive grows bigger and bigger over time they realize that as the number of buyers and download is stable there will be millions of images that just never sell once or that are never even displayed or zoomed once in their lifetime.
solution : find ways to mix up the search results, no matter how.
but still it does nothing to "keep the promise" of microstock which was to "sell cheap and sell many" .. at this point is just "sell cheap" apart for the top 5-10% best selling keywords.
to sell as much as in the past they should squeeze the archive to 5-10 millions pics or to deliberately "sandbox" 90% of the images that have underperformed in the last 2-3 yrs.
what's next ? merchandising ? POD ? food stamps ? it all smells of desperation to me as the root issue here is the lack or even decrease of buyers.
and even doubling the number of buyers will result in the same scenario when agencies will have 100 millions of images on sale ... again there's a math model that justifies the microstock model and either they stick with it or it just doesn't work, in particular for us suppliers.
222
« on: February 13, 2015, 01:16 »
free images are NOT a menace for the stock industry for the simple reason it would be like comparing apples with oranges, free or stolen images don't come with any licence or model release so they're inherently at risk in case somebody wanted to use them for business or commercial purposes.
and we should never forget our biz is based only on professional buyers who need a properly licenced images, not random bloggers lifting images online, they're irrilevant as far as we're concerned and they would never buy images even for a pittance, the same logic and the same scenario has been discussed to death regarding Warez and pirated apps/games.
and most important, there can be trillions of free legitimate public-domain or CC images around but since they're not properly keyworded and captioned they're useless and they just can't be found unless you invest hours and hours.
223
« on: January 06, 2015, 23:38 »
Although I don't own it, you may want to consider the Nikon 24-120mm f4.0. Friends love this lens.
i like that lens but i skipped it because being F4 is its only selling point, i could do the same with any other similar cheap lens 24-xxx F3.5/F5.3 VR without spending 1300$ for it.
224
« on: January 06, 2015, 23:35 »
[I'd hate to see] cheap or free winning over crafted and appropriately priced.
there will be always cheap and free images, just not in the quantity suitable for a stock agency, and of course not properly keyworded and without property/model realease. in short, they're not suitable for commercial use and that's why the stock industry is not menaced by the gazillions of free images around.
225
« on: January 05, 2015, 09:34 »
People will do the math and realize that they can no longer increase their own ports as quickly (by percentage) as the agencies can, making microstock a losing game once your port hits a certain size. There's just no way around this math.
what did they expected ? studio shootings with paid models sold for a pittance per download, millions of still life images with white background, business concepts copied over and over in any possible way, what could ever go wrong ?
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