Making my own website and Promoting my quality  works on Social Media?
What do you think of this? Would it be worth and give great money? I have 22k followers on instagram and I know how to get hundreds of organic reach in Facebook from different countries. Let say 500 different organic reach on Facebook daily.

What do you think? Have anyone here sold photos and videos from their own site?

THANKS A LOT IN ADVANCE

Depends on your approach.

What will you offer to cause buyers to want to use your site vs a microstock site? Lower price (if even possible), better service, unique images that don't exist on micro, etc?

Doing your own site using your micro portfolio would be a major challenge due to existing low prices and the need for huge volume.

Prices are already insanely low. So competing with lowe price may not attract buyers. Meaning if it's a dollar on micro do buyers really care if you offer it for 25 or 50 cents? Probably not.

If you can get a large percentage of your social network to become buyers then you may be onto something.You may need to get 50-100 sales a month just to cover the website hosting costs. Is anyone here doing over $50 per month in micro sales on their own site?

Or you need to come up with something unique that people are willing to pay more money for and branch outside of micro into higher-money lower-volume such as macro RM and/or prints. This is what I've done and it has worked well.

Now that I read the quoted parts of the decision, I can see that one judge doesn't understand copyrights or photography and creative images. I can understand that the image was not displayed with any copyright notice on various sites over time. Still, and a great point...

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on July 04, 2018, 16:50

Because Apple and other companies have implemented copy protection that prevents misuse. Plus high profile Napster and other situations made the general public aware that copying music is illegal. Getty tried doing this and they had infringers take to social media with widespread shaming campaigns about "Getty blackmail letters". Getty backed off when they should have stood their ground.

Even without the outrageous "blackmail" letters and the mistakes, like writing to the original authors in some cases, they could have kept up the program with a little less of a storm trooper attitude.

Quote from: stockastic on July 04, 2018, 14:41

The DMCA was written by lobbyists for the big internet providers, with the intention of shielding them from responsibility and, naturally, liability for copyright infringement.  It works well.

Yes, correct, but does nothing for us. 

I used to put a � on photos, simple enough there's notice, but also as pointed out here, once used, purchased, anyone can right click and copy from a paid use and steal them. In fact if you can see an image in your browser, it's already in the cache on your computer, or a thief's computer. There's no protection except law. That works for music and other works, I don't know why drawings or photos aren't protected the same?

ps the judge also saw this as a non-commercial use.

The judge needs their vision checked. On their website there are things like sponsors and also paid admission tickets. Regardless of all of the philanthropy listed on the website that shouldn't give them a free pass on infringement.

The article claims it was used in "good faith" and that the defendant didn't know it was copyrighted. I can take a photo of my big toe and it's immediately copyrighted and a judge should know that copyright automatically applies to all photos. Just because it doesn't say in large letters "COPYRIGHT PROTECTED" doesn't mean it isn't and ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Google puts in small print under the images in an image search: Images may be subject to copyright, which should be enough but if even judges are going to overlook this little fact then I guess big ugly watermarks are the future of photos on the web.

Watermarks aren't the answer. First, they can easily be removed. Second, once your image is legally licensed and put on the web without the watermark by your client, it is wide open to infringement. I have one image that was sold in microstock a couple dozen times but is used on hundreds of websites. Which ones are clients vs infringers? Thanks to RF, I have no idea.

And yes ignorance is no excuse. Imagine if ignorance applied to everything. "Oh well the keys were in the ignition so I figured I could take the car.". "The bike was on the sidewalk so I figured they didn't want it anymore". "The door on the house was unlocked so I figured I could take everything". Ohhhh, well in that case if you were ignorant then the court feels you were totally right in taking these things..

The company . . . ."responded by immediately taking the photo down." Why did he still have to sue?

We as copyright holders shouldn't need to waste uncompensated time asking every infringer to stop infringing. I have found thousands of infringements of my work where these people should be paying for use. My single-use RM license ranges from $20 to $1,000. That's at minimum over $20,000 in ingringed revenue. Should I just ignore this? Should I spend waste months or years full time contacting all of them just requesting take-downs?

When a store finds someone has stolen from them is their response "good sir/madam, could I kindly ask you to please bring back the items you removed from our store?". No, there is usually a consequence that deters people from doing bad or illegal things. This ruling sets the tone that there is no legal consequence for infringing on our work and as a result effectively encourages infringement.  I hope this ruling causes a sh*tstorm otherwise this is just another nail in the coffin for a profession that is already on life support.

There is still real money to be made from photos. You just need to know what buyers are willing to pay premium money for and not accept low amounts. I recently negotiated a print licensing deal for just under $10k for a large hotel chain. It�s not as common as the good old days but the opportunity is still there.

I got a call from a local painter who asked me where I took some of my images. He got my contact info from a store where my works are sold.

I looked at his portfolio and found he had some paintings, with compositions very similar to my photos.

These locations have very unique features and are not accessible by car. I was there because I had local guides.

He insisted on asking the approximate location. I told him, but feel uncomfortable. If he painted his works, he would know where they were.

In the past, other painters also wanted to paint my photos, I said no.

Is this guy painting on the basis of my photos? How do you feel about that?

You should have insisted he not call you again and then hung up.

I took some good pictures of a cityscape from a distance (a river separates me from the city), in long exposure, just after the blue hour, some were rejected for the reason "not in focus" ... I have a pana g85 and I wonder if the best way to focus a cityscape is to use a focus to infinity ... panasonic does not talk about this function in the guide, I'm a little lost ... do you know the best method to this type of picture?

My method: I focus on a particular point and then I put the camera in manual mode + manual focus, then I take the pose ...

thank you.

When using manual are you magnifying to confirm you're getting sharp focus? If you look at the photo at 100% on your computer is it sharp? If it's sharp then you may be getting a generic rejection in that they don't think the photo is sellable but are just using out of focus as an excuse to reject it.

If at 100% it's not in focus/blurry it could be a lot of different reasons. A soft lens. Long exposure blur due to camera movement. Modern focusing systems are ultra reliable. I mainly use Sony and autofocus on night cityscapes is rock solid. Try focusing on a high contrast area such as the corner of the building where the there's light and also black. Use a wireless remote shutter release or the 2-5 second shutter delay. If it's windy put a weight under the  tripod or lower the legs on the tripod.

Quote from: zdenkam on April 03, 2018, 09:42

I am not promoting myself or anything like that

OK. 

What I think?

I think that promoting selling stock is probably the worst thing you can do if you plan on continuing selling stock. 

So you're saying helping your competitors for free is a bad idea?

Going for Microstocks is like any other business, it�s a day by day struggle.

Young people come up with better ideas, are more creative, more innovative. Old people are backward-looking all the time, they simply are stuck in the mud.... and complain. Call it generation gap.

I don't think it's entirely age based. It's how willing and able you are to analyze and adapt to trends and change. If you are doing the same old stuff that worked five or ten years ago then you'll probably be disappointed regardless of your age.

According to this book - https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Business/Oversubscribed-Audiobook/B013KCG5DA?ref=a_typ_c1_lProduct_0_1&pf_rd_p=276381e6-3040-42a3-b411-51a3a26c7603&pf_rd_r=B6001W3FP9H6V4YFDXRR&

supply and demand is the key to making money. We all know the stock photography business is saturated by photographers, artists, etc. Driving prices down. so whats the alternative?

Well worth a listen to this book.

The alternative is either to create something that has little supply and high demand or create demand for something only you offer. Or find another line of work. Unfortunately the tried and true flipping burgers response is becoming irrelevant because this role is being replaced by self service kiosks and AI robots. 

Quote from: Josephine on April 23, 2018, 10:04

Going for Microstocks is like any other business, it�s a day by day struggle.

Young people come up with better ideas, are more creative, more innovative. Old people are backward-looking all the time, they simply are stuck in the mud.... and complain. Call it generation gap.

I am old...
I remember when photos were worth more than $0.25 and sold for an absolute minimum of $50 and more often than not in the average range of $300-$500 dollars and regularly more than $1000 and occassionally for $5000+
Old people like me are backward looking all the time wondering why the young people with all their better ideas and innovation decided to take a once lucrative business and devalue it.
Now I can imagine it will be all the old peoples fault for not providing you a self entitled future of success cause you were innovative enought to want to work for pennies and sacrifice yourself for your self applauding creative better ideas.
You can keep it.

I am old too. The right photos made available to the right buyers by a good businessperson will still sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars for a single use license. The assumption that all photos are now only worth a few pennies due to microstock isn't accurate.

The notice really doesen't mean much to me. Never used it for sales, just displaying life drawings. As far as I know, they as in SM will still have the settings I came to know and love for people who are just displaying images. 

Smugmugs business model is to sign up photographers for paying accounts to sell stuff. The main value I see in them buying Flickr is to convert displayers into Smugmug paying seller accounts. Paid Flickr Pro accounts probably aren�t profitable otherwise Flickr wouldn�t have been sold. Will be interesting to see what Smugmug does with it.

Flickr seems to have been dying a slow death for years