if blockchain offered any appreciable savings for middlemen, SS or Adobe would have set it up long time ago. It doesn't take that much nowadays, and they have the resources to hire people if any additional expertise was needed. They aren't exactly completely IT tech ignorant, being what they are. Clearly there isn't much there. But hey, good luck becoming another SS plus Adobe plus Getty aggregate but without associated expenses. Let us know when you do, we'll all transfer our portfolios at this very moment.

To be fair established businesses are often not good at spotting emerging opportunities - one word KODAK. But I'm not seeing the big benefits here maybe I'm shortsighted and at least they are trying something different.

In our case, we will charge 5-10% (to cover marketing and transaction costs) for the same transaction.

OK, I get it - the idea is that blockchain technology will decrease the real costs of transactions so that buyers and sellers can both have more money in their pockets.  The problem is that 10% isn't going to leave much to let buyers hear about it, especially considering that you want to lower prices and presumably keep some of it yourself for profit.

can be used in our marketing campaigns.

Which are?  What kind of marketing campaigns and how much will they cost?  How well is the marketing campaign outlined in your business plan?  (you do have a thorough business plan, right?)

We are not after buzz trends or are amateur rookies that have no clue how to start and build sustainable businesses. We have been buying stock photography for a few years for our prior projects and know the buyer-side market quite well.

Buying photography for a few years doesn't make you an expert in selling images!  You certainly are amateurs when it comes to setting up selling platforms and attracting buyers.  Have you set up a successful agency or selling platform before?  If yes, then maybe you are not amateurs.  If not, then you really don't have a clue.  These ideas are a dime a dozen but implementing something like this is extremely difficult in practice as we unfortunately have seen many times before.

Again, marketing is important, but most buyers care about the costs they are incurring more than anything. So when you offer a superior cost structure made available with new technology, it will be easier to attract new buyers.

And sellers care about getting the highest prices - nobody here wants to find a new technology to lower prices.  Now if you can find a way to attract buyers without significantly lowering prices then that would be great, but otherwise what would happen in the long run is that buyers will get lower prices and sellers will get next to nothing.  Anything that lowers the price of images in the minds of buyers is hurting us long term.  Plus it won't be easy to attract buyers if they haven't heard about you.

we understand the difficulty and expected cost of user acquisition and will be using most of our investment and future earnings to attract buyers.

How much do you anticipate spending for advertising?  What sort of campaigns on what platforms?  How will you get the word out relative to what SS and the other major agencies are spending? 

How many images do you need to attract buyers?  Will these be individual sites linked together a la Symbiostock or will you be starting an agency?  If the latter, what will your prices be and how will you review images?  What kind of search algorithms will you use?

It seems to me you have identified perceived "inefficiencies" in the costs of transactions that can be solved through blockchain technology - great - but haven't thought through all the other aspects of starting and promoting a new agency - or whatever structure you envision for this endeavor.  Many more details about your business plan are needed for us to understand what you are trying to do and to judge whether it is a good idea with any chance of success.  Sorry for all the negativity and skepticism but we have seen this many times before.

The seller will be able to charge $3.5 (for example) for the same image earning $1.25 more ($.35 goes to the platform) while the buyer will pay $1.5 less (30%) not to mention the fact that they will not have to purchase in bulk. This kind of microtransaction is only possible through the blockchain technology we are currently building. If you do the same with paypal or credit card, the transaction fee alone will be more than $.35 leaving the middle man with nothing. That is how we will have an advantage in terms of costs and value proposition that can be used in our marketing campaigns.

1. These kinds of "microtransactions" are possible in a million different ways.

2. Nobody wants buyers to get used to paying even less for images than they do now.

3. Who cares about the middleman?

who is going to inspect the files to see if they have logos hidden somewhere? If the file is overfiltered and has artifacts? If the file has a professional model release signed by a witness?

You see customers want to know that there are no legal and quality problems if they license a file.

And all agencies employ a huge team of reviewers from across the globe to check EVERY SINGLE FILE at 100%.

They also need lawyers who keep them up to date on the ever changing copyright landscape and agencies often pull thousands of files if there is a new legal problem.

Having a team of several hundred image inspectors, a team of 300 IT people...and in addition a marketing a sales department...that is what makes selling stock so expensive.

Buyers want an all clear before they pay money. It is the main reason, they don't use the millions of free files or those with a cc license.

Software cannot do that for you. The individual artist cannot do that for you.

That is why 10% will never cover the costs of your agency.

So good luck, but from your questions, I have the impression you really don't understand how this industry works.

We get people with ideas like these every year.

But the stock market is very specialized, it cannot be replaced by a simple plattform.

We understand that these ideas are hard to grasp at this point as blockchain and cryptocurrencies are in their early stages of adoption.

Thank you for explicit clarifications Mike. I still have my worries about sciens and techmology, is it good or is it wack?

From my end I understand that it is very hard for image buyers to understand the concept of revenue, but with time it will become very clear as things progress.

Quote from: mike_snaps on October 23, 2017, 00:18

In short, to fully understand the advantages of StockChain (platform we are building), it is important to be familiar with such concepts as cryptoeconomics, smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) and advantages that they offer particularly with respect to marketing and building P2P marketplace networks.

Customers just want to buy pictures easily and cheaply.

If you can't explain why StockChain can help them to do that better than existing agencies without patronising us with jargon, and belittling us for our lack of esoteric technical knowledge, then you might as well give up now.

In the end us contributors can only wait and see what benefits it might deliver.....if I were an investor I don't see anything that would make me want to buy into it. Time will tell I guess.

Yeah, I want cold, hard, dirty, filthy cash. When all the booze shops and bars accept complicurrencies then maybe I'll accept something else.

Perhaps StockChain is providing a complicated technological solution to a problem buyers don't have.

Nor contributors. "Trust us with managing your assets. Unfortunately we can't tell you how we are going to make money other than drop the prices and the clients will come". Plus, we are told that technologies at the core of the payment system, the engine of the entire business, is "in their early stages of adoption". That inspires so much confidence that it will really take off. Just wait till governments step in and start heavily regulating this whole p2p sales sector.

We are currently focused on building the network and the supporting infrastucture and plan to have the demo version in the first quarter of 2018.

I'm sure we will all be waiting with bated breath.

That is what I love about the stock community. We have so many people with different skills, it is easy to decrypt anything people throw at us.

Quote from: mike_snaps on October 23, 2017, 00:18

... One of the key components of DAO is that it incentivizes all network participants (in this case contributors and buyers) to expand the network and bring more participants as trading takes place in native currency which everyone in the network holds....

If you'd said up front you were selling a Bitcoin rival cloaked in a story about licensing images, that would have saved everyone the trouble. There's nothing hard to understand about the idea that this is a speculative pyramid scheme where no one is getting paid in currency with stable value. All the blather notwithstanding, Bitcoin is speculation, not a currency - it has no stable value, and there are a fair number of articles out there by people much more well versed in economics than I am as to how it can never be.

You're wasting our time

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2017/05/17/bitcoin-is-an-asset-not-a-currency/#59346d742e5b

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/bitcoin-will-never-currency-something-way-weirder/

There's lots more out there to read.

First of all, we are not building a bitcoin rival and it is absolutely the opposite of a pyramid. DAOs and blockchain networks are flat and fully transparent economic units with fully liquid cryptoassets. You can find articles written by the same editorials mocking and cliticising renewable energy from 10 years back, and then look at the current developments in this space. I would recommend doing more research about DAOs and smart contracts and then maybe you will have a slightly different opinion.

In any case, If you do not understand or support blockchain, then perhaps what we are building is not for you, at least not now.

Why do you want to use your fancy tech project on us?

you can easily build a plattform for people selling used cars, or kitchen appliances or books or music? or real estate? renting real estate? Car sharing service?

selling modern energy rights? Digital workshops??

Why the stock industry, where every file sold needs to have previous personal inspection by a skilled editor?

A used car plattform doesn�t need that. neither does a real estate business or any of the others I mentioned

Build the plattform, let the buyers and sellers work out the details.

Our industry is different because of the personal inspection process and the legal stuff, that needs to be cleaed for over 1.2 million new files that hit our industry every single week.

How will your plattform review 1 million files a week including all releases?

And why is our industry an interesting project for you.

I really don�t understand why, there are so any other options to build p to p  networks and plattforms out  there.

I think he said because in the past he bought stock photos. ?