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- Why Microstock is [apparently] Bad for Any Photographer & bad for someone else
(see graph below):
The whole mentality that you should sell your photos for less than a fair value simply because your a part time shooter is seriously flawed. Microstock is an awful business model. By selling your photos on sites like this, not only are you devaluing photography prices in general, but you are losing money every time you sell a photograph for way under what it cost you to make it.
Think about it. How much did your camera cost? Your lenses? Your lights? You computer? Let’s just say $6000 for this example. Now, how much do you get paid an hour at your day job? For the sake of argument, let’s say $15/hr. Say you spend an average of 10 hours a week for a year doing photography “part time”. Your value for working 520 hours a year is $7800. Grand total for your first year of business costs: $13,800. Now how much microstock would you have to sell to just cover those first year of business costs? Ummm ... average profit from a microstock sale is what, $.25? You would have to sell your stock photos 55,200 times just to break even!
Lincoln Barbour.
- Flickr Launches New Geotagging and Places Pages:
When I heard that Flickr was making announcements this evening, I assumed it was the long awaited integration of video into the service. That isn’t happening (it will soon, though), but they are making significant upgrades tonight around geotagging and a new area of the site is launching called "Places Pages".
Flickr first launched geotagging for photos a year ago - to date 29 million photos have been geotagged [Shankland says 42 million], with 150,000 new ones coming in each day.
"Places Pages" are dedicated pages that provide users with specific information about places and are built around the Flickr concept of "interestingness", but based on places and tags.
Flickr now has over 1 billion photos and 37.7 million unique monthly visitors. 2.5 million news photos are uploaded daily by 15 million registered users.
I wonder if founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield ever wish they hadn’t sold out to Yahoo so quickly, for just a rumored $30 million or so in 2005.
Michael Arrington/TechCrunch from the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
- Digital Railroad Marketplace:
I´ve been with Digital Railroad for a while, posting my pictures to their online service and using the cataloguing features of their web site. There´s obviously a vision for Digital Railroad that’s been followed since the service launched, perhaps at some stage to sell out to a Getty, Corbis or similar. The recent launch of the Marketplace feature seems to tie in with that vision.
Gavin Gough.
- User traffic increases after the closure of TimesSelect:
Only a month has passed since New York Times ended the subscription-only TimesSelect, but readers seem to have caught on fast. Within the past month the now free Op-Ed section of NYTimes.com has more the doubled in unique visitors.
An increase in traffic has also occurred for the overall site of New York Times. Within the last month the amount of unique visitors to NYTimes.com has grown roughly 10%. The overall amount of visitors has been around 3.8 million, an increase from the 3.4 million seen a month prior.
The Editors Weblog.
Rumors from the Stock Photo Industry Central Intelligence Agency indicate that the readership of the secret publishing division of the Stock Artists Alliance, the Stock Aslyum, which recently turned to microstock subscription pricing ($35) and blatantly undercutted the traditional proved and tested rights-managed publishing of Selling Stock ($150), has all of a sudden multiplied tenfold since the introduction of its new subscription service, which is quite crazy, and just another demonstration that the NYT is only a bunch of goofy jerks.
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