September 29, 2009 by pmelcher.

So the big buzz these days is all about social media. It started roughly with MySpace , followed by Flickr and now it’s all about  Twitter and Facebook.  A bit like the “Long Tail” theory has been improperly swallowed by a  lot of photography professionals, social media is all but properly understood.

It used to be that, after creating a blog, you had to have a page on Myspace. And then it was you HAD to have a gallery on Flickr. Now, it has shifted to Facebook and Twitter. There is even a scheduled talk at the upcoming Photoplus expo on how to master Twitter for photographers.  I wonder if, at the time, they had a “how to master CB radio for photographers” and how well that worked.

Social media is a critical tool if you are in the B2C market, directly selling your products, or services, to the general public. However, photography is much more ( besides wedding photogrpahers) then a simple B2B product and service. A bit like raw oil. Try and sell raw oil to general public. No one would buy as they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

So, having a business Twitter  account and spending hours a day updating it in the hope of closing a major assignment or licensing deal is like walking your neighborhood doing door to door marketing. A shot in the dark. A completely useless exercise in futility with the added bonus of wasting your time and concentration. No one cares if you just came back from a photo shoot or finished editing 341 images in less than one hour thanks to Aperture. And you could Twipic your “best of” until you are  blue in the face, all they care about is funny cat pictures.

Facebook has, for photography, pretty much the same marketing value as Twitter . Unless you are already friends with a photo editor, no one will search Facebook to find you or hire you. Might as well use your account to post funny videos. That, people will like.

The fascinating part of all this is that there  are now so called self proclaim experts in these “marketing photography via social media ” who claim they can take your business from zero to millions thanks to “secrets” they have found. If that was true, wouldn’t they rather be enjoying there money somewhere on exotic beach instead of trying to sell you their useless approach ?

It is somewhat pathetic to see how so much of the photography community falls, year after years, into these marketing dead ends and forget that the number 1 rule remains always the same : Shoot meaningful images. Or, in other words ” It’s the content, stupid”. Nothing else, nothing more.

Sure, you might even be succesful in getting thousand upon millions of hits on your website thanks to you mastering social media. Still doesn’t mean you will convert any of these into a sale. Actually, all this traffic might even block actual buyers to get to your site.

After hours and hours updating your blog, Facebook account, Myspace page , Flickr account and Tweeting about all this, when does one find time to actually work on photography ? Don’t we spend already too much time online  ? Are does really successful in creating a huge following on social media selling any images ?

Social media for photography is only good for one thing : make your clients talk about you to your next potential clients. For them to rave about your photography and your incredible customer support. Your exquisite sense of professionalism and your impeccable delivery.  And to accomplish that, you need to stop Twitering and start shooting.

Posted in Photoplus, license, technology, commercial stock, No sense, keyword, photojournalism, flickr, web 2.0, news | Print | 2 Comments »

October 26, 2008 by pmelcher.

Daryl Lang is a lucky guy. He gets invited to Corbis’s secret meeting on rooftops. And not me. I wonder why ?

Corbis executive team, apparently out for a week-end stroll, decided to inform some lost contributors that, in effort to make the company profitable, after only  15 years of trying, they would cut photographers royalties. Their logic is simple. After an apparently doom and gloom presentation about the future of the industry, how it will shrink to a peanut size, they declare that the only solution is to reduce the commission pay-out to photographers.

Make sense for a Starbucks Latte induced Seattle executive .

The logic is clear cut:   “we (Corbis) expect less revenue thus we will give you ( photographers) even less. After all, we are in it together.” However, there will be no salary cut for the senior management . If Steve Davis legacy is intact, the current CEO must be close to $800,000 a year with other senior execs making in the $400,000. But their salaries will no be touched. After all, continuing to run a company that has NEVER posted a profit and making sure it doesn’t should be rewarded well.

The rooftop meeting apparently welcomed a slide show by Mr Shenk who, according to that lucky, lucky Daryl Lang “  …forecasted that the total stock image licensing business will fall from $2.3 billion dollars in 2007 to $2.2 billion in 2011.”

No mentioned was made about the source of these wacky pretty numbers and what they included or didn’t. But what it shows is that Corbis has no intention of taking more market shares and will just ride the wave of this downfall. Cool !!. What a great company that is. They cut staff, they cut royalty to “some” photographers, the ones apparently most impacted by Corbis lack of sales, and they announce that they will do nothing to grow. However, they will keep more of what is left.

No one mentioned, for example, the web ready Corbis-Veer new pricing at $40, $9 less then Getty’s . It would have been nice to ask if this was a company wide policy to slash prices too.

The leisure, casual, dress-down-Friday meeting was apparently a new corporate attempt to make contributing photographers swallow a hard pill. And it seems it will work. Pro stockers, desperate to make any revenue at all, will seemingly accept anything these days. Even the fact that they could make 70% royalty if they moved to Snapvillage, the midstock arm of Corbis, or if they switch to shooting celebrity portraits and belong to the Outline brand.

There is a class system being instituted at the Bill Gates photo agency with photographers receiving different types of royalty based on what they shoot. You are a complete amateur, you get 70% of a growing market. You are a season pro, you get 40% of a declining one.

It is doubtful that any photographers will leave the paper tiger, as there are no alternatives anymore. If anything, Getty will continue to trim its contributing sources in order to keep the best. With the successive failure of all co op photo agencies models, the ineffectiveness of the trade associations and the impossible tasks left to the medium size agencies, its a grim horizon facing pro stockers. But then again, it always was:  “This is our company together.” Ya, right.

Posted in Midstock, Photoplus, commercial stock, prosumer, finance, getty, corbis, transaction, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »

October 19, 2007 by pmelcher.

After spending a day at Photoplus today, one aspect became really obvious. There were more internet businesses for amateurs and semi pros then I have ever seen. The web 2.0 bubble has definitely reached the traditional photo industry and one can see numerous web based solution for everything photographic. It was interesting to see, besides the traditional giants booth, like Canon, Nikon, and other Fuji or Olympus, a myriad of do it yourself, on line, community based solution for the wealthy amateur. And, a bit like the lotions that will make you a slimmer person or make your hair grow, these websites will enhance your photography to depths and lengths you had never dreamed about.

For just a small monthly fee.

Of different size and with this feel of “we are here to stay”, these stands will offer you anything from do it yourself self-published photo books that, if you listen to their sales pitch, will sell more than Annie Leibovitch ever sold, to others that will make you a seasoned pro, selling more images than Getty has in the last 10 years. So once you buy all the gear, then all the accessories, you are teased by these businesses that promise to build you a career and make you extremely wealthy with what you thought, only just about an hour ago, was a only a week-end hobby.

While Adobe or Apple have magnificent stands with pseudo preachers screaming into wireless microphones in front of a wide-eyed audience on how to turn an ordinary image into a work of pure biblical proportion, an army of recently VC-ed funded start up will grab your emerging hopes to stuff them in a community-based, crowdsource-powered “shlingalabada”.

Rows and rows of false promises with shiny teeth hiding a sharks’ appetite. A little Las Vegas strip full of a salespeople who practically beg you to join them in their fruitless gamble, in the desperate hope that you will give legitimacy to their underlying lies and insecurities.

The most interesting part is that, with purpose or not, the layout of the huge Javitz center is set up as a warning: as you enter, you have from left to right and wall to wall about three of four rows of the companies that make the foundation of this business. The giants: Nikon, Kodak, Adobe, Lexar, etc. As you venture deeper inside, you then hit the accessories guys, long time accepted parasites of the latter: lens companies, bags, lighting, etc. and then, once you escape the peddlers of tangible product, all you seem to see is computer screens. The fabulous wonderland of the virtual world. Online classes, online models, online storage, online archive, online this, online that. Some very legitimate, most, however, probably never to be seen again.

During the first dot com, the amateur world was not digital yet, so it was speared. This time, the market is perfectly rip. In a very compelling way, it is a perfect showcase of the current photo universe. What is the most troublesome is that none of the microstock where present. Why ? A fear of putting a face on the scam ? After all, Mr Corbis and Mr Istock/Getty, Dreamstime, Fotolia and Shutterstock, what better place to meet and recruit more contributors ? And when you think about it, where are the traditional agencies. After all, Photoshelter, DigitalRaiload and IPNstock are there recruiting photographers, why not them. Or is the Photoplus crowd not good enough to be accepted in their closed membership club ? One reason the traditional agencies have taken a beating from microstock is that they have snobily ignored a large part of the shooter community and yet they persist to behave like tightly restricted, invitation-only clubs.

One can see the circus of the double digit, multimillionaire VC funded carpet seller of web 2.0, live at Photoplus 2007. Two days left.

Posted in prosumer, web 2.0, Photoplus, flickr, photoshop, Royalty free, getty, corbis, Microstock | Print | 3 Comments »