How many times ?

April 1, 2008 by pmelcher.

How many times will  members of this industry get together and talk about IPTC, keywording and other metadata. How many meetings, conferences, synopsis, “get togethers”, panels, parties, does it take ? Both the ASPP conference in Arizona and CEPIC in Malta have scheduled hours long conferences on this subject. Again. The one in CEPIC is 8 hours long !!!

It used to be that the IPTC was a small geeky association of nerds looking into how to standardize metadata in images. It has now become the most sought-after organization. More than the dying PLUS coalition.

The amusing part is that none of the attendants are keywording their own images. They have staff people to do that. Furthermore, none of the companies that offer this service are on the panels( JaincoTech, Keedup, OnAsia Digital, Etc) They would know better, wouldn’t they?  Instead, you have marketing managers or agencies owners sitting in stuffy rooms, vaguely writing notes while waiting for the suffering to end until they can finally get a free drink at the evening’s cocktail party.

At a time when the temple of controlled vocabulary  ( the Library of Congress) has decided to pull out from its antiquated method of keywording by putting 4,000 of its images into Flickr and ask for crowdsourcing wisdom, the photo agency world is wasting time and money into desperately trying to impose a standardized form of controlled vocabulary. Some probably spend more time and money on attending these panels than they do in a whole year of marketing.

The aim, apparently, is to define a series of code words that could be transported from one databank to another and yield the same results. Thousands of them. Same keywords. Wether they are related to the real world is irrelevant as the priority is to standardize and eventually give photo buyers a book on which word to use and how. And then what, have university offer a degree in photo researching, transforming photo buyers into bonified librarians? It is bad enough that some “photo editors” have no visual experience, it gives me the shivers to think what would become if this would happen.

There are few misconceptions here :

Language, unless dead, evolves all the time. Even dictionary publishers worldwide know  as they add and delete words every year.  Who uses “walkman” anymore ?

Keywording is not a marketing tool:  A bad or irrelevant  image well keyworded is still a bad image. It will not sell.

Controlled Vocabulary does not include local cultures. If it does, than it cannot be controlled anymore. It is arrogant, pedant and quite simply foolish to even believe that one controlled vocabulary can and will apply to the whole world.

A word is not a definition. It is only a description. It takes many words to skim the surface of what an image is. Thus keywording should be an accessory to search, not its main engine.

In the long term, keywording will die. Already, there are other emerging ways to search for images : visual, color, face recognition, similar, pattern recognition. In the text world, there is even semantic search, which allows you to search by meaning instead of exact match.

Google images, which everyone sees as the ultimate “find me tool” does not even index IPTC.

They say insanity is repeating the same thing over and over hoping for a different result. Seems to be that the photo industry is banging over and over on the same door and it will just not open.

The solutions ? Exactly what the user generated content agencies are doing. Let the keywords be offered by the source . They shoot, they keyword. And they keyword well because they are using an everyday vocabulary that the buyers are also using. A vocabulary that changes and evolves all the time. A vocabulary that is not “controlled”. Organized chaos.

Or follow the giants. Getty, which you never see at these repeated panels, as well as AP, Reuters, Corbis and others, have hired outside companies to do their keywords. Because it is not their chore business and do not feel it necessary to have a full time dedicated team of librarians. They seem to prefer selling images rather than cataloguing them.

It would be an interesting exercise to calculate how much time was wasted in “perfectly” keywording images that never sold in some of the medium or smaller agencies that seem to be obsessive about doing in house keywording .

Would it be more interesting for these congress, meetings, conference to have a panel about how to make great pictures that sale ?

Worst that could happen would be a few hours looking at great image.

Posted in keyword, Search, Plus, Zymmetrical, google, flickr, corbis, PACA, CEPIC, getty | Print | No Comments »

The Philosopher’s Stone

February 14, 2008 by pmelcher.

All other parameters set aside, it has always been the industry standard to price an image based on how many people would see it. And for a very good reason: If it was used in a lesser publication, in a small format, there was more chance that it it would be used again, by someone else, in another media. On the other hand, if it was used worldwide, in many media, it would fetch a “buy out” price.

Example of an advertising based image from GumGum and X17
We rely on circulation, printing run and languages to estimate the amount of potential views. Than came the internet. At first, the initial website where “tests” and minimum funding. As friendly as this industry could be, images where licensed for a flat fee, at an extremely generous price. Granted, the traffic was small and the promises big.

Agencies and photographers where eager to help and see this new market grow. $125 for a home page and $50/$75 for “inside” quickly became an editorial standard price as we all struggled to make it work. For commercial usage, price where, and are, in the thousand of dollar. Because they are licensed, they are even given a time frame, although the biggest majority of websites never pull out images but archive them. The images thus become licensed in perpetuity. Granted, harder to find and see, but still there.

Websites came and website went. New one appeared, funded by obscene amount of dollars, while other crashed and burned in a masquerade of quirky business plans. A lot didn’t even bother hiring real photo editors and relied on web designers or producer with no experience in photography, to license images. Prices remained the same.

For two main reasons : The promise of massive usage and the impossibility to seriously track usage. Websites claimed that even if they were paying a small fee for usage, they would be using a lot of images, thus making the volume compensate for the low payment. Appealing for photo agencies, not so for photographers. Some companies, like Wireimage, even created baffling subscription plan ($1000 a month  with eonline.com for all you can eat images) just to gain market shares and kick the competition out of their space . The gold mine turned into a mine of chalk.

Then came the RF and microstock guys. Their model was to not even bother negotiating anything. Here is our images, here is the price, do whatever you want with the image. Perfect for the internet space and its web designer who could get images at 3 :00 AM and not have to justify its usage. Image tracking companies like Picscout or Digimarc just made the management of RM on the internet even worse for users and pushed then even more into using RF images. But it didn’t help the editorial world. Long gone was the accepted model of the more an image is seen, the more its price should be higher, exactly like advertising.

Finally, two guys from the West coast of America, not from the industry, looked at this and said : “this is insane !!!”. In a medium that can finally track exactly how many people actually see an photo, images are still priced with a scheme right out of the medieval ages. Ads are being sold on how many hits they receive, why not images ?

They launched GumGum, which became live today, first offering X17 content and with many more to come. You set your price for how much an image is worth per views ( or thousand of views) and there you go. The bigger the site, the more they pay. If no one visits the site, the image is free. You can also put a cap and decide you want to license an image for 1 million views. Once you reach that target, the image ads an advertisement. Thus you can archive the image while the owner still gets revenue.

This is the most refreshing and revolutionary idea to hit this industry in decades. It is not going to be an easy sell to publishers who had a sweet deal up to now, but it is the future of licensing online. It is fair, simple and automated. easy to understand, to use and to apply. No need for Plus coalition complex interaction and implementation, no need to add any salespeople, no need for drop down head banging menus and complex calculation. No need to ever figure out the pricing. The usage figures out the pricing. Its the ease of RF applied to RM. The Philosopher’s Stone.

More on Gumgum here .

Posted in celebrity, copyright, magazine, Plus, gumgum, license, web 2.0, news, Royalty free, law, editorial, finance, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

Who does it belong to ?

December 17, 2007 by pmelcher.

A rather big parallel universe to the photo industry is the copyright industry. According to the Copyright Alliance, “The U.S. core copyright industries accounted for an estimated $819.06 billion or 6.56% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005.” That, of course, includes music, graphic, video on top of photography. One has to assume that this number is about copyrighted and licensed products.

No wonder it has become a battlefield. On one side, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its followers who preach that the internet and everything on it should be free and exchanged. Its a virtual world, after all, and all content should be distributed equally as to facilitate new creations. A global, unrestricted mash up. They are behind the Orphan Work bill and would probably like to see copyright laws disappear entirely, at least on the internet. Not a completely insane proposition if you believe that there is more to life than making money and that we could all be more creative if we did not have to worry about our budgets. I get to use your image and you get to use mine. We share. It would be great if photographers and agencies where also in the business of creating websites for consumers. But besides Getty and its upcoming Jamd.com, none are. Since photography is a raw material, like oil, and used in the process of creating something new, like a magazine, book, or ad campaign, it is hardly exchangeable. But, regardless, the free-for-all, “private property is evil”, lets trade community is here to stay.

On the other side, you have those who would like a piece of the pie. Take Creative Commons, for example. Currently a non for profit organization that has managed to raise a lot of money since its creation. By redefining how work of art can be used, albeit in a very simple way, it is positioning itself to become a major and inevitable player in this field. Right now, it is entirely free to use, making it extremely viral. But just think that even if they charged 1 cent ( euro, canadian, US or other, you decide) how much would that generate. If they grabbed just 1 % of the copyright industry, it would be $8 billion a year. And that is for the US only.

Besides the CC, the photo industry is familiar with the PLUS coalition, also in the same space. PLUS intends to charge a fee per license used. Recently, the very rich and powerful newspaper industry has also launch its own standard, the Open Access Data. Without going into long and boring details, it is obvious that whomever manages to create a worldwide standard will be sitting on a mega goldmine.

Where does that leave the photo industry that solely depends on copyright to defend its turf ? Well, depending on who wins the “copyright/license definition” battle the outcome will be completely different. But one can already envision a not too distant future where, one way or another, every image licensed on the web will have an additional fee that will have to be paid to one of these “Standard license owners”. Probably a “service fee”, it will resemble a tax on copyrighted material and proceeds will go in the pockets of those who have no other creative talent then bending the rules in their favor. The idea is simple : you create a standard and you make people pay to use it.

Most people would enjoy paying for a service that simplifies the licensing model and will not mind. If it makes RM licensing easier ( as easy as RF !!), it is sure to attract more buyers to the game. Considering the volume, the fee will probably be extremely low per transaction. Imagine, getting a fee for every image licensed on the web. Quite an income, isn’t it ?

Posted in Search, license, copyright, Plus, IPTC, prosumer, law, transaction, finance, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »