Archive for the ‘Asset Control’ Category
A month with The3dStudio.com
Just last month I joined 3dStudio as a contributor, here is my Affiliate Link if you would like to join up as a contributor, I really liked the site as it does not come with the normal start-up hype I have seen so often, as they are already trading with other digital products they have an existing customer base that are used to paying more then micropayments, which is important to any new business.
I was not expecting to much so I uploaded 86 images on the 27th July 2009, as a non US contributor I will need to fill out an W-BEN or suffer a 30% tax on any licenses sold to US buyers, I joked on the MicroStockGroup forum that I would not need to do that for a while.
The transition of microstock
I spend time looking at forum posts, reading blogs, and talking to other digital artists, I am trying to analyse the current market and look at possible scenario’s for the future direction of the microstock industry, and I can see some patterns emerging that will influence how microstock develops, the comments below are just my thoughts.
Microstock is young in the business world, at about ten years old it is just like a child that has had a growth spurt and now it is time to mature, the body of the microstock child has been bombarded during this growth with all sorts of rubbish and other changes, the parents of this child can see it has reached a point now where it is obese and it needs to detoxify, lose the fat and work harder to become much leaner.
Keyword placement and search relevance
The Artists at Alamy have devised a system to see how you rank as an artists against your peers, they call it the BHZ game, where you add BHZ as the first keyword to an RM licensed image, then after 48 hours you can search on the term BHZ, based on where your image turns up in the search then that is your ranking, this is flawed in many ways as there can be many other factors, the other keywords, date uploaded, number of views and zooms, and Alamy’s diversity algorithm.
So on any stock website just how do you know if your keyword positioning is correct, and how your image is placed with it’s peers, I would like to share the method I use on my Alamy images and see what other artists think, with a small portfilio amongst over 17 million images, as a part-time photographer I often wonder how the buyers find my images, I do get recorded views, zooms with an odd sale here and there.
Content and usage is just the buyers problem?
Firstly I must say that this is by no means legal advice, just my understanding and opinions on some of the aspects of digital asset delivery via the internet.
Looking around the various Forums and Blogs I often read that the end client or customer is legally responsible for the image, and how the image is used, but what about the image content are you sure that you have no responsibility that you have not already discharged as an artist or agent.
There are some sweeping statements which are often used as a blanket response for all types of possible scenarios and image violations, but rarely do the posts and comments question the artists and merchants responsibilities, and was enough really done to protect the interests of the artist, agency, merchant, end client or customer?
PAWS for thought new model ideas
I have been looking at different ideas for a new digital asset delivery system, a model where the artist has more control and a bigger share of the revenue, and the assets are delivered direct to the customers browser, these are just my ideas and I would not be in a position to launch such a service so this is just a discussion point.
The key to any new model is putting the infrastructure in place, and that place for many of the recent businesses is in cloud technology and this is firmly the domain of Amazon Web Services, the biggest showstopper at the moment being Amazons FPS Flexible Payments System, this service will only work with a US bank account, until they change this it complicates the payment process, I have been in contact and they say they are looking at expanding this service to other countries.
