Fair Trade Chickens and Eggs
I used the word ‘Fair’ in a reply to a blog post on the Microstock Diaries Blog , I was commenting that Stock Sites could return a higher percentage if artists paid a penalty for rejected assets.
A reply to my comment had the following text, “Also, this is just my view, but I think you weaken your argument any time you use the word “fair”. It’s a capitalist market so the forces of supply and demand are what determine reward.”
The cost of rejection who pays?
The problem with rejected assets is that some artists will not learn from the rejection and still be uploading the same content the next time, they will not do the research and change the content or workflow, and you often see in the forums some artists will just not understand and take it as a personal insult and sometimes leave, while others will take the same view as a soccer coach and play the averages, 100 shots and hope a couple get through.
Rejected Assets – Problem Solved in Seven Steps
An artist might be very happy with revenue from sales but there is one thing that can make an artists un-happy, start to feel anxious and become defensive, that is when an asset is rejected by an agency, the asset is often seen by the artist as needing protecting and the artist may become defensive and not take perspective.
The asset inspectors and websites often become the subject of ill feeling and the target of abuse, by reading comments in forums like “it’s the inspectors fault”, and “my rejection was overturned”, can lead to the artist using these comments to reinforce their arguments and not to look at their rejected asset more closely, so how are these un-happy feelings dealt with and how could they be dealt with in a more positive way.
There are many thousands of assets rejected daily and a very vey small percentage of these will be overturned, some may be reprocessed and accepted later, others will just never be acceptable to that website and not always on quality, as they are just not needed, there are three ways that these rejections and feeling are dealt with and one of these can possibly reduce the number of rejections by using problem solving skills.
What if Ebay or Amazon had digital downloads
Over on the MicroStockGroup forum there are now some 33 agencies listed for digital artists to upload their assets to, the websites seem to all follow the same business model, with new agencies coming online and going into liquidation more frequently.
It seems that digital artists think it is reasonable for the agencies to take up to 85% of the revenue, why and how do we find ourselves in this situation?
Time for a re-think on Digital Asset Delivery
There are many services being launched around the Digital Artists Assets, many are just new sites that are just mirrors and mimic the existing big players business models, many of these services will fail quickly, because the market is already saturated with these services which do not have a unique selling point, all are trying for a share of the existing revenue pool which causes dilution and artists commission or royalties to be cut, where are the new ideas and markets going to come from?
