Posts Tagged ‘Blog Writing’
Affordable Editorial Images for Blogging?
I welcomed the move by Getty Images who have launched a new service for Web & Mobile images Sized, Priced and ready for digital use.
I have been researching the lack of affordable web sized editorial images for blogging, and looking at many blogs I find that most could be enhanced by a stock image or two, but the key problems as I see them are the lack of affordable editorial images at microstock ‘pay-as-you-go’ prices, and an easy method of search and delivery, and I personally think that editorial web image use has been much overlooked, with the focus being to over saturate the market with trendy commercial images.
Now that the ‘new commercial markets’ have dried up and growth by acquisition is getting to be less of an option for the bigger websites, how to maintain any business growth, I think that the target will become the editorial side of the industry.
Historically the thinking about the editorial use of images is around magazines and newspapers, along came microstock which targeted the commercial side of the business advertising and advertorial, with Istock becoming know as the art directors and designers ‘dirty little secret’, with the low cost images and aggressive marketing this opened up many new markets, like the small business users, personal websites, students and consultants that needed an image for a presentation.
Image by: Flickr/ahxcjb
Does Microstock have real Diversity?
I was reading this topic “Cultural Diversity, What is Needed in Imaging?” over on the Micro Stock Group forum, quite a lively topic with some good replies.
I posted a couple of replies myself and started to think ‘”just how diverse in other areas are the stock sites already?”, as we tend to have preconceptions and visual stereotypes, many images I see like this one here are departmental, as they fit nicely into subconscious boxes, the ones that spring to mind are the many family images which are mostly mum, dad, kids and grandparents, I then considered how many of these typical families I know myself and there are not that many, so what if I had to write an article with a single parent and child as the focus, how diverse is the selection of images and what images to use?
