Posts Tagged ‘Digital Assets’
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.
New Businesses and Digital Real Estate
Every month we see one or two start-up companies hoping to take a slice of the merchants digital asset revenue, generated from digital artists license sales.
The new businesses or services are usually owned by people that have maybe tried contributing to the existing digital asset sites, created applications as a service to help artists submit their assets to the websites, or have an existing digital online business for other forms of digital assets.
Fire-starters that will either do well and soar or just crash and burn, these are the phrases I would use for some the new businesses, that are coming from a limited exposure to the world of digital asset delivery.
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.
If I had to start up a new microstock website
This was the title of a topic here on the MicroStockGroup, and there are many good points raised from the Photographers, but the general consensus is along the lines of a microstock boutique agency, with exclusive content both RF and RM, much along the lines of the Istock Vetta collection, invited contributors and selected content.
This is an option that many other microstock site might already be looking to follow, I thought hard about what would be my target market ,and I still really think that the largest most under serviced asset users, are still bloggers and content providers, and the small sizes are still the future of this industry, the niche collections are the cream and do have a place but are an already limited revenue stream.
