An Idea

Hi Steve,

I noticed that this thread had gotten lost at the bottom of the page unanswered so I am bumping it up as well as giving my opinion.

I think it would be a good idea. Not sure about incentives but maybe you could post a link to their site on yours. Or have some sort of weekly or monthly contest for recognition. ??

Hey, you never know unless you try.

I would however be careful not to get into some sort of copywright dispute with this though.

Sonia

Weird though it may sound, you could learn a lesson from the porn industry for this venture - running some kind of pic-post system whereby professional photographers can offer up a single image of their own to be distributed on your site in exchange for a linkback to their site in order to receive the fullsize version of the photo.

Actually, the porn advice goes out to most internet entrepreneurs - they have made a fine art out of encouraging people to part with cash/email addresses, and most of their techniques can be easily modified to suit any business model.

Not that I particularly advocate porn... but their marketing is particularly astute. I'll shut up now.

I think what drives the porn industry is lust, not tactics.

The thing is, what's your product? Porn is a consumable product, a sort of produce -- new stuff is needed, after awhile, the old stuff isn't any good anymore.

General images are not.

The market is immensely smaller, for one thing, and extremely specific. While I enjoy looking at photos of cats, kids and nature, let's be honest here, WHO took the photo is often more important that the nature of the photo. Like authors.

There have been a number of attempts to get royalty-free images out there, and to get people to donate them, but they all collapse or fail to achieve the lofty goals of the people who create them. The latest was image-cafe.net which has recently changed ownership.

Quote: I think what drives the porn industry is lust, not tactics.

Certainly lust is the reason people seek out porn in the first place, but that alone is not what gives adult sites the levels of success they've enjoyed over the past five years.

When intending to acquire a resource over the net, regardless of nature, everyone is propelled by a need of one kind or another. In the case of Steve's idea they'll (hopefully) be driven by the need to find copyright-free, high-quality photographs - which could be initially promoted in a similar fashion to the online porn industry, since the medium is similar.

To say that the seedier side of the internet is without ludicrous is a little short-sighted. You need only look at the partnerships between many adult and warez sites to see the targetting of potential customers; the adult industry having identified a group who would be both interested in their product and prepared to dive into the "darker" aspects on the net, then targetting sites they are likely to frequent.

In Steve's case maybe cross promotion with font distribution sites or fine-art directories, and other loosely related by non-competitive sites would be beneficial in raising the profile of the site, which is important, not least of all, because the higher the profile of his site the more likely skilled photographers would be prepared to offer him some free content in exchange for promotion.

To return to a different point for a moment, if such a project was a success it would soon cease to be financially viable for Steve to run due to the amount of bandwidth the site would be consuming, therefore some kind of subscription plan, or phased payment system may also be in order. As Suzanne says, there have been many sites that offered everything for free in the hope of getting enough donations to stay alive, but eventually popularity will force your costs beyond the point where you can afford to operate it for nothing.

Just my 2p

Not arguing here, it's true that cross-promotion is key for many markets. I just wonder if the drive to consume is similar.

Fonts are like chocolate for a lot of people, they just want to have them. Same with dingbats and brushes and and and -- they are graphical candy.

But are royalty free images in the same category? I'd say they aren't. Specific to this market, I think that with the advent of digital photography, royalty-free images will be in higher supply than demand.

I tend to disagree. I would say that stock imagery falls into the designer's arsenal of tools in the same way that brushes, dingbats, and fonts do. The problem with stock imagery is that it's often difficult to find that perfect pic, so it's always good to have more sources to choose from. Another problem is that with fewer resources, the chances of others designing use of your chosen photos is higher.

The biggest problem is going to be getting good, high quality photographers to submit to your site and I don't see how you'll be able to do that without some sort of exchange of funds involved. There are other places they can go for that, or set up their own site etc.

Good luck with it, anyway.

My cousin owns and runs digitalart.org. When DA.O started up, it was free for visitors with a few ads. The site's ads almost covered the cost of the shared server it was running on. Now, with the larger bandwidth requirements, and it's own dedicated server, the ads only pay for so much.

My cousin just finished version 3 for the site, and it includes a "Premium Membership" scheme. Version 3 has only been up for about 2 weeks, so I have no idea how the site's economics is doing.

I agree with Megan and you have to remember stock photography can be a photographers income.
I used to be a photographer and still have a few thousand images in a photo bank that give me a few dollars a month. Photos depending on their use can sell for as little as .50 up $50,000.00 depending on the subject, where it will be used and how often.
I was surprised when I first saw them free online but you aren't getting the quality of the real image (all stock photos are slides)