Where to go?

It's almost 2006....

The fact is that over the period since photoconnect was set up the market has changed somewhat, with the ‘micro’ agencies (selling images at $1 a throw) mopping up the designer segment of the market (where photoconnect used to get quite a few orders) and many, many more sites tuning their online content so they get found by the search engines. I’ve been adding features to make the site easier to load images to (including import IPTC keyword data) and to allow linking to images in libraries where an instant download can be obtained. This fitted in with my workflow but also with a growing number of photographers who seek to market their images through multiple outlets.

While new facilities are all well and good, what really counts is getting the buyers in. While images on line have increased the number of visitors and resulting orders have been on the wane; in contrast there has been some recent success in getting contacts for assignment work (including from the BBC) built on the concept of the photographer’s home page (getting found in Google location searches for photographers) or because of the specialist nature of the content enforced by the narrow subject matter requirements of the typical submission.

(For a photographer in any but the very biggest cities Photoconnect does seem to be a good value advertising outlet.)

The latest change that I have made on the site is to set up a new submission facility that can deal with single images. Here photographers share content pages in the same way that they would at any other online outlet. This reduces the time associated with running the site which was becoming far too great dealing with the submission based system.

Finally I have to address quality or licensing issues with some of the content on the site or the licensing chosen for images (in particular unreleased RF images of people).

So what I have to decide is whether I simply go forward using Photoconnect to market my images only or continue to add in facilities for other photographers eg

• Retain existing content asking for 25% commission on existing sales
• Upfront fee to continue adding images then 25% commission on existing sales
• Increased fee for photographers’ home page to take account of advertising nature of content
• Fee for adding pages of own (as opposed to shared) content
  

The fact is that dealing with other photographers is a major investment of time and reduces my freedom to do what I want to do for myself with the site. The fees that I would have to charge to make it economical for me would have to be rather higher than at present. So I’ve still not decided what to do - but I can see a real difficulty in selling the concept while the search results market is so much more competitive than it once was.

Photoconnect is a great platform for direct marketing - I've always encouraged photographers not to rely on search engines and try this. But I've not even done it myself - yet, and would require a further addition to site facilities...