What exactly was wrong with beige?

In case you are surfing around the site right now, you may be taken aback by the design inconsistencies. But although it's getting worse in the short term, it's going to get better and as the beige elements disappear (was it beige anyway? more an off- beige perhaps?) so nice neat and consistent in design white pages will emerge.

As I'm updating I'm noticing that the photos first placed on the site really look rather dull compared to the recent ones. I'll be updating most of those in due course - but in the meantime remember that what you get is not what you see, what you get is an image file freshly prepared for you using a far superior monitor and software compared to that I evidently struggled with 7 years ago!

Buying a stock photo here at photoconnect should finish up being an all round better experience.

Updating the site!

I've been quiet on the photoconnect front in the last year or so. However I've been prompted to reconsider this relative inactivity by the realisation that the continued first place positions on Google and other search engines for terms such as "Stock photography London" and "stock photos Paris" can be capitalised on in driving traffic to my assignment site, Light Touch.

It's the London pages that are key to all this so I've just uploaded about 300 new images captured over the last year. And looking at the London stock photos index page I've realise how this really could be better organised (done) and simply look better (on the way). There are some quaint link descriptions to pages of obscure content that really need to be updated to something snappier and some even quainter images that need to go in the favour of the newer, better content. All this I'll be working on this week.

In fact I really want to build on the London pages to make them clearer to all and easier to navigate, bringing better images to the fore. Clear reference to districts should allow for people looking for a photographer to stumble upon Photoconnect content. And separately, appropriate linking from portrait stock photo pages should pick up on people looking for a portrait photographer rather than portrait stock photos.

But also, more importantly, the upshot of all this should be that more stock photo images should sell!

Long time, no post - Getty $49

It's the final nail. With price expectations at a new low it's simply not time efficient to sell images for this sort of use; with web use being one of the main markets I have to wonder whether its time efficient for me to put images on my own website!

Translating into £25, it just about justifies the time taken to prepare the image, deliver it and invoice it. A personal service. It does not pay for the time taken to take the image, keyword, get on the site. It does not pay for the time taken to get the many other images put onto the site that have not sold. And it pays nothing for the little element of art and expertise put into getting the image.

So when I quoted £30 for web recently and was told "That's rather more than we have previously page for a stock image" I did not bother to reply. I should have said "Well, go to Getty and spoil yourselves". But that would have been helping 2 companies that did not deserve it.

Running Adwords on Photoconnect

So it seems to be quite public now that the lay offs at Acclaim Images were not that amicable - unfortunate since it appears 'family' were involved.

One of the issues raised was that Fred Voetsch's decision to run Google Adwords on his site exploited the photographers - by effectively making money by advertising competitors.

Since it is easy for many to see some truth in this, I have to consider the situation here at Photoconnect where I do the same.

Photographers originally paid to be on photoconnect - but that was in different market conditions to those that exist now. Each photographer has paid for a year's exposure for their images, an alternative to their own website costing rather more. After the year matured I have not asked for more money, or for photographers to leave but recently I have started running Adwords on the pages on this site.

I am in a slightly different position to Acclaim. My only marketing is the search engines. Acclaim uses them but has also been raising its profile by other means, although that may change now.

Now say a photographer puts on this site images of the New York Financial District. That page will get found in a great number of Google searches. Some people will want to buy a photo of the New York Financial District. Others are looking for something else to do with New York or to consider their Financial affairs.

Those looking for a photo will either see what they want on the page in front of them or not. If yes, they will look to buy. If not then one in a hundred will click on a advert earning a few pennies to help keep Photoconnect running, subscription free. The ads MAY be for other stock agencies but are as likely to be selling Mutual Funds or travel to New York. So those looking for something else will find what they are looking for.

One thing I do is try and keep control of 'free photo' adverts or adverts for microstock sites. I can do this through a filter Google provide but inevitably some sites get through until they are spotted and I employ the filter.

So all in all I don't think the adverts affect sales. What they do is keep the site running with no subscription. The modern internet runs on the basis of advertising keeping many sites alive, and photoconnect is not an exception.

Lifestyle - more than one style....

One of the little issues that I face in pulling together images on photoconnect is how to categorise lifestyle.

Well, I've finally found a place (a tip from Chris Elsdale on the AlamyPro group):

http://www.imagesource.com/

A way forward for photoconnect?

I've thought long and hard about how to include other photographers on Photoconnect. The crux of the issue is whether Photoconnect is going to get in visitors to click on ads (and sell a few photos) or whether it's going to sell lots of photos AND have visitors clicking on ads.

It's the latter I'd prefer and I've reached the conclusion that this means that, yes, I've got to be a little choosy about which photographers feature on photoconnect but more choosy about which of their photos feature.

Photoconnect is built on using keywords that correspond to those that people searching for images are using. Those people get their first impression directly from the images that they see that feature those keywords. If they are potential buyers then I and other photographers need them to hang around or even better return again. Nothing will happen on the site if it is padded out with lots of images concentrated in a few vague areas eg landscapes. It needs to have a great breadth of specific subject matter, travel images covering individual cities, countries, states, sports images covering specific sports, lifestyle images covering specific feelings.

So when a photographer declares an interest in Photoconnect then I'd look at their portfolios on Alamy and see whether their images are concentrated in subject matter areas that are going to work on photoconnect. Are the image titles good? Then I'd ask them to load up the images and take it from there.

While this is happening, I will have to do a purge of existing images to bring them up to scratch. Mine, other photographers. What I do not have great confidence in is the ability of all photographers on the site to deal directly with buyers. At least if there are links to Alamy the buyer will be able to purchase from there and the site will not gain a poor reputation because of an inability to deliver.

Free photos! (Maybe.....)

It's been a while getting around to it but at last I've set up my fight back against the relentless march of the micro agencies - yes free photos!

Well not quite free of course. It's a pretty restricted list of beneficiaries and anyone using a photo has to provide a link back to this site. That link helps with the Google ranking here and accordingly will help the site get found by people who will be paying for photos.

And what is the point of giving away images to governments and schools? Easy - no link is of more value than one from an educational establishment or government organisation. Links from these sites are a huge spur to online marketing efforts because they are so difficult to get and they are going to be genuine. So links from them give a site credibility and Google regards them as of being of much greater value than other links.

And some photographers object to giving photos to charities. I've always regarded giving money to certain charities as being a waste of money. For example, hospitals. Give £500m to the health service and the government (who will always fund it to the lowest level that is politically acceptable) will give £500m less. But overseas charities are different. No one cares too much how much is given to support people overseas, so they need it more.

And the page itself should of course pull in the punters looking for free photos. With the new watermark (it's not actually on the photo but it will seem it is) and the photo click protection the defences are up. It's not foolproof but it makes it just a bit more difficult.

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...