Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Crestock WordPress plug-in

I am Crestock contributor and WordPress blogger so I got interested in announcement I received in email this morning. It looks like Crestock developed plugin that allow bloggers access to search for, and add, any Crestock image to their blog - free of charge. Obviously I applaud any marketing initiatives that will help my photos to sell better but I got couple questions.

  1. Why I as a blogger need high quality commercial photos for my blog? I am not making any money on my blog so why would I want to pay for images? I can get whatever I want for free under Creative Commons license. Lets say I want image of carrot on my blog. If I search for "carrot vegetable" on Crestock I got very few results.If I go to Google Image Search and search the same terms with CC license I got hundreds if images.

  2. How do know that this plug-in exists?  Where is a press release? How do I install it? Why do I care about it? What are benefits for blogger? I would rather want a paid banner from Crestock on my site than ability to display watermarked images.  The answer is Google Search. It will lead you to WordPress page for this plugin. Nothing more. What kind of marketing effort is that? 24 overall downloads, it is not going to bring any sales I think

Friday, September 25, 2009

Picasa 3.5 available for download

Picasa
Basically it's about name tags that have been available in web version for a while. It  scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together.  It will also sync back and forth with online albums so if you already got name tags there all will be imported to your local collection.

Other features include geotags and integration with Goggle Maps. You can easily set album or photo geographic  locations.  Tag management has been improved which makes it more interesting alternative to commercial photo management software. last but not least is simplification of import, upload and sharing. You can actually do this in one step.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Pixelpipe

Pixelpipe
Pixelpipe is a web gateway that allows mobile desktop and server applications to publish once through Pixelpipe and have that content (photo, video, audio, text, file) distributed out to over 100 different social networks, photo/video sites and blogs around the world. For consumers we provide a huge selection of software and plug-ins including iPhone, Android, Picasa, iPhoto and more available as well as support for a number of open APIs (Flickr, Atom, twitter..) for software developers to publish through.

Pixelpipe

Microstock mergers & acquisitions

Can we say that holiday shopping season just got started? I think it actually started when parent of #2 (IStockPhoto) snapped parent of #5 (StockXpert). Now #1 (Shutterstock) takes #6 (BigStockPhoto). What should #3 (Dreamstime) and #4 (Fotolia) do, merge? This way Big 6 will be reduced to Big 3 and rest of small players sooner or later will bite the dust. Wait, there is still the "biggest looser" of microstock industry Corbis they can drop big money on something change the balance of forces.

Friday, September 11, 2009

August 2009 earnings breakdown

I am posting August results a little bit late because I was on vacations during first week of September. So how this month is comparing to previous one? Still it seems like downtrend across the board but it is getting weaker. I gained back some of the losses. IS is still loosing, fourth month in row below payout level. Other players are actually doing better than usual. Hopefully vacations are over now and we are entering holiday season.


Aug Aug/Jul
SS 45.28% 92.69%
123RF 16.61% 227.70%
DT 15.82% 159.61%
SXP 9.88% 89.90%
FT 4.94% 148.33%
IS 2.85% 65.52%
BS 2.22% #DIV/0!
CS 1.67% #DIV/0!
CSP 0.72% 65.00%
Total 115.52%


aug2009microstock.png


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