The perils of taking advice from pros

I got an email today that seems to be representative of a common thread I'm seeing. I included excerpts from the original sender and my responses:

In Chapter 7 you note that in 2000 you increased your image library, and had a big spike in traffic (2000 visitors/month). If you don't mind me asking, approximately how many images did you have online entering 2000?

I have no idea. And though I appreciate the motivation for your question, the milestone comparisons are inapplicable. The major reason my success back in 2000 was that there was virtually no appreciable photo content online. Anyone that put photos online did well. Most pro photographers were still shooting film, and the time and cost of getting that media scanned and online was a major barrier for photo imaging growth. While digital cameras were around, their resolution and image quality were too low to have much commercial value till 2003 (Canon's EOS 1Ds was the first camera that could produce an acceptable professional image quality for commercial production.)

So, whatever size my archive was, or photo quality, it was easier to succeed. So, don't look at my past as having any relevancy to today's market.

I tried to advise pro photographers to do this back then, but most were adamant that it would cause more harm to have images "stolen", and that film-based stock photo agencies were still the only viable distribution channel. It was this heated argument that propagated my postings (and my website) to other websites, which resulted in my getting so many links, which translated into traffic, which helped elevate my site rankings, which translated into sales.

(Ok, I'll admit it: I probably also had a lot of worthwhile photos to buy.)

A big part of my strategy is blogging on my image creation and some of the places I have visited where images were taken. I'm trying to be as search engine friendly and optimized as I possibly can, per your suggestions.

My suggestion is not to be "search-engine friendly", per se. It's to rank highly in search results. The two are not the same, and you don't achieve high rankings by having search engines merely find you and index you accurately. (That's being "friendly".)

Ranking highly in search engines requires other sites to link to your site. The value of those links are assessed by the ranking of those sites, which affect your ranking. Search engines are aware of people attempting to game the system through "link exchanges". Accordingly, you can reduce your own rankings if you try to agree with other sites to link to each other as a way of increasing each of your link counts. Those sites rank poorly, and so will yours, if you do link exchanges.

So the question is, who do you want to link to you?

Writing articles on "image creation" and "the places you've been" will attract mostly other photographers. And they don't buy photos. While it is certainly desirable to have highly-ranked photo-centric websites link to you, this is a very narrow market, and not one that will boost your overall rankings that ultimately attract image buyers.

If you're going to invest time into blogging, you want NON-PHOTOGRAPHY sites to link to you. How do you do that? By blogging about subjects that probably have less to do with photography as the other subject.

My advice has always been to be an expert in something other than photography. Write about that and cross-post your articles to discussion forums or other formats to attract new and different audiences. If they regard your knowledge and opinions as valuable, they will link to you, talk about you, and regard you as credible. This is what will raise your site's ranking.

Do I follow my own advice? Well, not as much as I should. Yes, my site has a lot content about photography (business and techniques), and yes, I rank highly for that. But again, I did this back in the 1990s and early 2000s, when such things mattered. It doesn't matter that much anymore. I would not be successful today by repeating the same steps I did back then, so don't emulate me just because I capitalized on what was at one time a successful technique.

More recently, I have a great deal of non-photography content as well -- mostly in the form of photos, of course. But here's where I've dropped the ball. I don't spend nearly the kind of time talking about non-photo subjects as I should. I am in the fortunate position where I don't really have to. And that's the part that doesn't translate to other, emerging photographers.

This leads to another point I've made often in the past: don't emulate other pros. What they do NOW, or have done IN THE PAST, often has no bearing on their current success, or yours. Most of them are unaware of this, and erroneously believe they have advice that emerging photographers should adopt.

See this blog post about asking pros for advice. Though it's about pricing, the concept is the same: pro photographers' opinions or experiences are not universal and cannot necessarily be expected to apply to anyone else--especially those still trying to build their careers or a presence.

There's also this related post: this one is about the perils of being a photographer's assistant, or having existing pros be "mentors." Most pros today were successful at a time where their experiences no longer apply today. Having their advice can be fraught with as much poor advice as useful, and emerging photographers cannot discern between the two.

My best advice for emerging photographers in this day and age is not to look at photographers at all -- look at general online business development. There are many texts and periodicals that deal with building business models that are more universal, and can better translate to a photography business than what narrowly-experienced pros can offer.

Getty and Flickr: Prophesies Coming True?

People have been emailing me copiously, asking for a statement in response to the new relationship between Getty and Flickr, where Flickr members and visitors can work with each other through a new program with Getty Images called “Request to License”. The details of this program are listed here. From that page:

When a prospective licensee sees an image marked for license, they can click on the link and be put in touch with a representative from Getty Images who will help handle details like permissions, releases and pricing. Once reviewed, the Getty Images editors will send you a FlickrMail to request to license your work, either for commercial or editorial usage. The decision to license is always yours.

Why are people asking me about this?

For years, I've been proposing that precisely this model be implemented. Most of my blog entries in 2007 and 2008 articulated this very model. The first was on Feb 13, 2007, in an article titled, "The future of photo sharing sites and agencies". There, I predicted the inevitable convergence between companies like Getty and Flickr:

I believe it will invariably happen that major photo agencies like Getty and Corbis can (and should) move into the consumer market. Consider what would happen if major stock agencies expanded their businesses by opening the flood gates and letting everyone in. By removing the barriers that require photographers to "submit images," and having a separate portion of their sites be entirely open, much like other photo-sharing sites are, they would give more options to buyers, and provide more opportunities (and greater incentive) for photographers to join at all levels. Getty owns iStockPhoto.com, which is a microstock agency that sells images for much less, but this is not a consumer-based, social networking style photo sharing site like flickr is.

The key here is in italics: microstock agencies are not social networking sites, they are therefore limited by both buyers are sellers than the social-networking sites. My premise for this logic is based on my years of research showing that 80% or more of licensed images is peer-to-peer, directly between buyers and photographers, not among agencies. You can read this research in the article, "The Size of the Photo Licensing Market"). The summary of that research is this basic truism: Most buyers find images on non-stock agency websites.

On Feb 18, 2007, I wrote how the photo-sharing and social-networking sites can capitalize on this opportunity in an article titled, "Two-Phased Approach to photo-sharing/licensing model". I said:

Phase One of this business will be where a photo-sharing site merely allows visitors to license images directly from the site. Phase Two will involve the distribution of the same photo assets to other sites, much the same way online ad sales are hosted (or "published") on other websites. ... For the sake of discussion, I'm going to assume that the approach ultimately adopted is the one I've suggested in the past: make it pure and simple by giving the user a toggle for setting whether his photos are (or aren't) permitted to be "sold".

And that's exactly what Getty and Flickr are doing now. Over four years later.

You may note that I said there was a two-phased approach. That second model will eventually become part of more photo-licensing business models. (In fact, it already exists, but among companies too small to get anyone's attention--partly because the technology and business models they've adopted do not properly understand and implement the true nature of photo licensing, copyright issues, and potential target markets. This is an aside for the moment; it may come up again when larger players eventually begin to consider the opportunities.)

Speaking of predictions, I remain steadfast in my opinion of the inevitability of what happens next:

In July, 2007, my blog post titled, "The Solution to Getty's Woes" explained how Getty can get out of its financial troubles by simply buying Flickr directly from Yahoo and using it as the main stock licensing engine. The article got into exceedingly detailed analysis of Getty's financial model (and troubles) combined with the explosion of available imagery on sites like Flickr that make this solution not only obvious, but inevitable.

On a directly related note, I called into question the life expectancy of the Creative Commons in this article (2008), where I again proposed that Flickr allow users the option of choosing between allowing their images available for free via CC, or to get income from their images. I said,

...it begs the question about whether enough people would choose the option to "make my images free"(CC) if it were next to the checkbox that says, "pay me a quarter if someone's dumb enough to buy it."

And then there's the buyer. If they were given the choice between "free images, with disclaimers and risks" and modestly priced images without such risks, it wouldn't be very likely that the "free" versions would be chosen very often.

The concept of CC would never survive under these two conditions.

Without getting too far afield, I have no qualms with the CC, per se. It's more about how simplistically it's been designed and deployed. It's just not sustainable in the real world business market. The problem is not the "license terms" and the structure of the legal contracts--those are all just fine. It's the fact that the system can be gamed so easily by both buyers and sellers, that it's too unreliable to be sustainable beyond a small handful of casual users (by comparison to the larger market of stock imagery). The true protections for both buyers and sellers is to leverage the copyright registration mechanism. That is, creative commons images that are also registered with the copyright office lowers the risk both both buyers and sellers, as explained in that article. Since no one is building copyright registration into their online business models, and the CC itself has a fundamental objection to the concept of copyright in the first place, the CC will be relegated to an historical footnote , bringing strength back to the for-fee licensing model. And which brings us back to why I'd always argued that Flickr should have enabled image licensing.

So, why is this all good for the photo licensing industry? I articulate this answer in the blog entry I wrote on March 15, 2007 in the article titled, "Photo-sharing-licensing sites leveling the playing field."

As more companies engage in the business of licensing images, photographers with credibility will gravitate to the sites that offer a better return on their money... In a way, this is how photo agencies started in the very beginning, only better: because photographers don't have to be "accepted," the playing field is much more level, and the market forces can be more free to let the money flow to those who really do merit the higher earnings (rather than at the whim of photo editors). The buyer, it turns out, is the best photo editor, and it will be pretty clear in short order which sites are hosting good, honest content.

I summarize with another excerpt from that article:

...the most basic, fundamental truism about photography remains: there are more people who have it as a hobby than as a profession, and the barrier to entry is low... the honeymoon period for Getty will end once photo-sharing sites become new outlets for photographers where the open market can decide their rates."

2009 Year in Review: Web Optimization

In this second segment of my series, "2009: Year in Review," I discuss issues related to managing my web presence. Some of these methods directly result in income, such as advertising dollars, whereas others indirectly affect income, such my ranking in search engines or by directing traffic towards monetizable content. Nothing discussed here addresses my actual sales and licensing methods, which was addressed in Part 1 of this series.

Web Traffic and Advertising

Traffic to my site has marginally increased by 16% from the same time last year (2008). More specifically, I averaged about 15,000 visitors a day in 2009, but the number would have been much higher had it not been for a technical mis-decision I made during the summer months that dramatically dropped my rankings, which had to do with "keyword stuffing", discussed later. Normalizing for that, my traffic has been pretty steady at around 16-18K unique visitors a day, compared to 14-15K/day in 2008. (Stats can be seen here.)

While that may sound impressive, it's not that simple. There are a number of devils in the details, and sifting through the data is only half the battle. For example, the bounce rate (the rate at which people leave my site after viewing the first page) rose to 8.5%, and the average time on site dropped by 11%. In other words, people are leaving my site sooner than before.

One would think that this is a bad thing, but there's other data that suggests otherwise. For example, advertising revenue more than doubled; in some cases (some pages and topics) tripled and quadrupled. All those people "bouncing" away without spending time on my site are clicking on ads. For 2009, advertising revenue jumped to represent 17% of total income.

One might say that I'm losing potential buyers to advertisers, but that's not what's going on. Most of the ads on my site are not for photography prints or licensing, which is the lion's share of my online transactions. That is, people are clicking on ads because they decidedly do not want anything I have to offer. I don't care that they leave; it just so happens that they're paying me a effective "exit tax." Or rather, the people who are getting my traffic are paying that tax.

Indeed, this turns out to be mutually beneficial: advertisers whose own sites don't rank well for some search terms, actually get a lot more relevant traffic from my site than they would if they paid to get onto Google's search page directly. That is, they'll pay ten cents to a dollar per click to put an ad on my page (through Google's adwords program), compared to twice or three times that much to put the same ad on Google's search results page. They may not quite get the same number of total traffic, but they'll get much more relevant traffic that converts to revenue if they place those ads on my site (or any of the other top-ranked sites). This kind of advertising-indirection costs them less, they get better bang for the buck. Best of all, I get a cut of it. :-)

I should point out that this isn't always so straightforward for advertisers, because targeting a specific site can be costly (in the form of lost opportunity, not necessarily money) if that site isn't consistently well-ranked. That is, if they target a site that appears to rank well sporadically (because their content changes), they could get a boost of traffic for a short time, and then go dark. Since my site has been around for a long time and is generally stable, this risk is not a concern.

In fact, many advertisers come directly to me and pay me to put their ads on my pages, rather than going through Google. There are advertising aggregators that have clients that pay them to do this analysis, and my site is coming up more often in their radar. My advertising rates are not based on clicks or impressions; they're flat fee rates, which advertisers like a lot for a high-traffic site like mine.

This then begs the question: what was the actual end-user looking for that they landed on my site, even though I didn't have what they were looking for? Why am I ranked so highly for them? Isn't that a problem with the search results?

First of all, the bounce rates are still quite low. Google does accurately put users on pages that match their searches. Of the low number of people who bounce, it's usually because they used the wrong search terms in the first place, and Google couldn't possibly know that ahead of time.

Take the Olympics in Vancouver, for example. If you search for "photos of vancouver", I'm currently ranked #8 on Google. (Before the Olympics, I was ranked among the top three.) So, I get a lot of people looking for olympics photos, even though they didn't use the term, "olympics" in their search query. When they don't see such images on my Vancouver page, users click on an ad that gets them where they wanted to go.

Vancouver is only one of a long list of examples. At the moment, I score very highly for phrases like:

1. "black and white pictures" (Google Rank: #4)
2. "what kind of camera should I buy" (#6),
3. "learning photography" (#2)
4. "photography business" (#1)
5. "model release" (#1)
6. "star trails" (#1)
7. "fill flash" (#1)
8. "photographing people" (#1)
9. "selling prints" (#1)
10. "photography marketing" (#3)
11. "sahara desert" (#5)
12. "stairs" (#6)
13. "photos of doors" (#1)
14. "photos of new york city" (#3)
15. "photos of san francisco" (#1)
16. "photos of kids" (#1)
17. "photos of united states" (#1)
18. "photos of patagonia" (#3)
19. "photos of cuba" (#1)

These are but a few among hundreds of phrases that Google ranks my site and/or pages among the top-five. But the key is that these terms are generic and they themselves do not bring traffic that can be attributed to a single dime of sales revenue.

While they are good for generating advertising revenue, there's an even better benefit to ranking high for generic search patterns: Non-buyer traffic out-strips buyers by orders of magnitude, and any traffic--buyers or not--contributes to the overall ranking of my site. When people search using more specific terms (for content that they do want to purchase), my site will rise in those search results, yielding sales.

So the objective is to have as many pages rank as highly as possible. One key strategy here is that I don't particularly care to rank highly for any single or small set of search terms--that doesn't necessarily benefit me. It's just having my site itself be indexed well for whatever content the search engines deem appropriate. And therein lies the question: how do they determine what search terms should send users to my site? Since they cannot determine what's inside of a photo the way a human eye does, search engines look for other clues to determine the content of a page that otherwise has very little text: metadata.

Keywording

I've blogged before about keywording; it's a huge topic. I'm not going to reiterate points I already made, but to appreciate how and why I employ my keywording methods, you need to at least understand this very basic set of truisms:

1. Most image buyers use search engines first, stock agencies second.
   Search engines act like "metasearch" for all the stock sites, as well as many other image sources, including mine, yours, everyone else's. It's best to use keywording techniques advised by search engines, not stock photo agencies.
2. Search engines are intelligent about search queries.
   Unlike days long ago, they know all the synonyms that are related to a common root. So, you do not need to include the singular and plurals, all the variants of "dog" (canine, puppy, pooch, etc.), and so on. What's more, intelligent search is becoming more common, even among stock agencies. The need to stuff your images with synonyms and other related keywords to make your list "more thorough or complete" is gone. In fact, attempting to do so can backfire on you. (More about that later.)
3. Controlled Vocabularies are a complete waste of time.
   There was once a time when such lists were useful, because it made the job of image search much easier for unsophisticated (brute force) search algorithms. Controlled vocabularies helped you use a small, consistent set of words, which kept you from using dozens of similar words that might come up with different search results when the user input search queries.
   
   While that premise was useful, it only addresses half the equation: the weakest link in search is not you, it's the end-users. Or rather, the search queries they submit. These people are not going to conform to controlled vocabularies. So, in order to map their queries to your images, their input text has to be converted to root words anyway. If the search algorithm is going to do this to end-user queries, it can (and should) also do it with your keyword list. Forcing you to conform to a list becomes a waste of time.
4. Keywording should take only a few minutes and minimal thought.
   It's very easy to over-think how people might find your images, or to worry that your images might not be found if someone uses a series of queries that you didn't think of. But this kind of over-thinking can negatively affect if and how your images are found. End-users learn very quickly to be very conservative in their search queries, or they will get a lot of irrelevant results, rapidly wasting their time. They may experiment with creative, conceptual, or "refined" queries to see what they get, but it doesn't take long to learn to "keep it simple." So should you. Keywords should include only the most basic, obvious, and prominent items in the photo. Search engines also rank the quality of photos (and the sites that host them) on their brevity. More than ten keywords will diminish a photo's rank because it usually means that someone is going to stuff the keyword list with unrelated words in an attempt to game the system. This is a common technique among photographers who submit their images to dozens of microstock agencies who do not enforce such restrictions, and who use brute-force (letter-for-letter) search algorithms. Keyword stuffing--also known as "keyword pollution"--has proven to be effective for such photo sites because it allows those images to be found ahead of other, potentially more relevant results for any given search.

In fact, I fell victim to "keyword stuffing" myself midway through 2009. In my automated keyword algorithms, which normally strips redundant or "similar" keywords, I had thought I was being clever by adding in location information (city, state, country) into the keyword list. Yet, what I found was that because the IPTC data already had these keywords, which search engines tap into, and because my keyword list grew (unnecessarily) by three more words, this dropped my rankings down by several notches, which kept me out of the "top fold" of search engine results. It's a huge deal dropping from #3 to #6 or #7 for a given search term, and you can see the results of this in my site traffic data over the summer of 2009.

Needless to say, this cost me quite a bit in traffic, which affected every other aspect of my business, from sales to advertising rates.

You can imagine, therefore, that "effective keywording" (so that images and website are deemed "credible" and ranked highly) is a hotly debated issue in the photo community. It's also one where entrepreneurs try to come up with solutions--some good, some not so much.

One example is a product "imense annotator" (annotator.imense.com), which has some interesting ideas, such as an image-recognition algorithm that tries to guess keywords that might describe the people in an image. It will do a reasonable job in ascertaining the ages, sex and ethnicity of people in a photo, and then attach those keywords to your images. Clever, and possibly quite useful more to a stock agency than an individual. This is because agencies have millions of images to process, none of which have been (or will be) seen by company staff. On the other hand, original photographers that shot the images could do this task quite easily on their own. One can only shoot so many images in a day, and since one has to eventually go through a manual (if not minimal) keywording phase anyway, one can assign the keywords associated with the "people" photos as part of that process. This shouldn't be all that time-consuming for reasonably well-disciplined photographers. And human analysis on such things is always going to outperform a computer. (Yes, I say this as an active programmer.)

(Note: The annotator only does people/facial recognition.)

All other aspects of annotator look and sound cool, but are considerably less effective in practicality. Again, these include "commercial vocabularies", "crowdsourcing" and "controlled vocabularies." As noted earlier, these ultimately contribute to the perils of keyword stuffing that search engines don't like--and which only serve to confuse stock agencies' less sophisticated search algorithms.

Another thing to keep in mind is keywording is often done once, and then you never touch those particular images again. Therefore, whatever you use as keywords today are likely to stick with your images long into the future. But technology doesn't sit still--especially image-recognition and search algorithms. For these, time has a tendency to speed by rather quickly. Before you know it, most search engines will be incorporating the same sort of algorithms like the annotator above. In fact, Google's own image recognition features are rather well developed, and can be seen in action if you use their Picasa image management solutions.

In any event, the point is that keywording is a classic case where "less is more." Images should have minimal base tokens in the keyword list; the search "intermediary" interprets the uncontrolled end-user queries and maps them to the minimal keyword list in your images. This is and will always be the most effective way for images to be found.

While I don't necessarily fault software companies for coming up with creative ways to "enhance" keywording, I draw the line when companies actually recommend methods and behaviors that are wholly counter-productive. An example is Cradoc Software's latest product, fotoKeyword Harvester, a product that does a form of semi-automation of keywording your images. While I am a fan of the company in many ways because it tries to also be the photographer's "coach" on many vital business matters, it has never been on the forefront of the photo business--rather, they seem to be stuck in the 1990s with many of them. Alas, most of their advice, while applicable 10-15 years ago, is well behind the times today.

In the case of the Keyword Harvester, the company sent out an article titled, "best ways to keyword images using concepts and attributes." A quote is: "You'll need to start paying attention to how images convey messages in advertising." They say:

One of the most valuable types of keywords for an image are things called Concepts. A concept is a term that describes non-concrete aspects of your image, an abstract idea. Concepts are used by advertisers to sell their product with the use of your image. They want the consumer to think of something specific when their product is thought of. (...) For example: Wells Fargo Bank uses images of cowboys, wagon trains, horses, and the wild west to promote their business. The concepts for these images are: excitement, freedom, trust, historic, strong, powerful.

There are several problems with all this. First is one I highlighted above in my bullet list: photo searchers (commercial or not) do not use conceptual search terms very often--at least, not with much success as they once did when the stock industry was far smaller, before digital images, and before the internet--a time when almost all stock sales were dominated by Getty Images. Back then, yes, conceptual keywords worked. And this was because Getty internally controlled all keywords for all images. Also, they had their own intelligent search, and they controlled the images in their databank.

Today, images are found in many places, are keyworded by arbitrary staff--or worse, photographers--and the consistency is impossible to centralize and manage. The direct result is that photo buyers don't search the way they once did. (This is an example of Cradoc seems to be stuck in the 1990s.)

It's easy to put this to the test: go to images.google.com and search for the "conceptual keywords" that Cradoc said represented the kind of themes Wells Fargo uses in their imagery. I tried every word on their list, as individual search terms, in pairs, in triplets, and as the entire group. Not one single set of results from these queries contained images that would ever be used by Wells Fargo. They are totally unrelated to all their business models. This is not unique; it's rarely ever the case that conceptual keyword searches yield desirable results. That's why most searchers don't use them anymore.

By contrast, if you search for images based on the actual elements used by Wells Fargo imagery -- cowboys, wagon trains, horses -- image search results show many images similar to those the bank actually uses.

Again, the lesson: keep it simple. Don't get clever. Do not try to anticipate what the searcher might use as search terms. Photo researchers are more afraid of you than you are of them. They are going to keep it simple, too.

I can verify this with my own statistics: My site gets about 19,000 search queries a day on my own search pages. Of the search terms I get, 99% are for very specific items. Furthermore, when someone actually licenses an image from me, and I track their search patterns that lead up to the sale, it is never the case that people use conceptual terms.

In preparation for this article, I interviewed one particular client about how he tends to search for images. He said, "I found that sites are so inconsistent about search terms, that I've learned not to use big words. Just be as specific as possible to the actual things I want to see in a photo."

When I asked him how he chose the particular photo he licensed from me, and what search terms he used leading up to it, he said he wanted a "futuristic landscape." When he tried that phrase (and derivatives, such as "future" and "cityscape") on Google, Getty and Corbis, he got nothing like what he wanted. So, he just got specific: "glowing buildings", which lead him to the image he licensed from my site, which can be seen here.

Keywording Methods

So, let's get to brass tacks: how should you keyword your images? Google has a document called, Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, which includes tips on optimizing your images for search. It all boils down to:

1. The image's filename should include the most relevant elements of the image.
   For example, if it's a photo of a boy and a dog, use "boy-dog.jpg". If you have many such images, use sequences: boy-dog-1.jpg, boy-dog-2.jpg, etc.
2. Use keywords sparsely.
   The more keywords you try to associate with an image, the more you dilute it, bringing down its "rank" and relevancy (and credibility) with search engines, or with given search queries. This is because search engines use two key metrics to determine how well a given image matches a search parameter: the ratio of matches between an image's keyword list and that of the search query, and the filename of the image. For example, if the user entered the query, "boy and dog", the search engine sees two words: "boy" and "dog." (It throws out filler words like "and.") Here, the image named, boy-dog.jpg has a 100% hit ratio of query terms with keyword terms, and the keywords were in the filename. Note that the actual photo itself may very well be that of a fish and a boat. (Google doesn't actually look at that, because, well, it doesn't know how.)
3. Avoid using synonyms and other "related" terms in keyword lists
   That is, do not attempt to be thorough in describing images with keywords. That's not your job. Search engines already know how to do that. They've got thousands of programmers with PhDs doing that for you (and for the end-user). The more you try to "help," the more you're actually interfering with the process, which reduces your relevancy and ranking.

The good news about keywording is that proper and effective use of keywords is extremely simple and shouldn't require much (if any) thought or time. Using myself as an example, my workflow involves two phases: the edit phase (where I rename all my photos so that their filenames reflect their content), and the keywording phase, where I apply individual words to images--usually in very large batches.

For example, let's say I'm on a photo shoot of a boy and a dog. After editing out the stuff that gets tossed, I'm left with several hundred images, where I then name them just as recommended by Google: boy-dog-lake.jpg, boy-dog-bridge.jpg, boy-dog-1.jpg, etc. In order to assure the highest ratio of search queries to keyword terms, I try to limit filenames to two to six words, though most are either three or four. This is a difficult decision because if I use too many words, I may "match" more queries, but the ratio will be diluted. If I use too few words, I will rank highly for very narrow searches, but may miss more opportunities. This trade-off is a zero-sum game, so rather than try to game the system, I just be honest: determine what's in the photo, and use that as the filename.

Any words that may be "in" the photo, but seems to be less relevant are then added to the keywords list in the image's metadata. And even then, I rarely add more than two or three words, usually modifiers such as "young" or "funny."

Naming files is often very quick because most are batches of similar images. One only needs to browse a given gallery on my site to see the number of similar images that are shot together. The keywording process is similarly fast, also involving mass-assignment of specific, unambiguous words to large batches of images. My rule of thumb is that keywording thousands of images should take no more than 30 minutes.

Most any image-management software can add keywords; I happen to use Adobe Bridge, which is bundled for free with Photoshop or any of the creative suite products.

Note that if you inspect the images on my site, you may notice that they appear to have lots of keywords. Most of these keywords aren't actually in the images that I process--these are added later by an automated post-production algorithm that generates all my static html pages. I do all this to present hints to the end-user for suggested related search terms to stimulate new search ideas.

Maps

The newest addendum to my website is the use of Google Maps. Essentially, each of my web pages incorporates a google map to represent where every photo was taken. While it may seem frivolous, there's been great advantage to the maps. (It also wasn't entirely easy; Google set up the whole mechanism for the sole purpose of presenting maps based on specific street and/or mailing addresses. I have no interest in that level of detail; I just wanted to generate maps for generic locations, like city/state/country. Well, that isn't quite so easy because there are many streets named after cities, states and countries, and there's no way to tell Google maps that I'm not interested in street addresses, just general city maps.)

Though I instituted maps onto my site late in December, the effect its had on my traffic and ranking has been a surprise. Search engines seem to give extra boost to web pages that are geo-tagged--that is, they indicate location. When people search for images where the search parameters include a location, my pages get an additional bump. I've seen about a 10% boost in traffic two months after having introduced geo-tagging onto my web pages, and I look forward to seeing more data to quantify the extent to which geo-tagging has long-term benefits.

2009 Year in Review: Content Remains King

In this first segment of my series, "2009: Year in Review," I discuss the role content has played on my business.

As I've preached since the dawn of my writings on the business of photography, the best way to make money on the web is to create as much content as possible. Having more inventory to sell is only a part of the benefit—indeed, a much smaller role than people may think in some cases, as I'll articulate shortly. The main reason content is so important is because it's the nucleus of all other revenue sources and business activity. Content plays an important role for search engines, which not only allow people to find you, but provides other sites with links. As links build, your search rankings increase, which increases traffic, which feed these various revenue streams. I discuss this principle in general in my chapter, Web-based Photography Business, which is part of my series of photo business books. (I discuss 2009's numbers more specifically in the next article in this series.)

As a general business model, I follow my own advice to others: Almost everything you do should ultimately result in new, monetizable content. Once you have it, you can make money with it in perpetuity, with very little (if any) additional overhead or resources. Outside of some initial short-term costs and overhead, your business can scale up to virtually any size by merely adding new content. Whatever short-term income or expense that may be involved in acquiring new content, it should be regarded as part of your investment in the future. (That is, the short term pay or income is less important as the long-term potential.) I'll get back to this subject shortly.

Though people monetize their content in different ways, I happen to choose to be the exclusive licensor of my own content. That is, I do not use stock agencies or other distribution models. I usually recommend this approach to people as a default assumption when considering entering into the photo industry, but one can certainly leverage the sales resources of agencies, if done properly from the outset.

Given that I have over 60,000 images in my online archives now, and the manner in which content can be leveraged so easily, it may come as a big surprise to learn that licensing of still photography only represented 5.8% of my total revenue for 2009, compared to 16.9% in 2008. But don't take this bad news.

First, still photography (the majority of the content on my website) is what I call the "gateway drug" for my clients. People discover my site primarily because of my still images, and end up making more lucrative transactions later. The fact that still imagery licensing has dropped as a percentage of total revenue is more due to the much larger increases in other, more lucrative revenue streams (discussed later). This further underscores the importance of having a robust and diverse business model that can survive (and even benefit from) shifts in the economy. In this context, the recession may have caused some people to spend less, but it also caused others to shift their spending towards me. Those "others" is a much larger population, even though each spends less on a per-transaction basis.

For example, my fine-art sales represented 19.5% of my revenue, up from 12.7% in 2008. This can be entirely explained by the economy and shifting demographics. Buyers on my site in 2008 and prior had been low-end art collectors and enthusiasts (see Selling Photography Prints), whose average purchase was $232 per order. By contrast, 2009 saw the average drop to $188 per order, but I got a lot more orders. Though I may have lost art collectors, they were replaced by high-end consumers were who shifted their spending from more expensive gifts (such as jewelry, etc.) to photography.

Assignments

In light of my prior blog articles on the principles of economics for photographers, assignments are also extremely critical to the acquisition of content. Many photographers scoff at the notion of accepting "low pay" for assignments, or even doing them for free, but this is extremely short-sighted and self-defeating. Acquisition of extremely valuable imagery is key to long-term revenue generation, and assignments are pivotal to that objective. If you choose your assignments well, then the "fee" you charged—be it a lot or a little—is, and should represent a very small proportion of the revenue you yield from the photos you just took. In other words, if you're only revenue form an assignment is the assignment fee, you have an outdated business model; you simply cannot compete in today's modern internet-based economy, especially when millions of people are taking pictures themselves. That assignment rates go down may be an unfortunate side-effect of this growth, but it is merely a blip on the screen when it comes to a mature photo business model.

I'm not dismissing the potential income from an assignment; I never leave money on the table. If the client is well-endowed and I can negotiate higher fees, I do so. Mind you, negotiation is an entirely different subject, which I discuss in greater length here and here. But negotiation is only about optimizing what you can get, and should not be confused with whether you should take an assignment (regardless of price). In short, in mature business and career planning, assignments should be regarded as one-off payments for opportunities to acquire useful images that last into the future. When you amortize your assignment fees over the course of time, it should be negligible. (There are assignments I shot in 1996 that still generate revenue.)

Assignments represented 12.1% of my 2009 revenue, up from 4% in 2008. This substantial increase is due to both an increase in the number of assignments I took, and the amount I charge per assignment. As I said, I don't leave money on the table, despite the fact that I face the same market conditions as everyone else—namely, attempts by other photographers to under-bid me, even offering to shoot for free.

So, why would my clients pay me a higher rate than they used to, despite the increased competition? Because I provide something that cannot be supplanted by the lowest bidder: a track record. My experience, quality, reliability, and maturity in the industry is important to clients that cannot afford to risk getting a photographer to shoot something for free, yet end up with images they can't use, or other bad side effects of working with an inexperienced photographer.

I also choose clients wisely. I don't seek or need clients who can and should be serviced by emerging photographers. My motto is, "real clients don't need newbies." (Any photographer that complains about being harmed by newbies should have moved up and out long ago into the next tier of their profession.)

People often ask how I come up with my assignment fees. It's actually a very simple calculus of two factors: the client's financial condition, and the "value" of the images I can get. Remember, this doesn't govern whether I take an assignment, just what I charge for it once I deem it worthwhile. I emphatically dismiss all of the fee calculators that you see in books and on blogs. For example, most pros will say you should factor in your "costs" for any given assignment into your fee, whereas I feel costs are entirely irrelevant. I am never concerned with whether I'm making a profit for any given assignment because—remember—the true value of any given job is the longer-term potential with the images. Thinking about purely the fees for an assignment prevents you from focusing on career growth.

While I do generate good revenue from assignments, I will still shoot some for free. Last year I'd done two very important assignments, one was for free, and for another, I spent $3200 of my own money to fulfill the job. In this case, I knew that the imagery itself was invaluable. (And indeed it has already paid for itself in the aftermarket.) Better still, once my clients saw the results of the work, I not only sold them additional content that they didn't anticipate, but I got follow-on work to do exactly the same thing at twice my normal billing rate.

Still Photos

Over the past year, I've added about 30,000-40,000 new images, all
entirely from assignments. These include:

1. Cambodia (Siem Reap, Cambodia)
   
2. Laos (Southeast Asia)
   
3. Croatia (Europe)
   
4. Puglia (Apuglia) (The 'Heel' of Italy)
   
5. Jerusalem (Israel)
   
6. Paris, France
   
7. Oregon (USA)
   
8. The State of Idaho (USA)
   

Not included in this list are projects that I haven't yet gotten online, plus thousands of images added to existing galleries, mostly in and around California, such as Marin County (California), San Francisco, California, up and down the central valley, the The California Coast (USA) to the The Sierras (California). I've also expanded my topical pages, such as Doors and Windows, Stairs and Steps, Random Black and White Photographs, and other topics.

Video

As noted above, and in keeping with Truism #4 of my treatise, the Photography Business (1998), my latest expansion into new revenue resources includes video. As you know, video online has been increasing, and the technology required to produce quality video has come down. This has given many people an opportunity to expand their licensing potential in ways they never could before. I'm encroaching into the video turf much the same way consumers have encroached on the pro photography turf when digital cameras and the internet became inexpensive and accessible back in the 1990s.

Prior to 2009, I licensed no video footage. Yet it instantly grew to represent 12.2% of my 2009 revenue. Most of it is time-lapse photography, which I'd produced mostly as a curiosity that I stumbled into when I discovered my camera's cable release had an interval timer setting.

Most surprising about my video revenue is the fact that I have never promoted or solicited my videos. In fact, aside from my blog comments, I never even made it known that I had video content. I hadn't upgraded or enhanced my site in any way to host or license video content, and the only access to it is this page, which is merely a collection of links directly to my YouTube channel.

Needless to say, the natural viral marketing effect of YouTube is self-evident.

One then asks: if my site doesn't support it, and I can't license it through YouTube, how am I conducting transactions? Email! This is exactly how my stock photo business started. From 1996 to 2003, I had never had a shopping cart—buyers simply emailed me and asked to license images, and they'd send me a check.

Of course, that wasn't that unusual back then—few stock photo sites existed, let alone had automated shopping/purchasing systems, so buyers accepted it more readily back then. Times are different now, and so are expectations. All the more reason why I'm as surprised by the degree of video licensing I've done using this archaic model.

That said, I expect to integrate video licensing on my site soon enough.

It should be noted that one reason why my time-lapse footage commands such a high price is because of the way I shoot it. Rather than use a video camera, I use my conventional still cameras and capture each frame in full resolution: 5600 pixels wide. I then string them together into video sequences using either iMovie (for presentation onto YouTube) or Final Cut Express to retain the full ultra-high-resolution. In fact, these clips are so high-res, buyers can pan and zoom within the sequences down to ¼ of the original footage, and still retain enough resolution to achieve 1920 HD. (And even then, most video buyers don't really need 1920 anyway.)

None of this is possible using conventional video cameras, nor is it offered by other video-production service providers. And of course, the quality is much higher than video footage because night-time image detail in a pro-level dSLR far exceeds anything in the video camera category, even the amazing Red One. This strategy anticipates not just every possible buyer, but prepares for the future as well.

One might think that this is a huge shift in my day-to-day shooting. That's where the best news is: shooting time-lapse footage is as easy as setting up a camera for a conventional landscape shot, but instead of pressing the shutter button once, I press the interval timer, and then go away. For all-night images, I just go to bed; for daytime footage, I use my other camera body and shoot stills while the time-lapse body snaps away every 3-5 seconds. This is not to suggest that all time-lapse is easy (or yields successful sequences), it's only to say that it doesn't interfere with my existing shooting patterns.

Note that the videos on my YouTube site do not represent all the footage I've done, either in time-lapse or conventional capture. I've done a number of productions for clients as an addendum to my standard still-photography services. So, I haven't really grown a new business model as much as enhanced my existing assignment services. Also note that my Canon EOS 5D Mark II, the body that I use in standard still photography, also captures HD video, where I do get short segments of conventional video clips. (Always adding to my "content.")

Lastly, don't assume by any of this that I'm moving towards video and abandoning still photography. The kind of video I'm doing is just the low-hanging fruit that happens to be available given my set of conditions (equipment, talent and clients). I am by no means a true videographer that could be hired by a television network to produce content for broadcast. That said, the future of video licensing looks very, very bright, and it would be something I would strongly encourage other photographers to do if they had a propensity for the technology and the clients that would use it.

Consulting and Business Development

2009 saw a big decrease in my consulting revenue largely because I'm shifting away from that business model. I've always used it as a vehicle for conducting research into new and interesting areas of the photo industry. However, my interests are shifting into new directions, and I'm finding that the information many people seek is becoming repetitive, and ultimately fruitless. I'll be posting future articles on some of those initiatives.

Nevertheless, one of the side benefits of all this research is that I produce a lot more content that's not only indexed well by search engines (which brings me traffic, which helps my content sales), but it also leads to publishing revenue. As most of my readers know, I have written a few books on the photo business, which continue to sell quite well on my website. Even though they are "old" by publishing standards, I wrote them with longevity in mind, as they address timeless business principles. In 2009, my book sales and other publishing revenue (see below) represented 12.8% of my income, compared to 14.9% of 2008 revenue. (This aspect of my revenue is and always has been rather constant.)

Another noteworthy fact is that my site outsells ever other book retailer on the net by many orders of magnitude. And I negotiated the contracts with my publishers with this in mind—I don't mind taking less royalty advances on my books in exchange for very advantageous discounts for direct purchasing from them. Though my contemporaries in the photo business publishing world may sell more books on amazon than I do, I sell far more total books because of the volume on my site. There's also the fact that I get $10-15/book, whereas my counterparts get maybe 10-15% royalties on those amazon sales. (I'm guessing these royalties translate to about $1.50 to $2 per book.)

Then there's the revenue I get from publishers who reprint some of these blog entries (condensed down to 1500 words—yuck!) in their columns and newsletters. Interestingly, most are from non-US publishers. (One was translated into Russian. I got a copy. It was weird to see.)

The next article in the series will cover Web Traffic and Visitors, Search Engine Optimization, and advertising revenue. Stay tuned.

Weathering Climate Change within the Photo Industry

Unless you've been hiding in the smog in LA, or deep inside a coal mining operation in Pennsylvania, or in an oil slick somewhere near Alaska, you've probably heard about the controversy over Global Warming. There's been a lot of bickering on whether it actually exists, but the key sticking point is what role humans have played in the process. Do they have a material effect on climate, and, if so, to what degree? Or is the world simply going through its normal cyclical swings that it's done for billions of years?

The answers to those questions dictate whether, and to what degree, we need to do something about it. But problem isn't so simple for many reasons and many levels. And it's the worst kind of problem to have because all the solutions are not only very expensive, but the consequences for the wrong decision--in either direction--can be dire. If the problem is real and we don't react strongly enough, global warming can have devastating effects on life itself. If the problem is overstated and we overreact by forcing new and expensive technologies and other changes upon world governments, there could be severe economic hardship that itself leads to worse conditions, such as social and political instability, which leads to famine, war, and possibly the end of Facebook.

Then again, we could just weather the storm till mother nature swings back to the kind of normalcy that we've become familiar with.

What does this have to do with the photo industry? Unless you've been hiding inside a darkroom since the 1980s, you've probably noticed that there's been a dramatic change in every aspect of the business, ranging from photo license fees, to distribution (the internet), to the legal and social sea changes. At the heart of this debate is what role--if any, and to what degree--has the "consumer" played in this climate change? And, how do we react to that? If consumers' role is real, do we alter our "best practices" recommendations as professionals, what technologies we use, how we deploy our imagery, who should represent us as an industry, set new strategies for pricing models? Do we actually embrace consumers as our partners as both producers and consumers of imagery within our business climate? Or, if the consumer's role is minimal, then how do we react to the deteriorating conditions we see?

Then again, we could just weather the storm till mother nature swings back to the kind of normalcy that we've become familiar with.

What the photography industry and global warming and climate change have in common is that they are excellent scenarios for those who study behavioral economics, the field of research that examines how cognitive and emotional factors affect people's decision-making. What people choose to do about global warming--or about the effects being felt in the photo industry--is based in large part by the backgrounds (and biases) of the participants. Odd though it may sound, the "hunches" that people use to make business decisions, stem from predispositions and prejudices shaped by formative events early in people's lives. They establish certain philosophical principles, which serve as one's compass in their business decisions. You don't see medical doctors successfully running cigarette companies, or vegetarians successfully running beef factories, or war pacifists successfully leading infantry platoons into combat.

The question for photographers facing the climate-change conditions within the photo industry is whether their predispositions would allow for taking those actions necessary to survive, unpalatable though they may be to their historical traditions.

We can forecast this in some way by examining how they handle discussions on key points germane to the fundamental issues being discussed. Do they hone in on these major points, or do they get mired in nit-picking unimportant details that don't affect the final analysis? What we find is that most disagreements are not really about details, but in the philosophical positions of the opposing side.

The true test of this can be seen when you ask people how their own views would change if they were faced with the hypothetical premise that their own position has been disproved. For example, how would climate-change skeptics propose we solve the global warming problem if we could wave the magic wand and say, "yes, humans are responsible for this, and the world is coming to an end quickly." Would they turn into born-again converts? Would they say, "You've convinced me. Now, let's put caps on emissions and force companies and countries world-wide to migrate over to clean-energy alternatives."

That won't happen. Of the discussions I've read in a variety of media, their response can be summed up this way: "How are we going to pay for changes that doesn't create a worse situation? We're already in a recessive economy, and this kind of investment will make it worse. Companies and third-world countries would harm the global economy worse than the housing bubble did in 2008, causing global economic collapse and massive unemployment, forcing companies and countries alike to swing in the opposite direction: migrating back towards the cheapest possible energy alternatives, which are more wasteful and harmful than today."

Then there's the other side of the argument: What would the climate-change advocates say if their premise was disproved? That the world's climate is doing whatever it will do, irrespective of human activity, and nothing we do will alter it. Do you think they would swing over and say, "Well, Ok then, let's just keep going on the track we're on."

That won't happen either. They'll say, "It's got more to do than just climate. All sorts of human ailments ranging from cancers to other diseases are the result of waste byproducts in the air, water and land. There are unsafe working and living conditions in every country in the world, not to mention the huge costs in clean-up efforts. There are lost economic opportunities in producing new clean-energy production, not to mention the future technologies developed as a byproduct of research and development. And then there's just the plain aesthetic toll on the environment. Waste is ugly, which itself affects social growth, initiatives and investment."

The truth is, there's legitimacy on both sides of the argument, but it's gotten so heated and partisan--as has our culture--that people feel compelled to simply dismiss the other side's ideas out of hand, and just argue minute details instead of substance.

This is why I try to avoid point-by-point arguments with people who have fundamentally different philosophical foundations. It's not that I disrespect their positions or philosophies--reasonable people can disagree. But discussing such things in an open forum can be fruitless because, even if there were hypothetical agreement on certain facts, opposing sides will simply argue any and all points.

For example, in a recent blog entry I wrote entitled, Why there's no one-stop shop for photo buyers, I postulated that the photo industry is "immature" because it has not yet achieved certain kinds of efficiencies that other, more "mature" industries have, such as electronics.

This prompted a response by John Harrington in his post entitled, One-Stop Shopping for Photo Buyers - Too Complex and Fractured. His post took exception to many of the individual details of my article. The argument strategy is a common one where the real goal is to undermine the underlying premise by discrediting the facts that lead to it. But the details he chose were not germane to the larger point.

For example, John says, ...photography has been in the marketplace for far and away longer than electronics; and later, the photo industry is mature, but fractured. He concludes by saying that photography is a different media than electronics, and that accounts for the differences.

All fine points, but individually unimportant to the larger argument. In fact, I would propose that we don't really disagree on the main truism: pricing inefficiencies exists, and that is due to in some part to a fractured market. Posturing a position of disagreement and discredit for the purpose of undermining a more fundamental principle that he disagrees with is one thing, but the net effect of his post is counter productive: it perpetuates the partisan divide. His readers will be even further convinced that I am off my rocker, and my readers will continue to nod their heads in disbelief that the pundits in the photo industry still have their heads in the sand.

This doesn't lead to addressing the real problems that our industry faces.

Thought we may disagree on the terminology we used to describe the conditions that we both see and agree on, what he didn't address was my larger thesis: why is the market is "fractured" in the first place? (I called it an "immature industry" to be in keeping with more conventional economic terminology.)

So, how do we get the discussion back on track? We can begin by addressing one fundamental disagreement that has fathered all the other disagreements:

What role does the consumer play in the global economic effects we're seeing in the photo industry?

Here are the opposing positions:

1. I'd been arguing since the 1990s that the internet and digital technologies created an environment where consumers would be playing an ever-growing role in the economics of the industry, and that if photographers don't accept this premise early on, and change certain fundamental business practices, perceptions, and other strategic relationships, they would lose control over their own domain. There would be a time when all economic, social and legal matters important to pro photographers would lie outside their sphere of influence.
   
   
2. The counter-argument has been (and continues to be) that pro photographers still account for the bulk of licensed images, and stock agencies for the bulk of image sales. Therefore, economic, social and legal conditions are all manageable within the pro photographer community at large. The challenge has rather been that it's a large and decentralized group of mostly independents, each of whom represent a large swath of disciplines. Getting consensus on how to address certain things may be logistically hard, but doable, and outreach is expensive and education difficult.

These diametrically opposing views of the industry is the source of many, if not every, disagreement I've had with those in the photo industry.

For example, On the topic of price inefficiencies and erosion, I contend that it's due to the huge and disproportionate number of consumers who've entered the market as both suppliers and buyers of image content.

The opposing view holds that it's because too many microstock agencies came online and pros and other agencies were forced to drop their prices.

(My retort to that argument can be found here.)

Depending on which of these two premises you buy into will govern decision-making for your own economic future (if you intend to make money as a photographer). And which of these two premises you choose can be predicted by behavioral economists: cognitive and emotional factors govern decision-making, and those decisions are based on philosophical foundations. My philosophical foundation rests in a belief in open markets, strong competition, and no reliance on peers or "all for one" cooperation to succeed. Therefore, I responded to pricing pressures early on in my career by altering my business model to focus on higher volume, rather than higher per-unit pricing.

The traditional industry professional has philosophical foundations that holds that pros still control the market--not the consumers--so to maintain price stability, cooperation must be maintained through solidarity, which implies not undercutting other pros, never give anything away for free, and acting as a collective in all matters.

You name the "event", and I personally will behave diametrically differently than the traditional pro: Creative Commons, Orphan Works, copyright protection, marketing methods, use of "free" in sales and/or promotion, the use of portfolios, and so on. Every single aspect of the photo industry will be perceived differently between me and most photo industry pundits simply because of this sole, root disagreement about the role of the consumer.

Yet, the elephant in the middle of the room is still a common climate-changing event: pricing, copyright compliance, and distribution have changed. Our greatest challenge is akin to that facing those in the global warming dispute: it's not whether we can come to agreement on basic, core points, it's whether we can move forward with proposed solutions.

I agree that disassociating the two is counter-intuitive. How can you come to agreement unless you agree on the points that lead to particular proposals? Well, the first thing to realize is that one's one philosophical biases may not yield the same perceptions on such points. The different use of terminology between me and John Harrington when referring to price inefficiencies, for example: an "immature industry", or "too fractured?" Does it matter? Yes, points are important, but focusing too much on them can stall forward movement. Sometimes, solving these issues is more like solving a maze: start at the finish line and move backwards.

The way to test that theory is to probe what the either side would say if the underlying premise (the role of the consumer) is or isn't true. I'll start:

1. Let's say that my premise is false: that the role of the consumer has not been substantial enough to affect pricing or other issues facing the industry, and that photographers have a direct and strong influence on shaping the future of the industry. In such a case, I would say that the basic philosophies of the trade associations and recommendations by pro photographers are well-considered and actually spot on. The real problems are political: there's lack of unity among the trade associations (they should be merged into one or two), there's too much homogeneity (dissent and differing views are not well-accepted), and there's a deficit of intelligentsia. (No one does true research or recognized economic modeling; most studies I've seen wouldn't pass muster in basic college statistics classes, mostly because of the sample sizes of surveys aren't representative enough of the population being studied.)
   
   I've written longer manifestos detailing all these ideas, most of which were published in the 1990s, back when I did believe that the photo industry still had such control. (I was warning that, unless these changes were adopted, then the industry would lose control, which I believe happened in the early 2000s.)
   
   
2. I now put the question to the other side: "If you believed that pro photographers were so outnumbered by consumers as both buyers and sellers of photography, that pro photographers and trade associations has absolutely no material influence on all aspects of the industry--economic, legal, social and legislative--how would you alter your approach to addressing the "climate" problems in the photography environment?"
   
   You have 30 minutes. Use a #2 pencil. Go.

If your answer to that is, "If we're entirely powerless, what point is there to answering the question. There's nothing we can do!"

Au contraire, mon frere. There's plenty you can and should do, and these come in two forms: inward and outward.

Looking inward, assistance to photographers should include helping them better compete under conditions where their main competition is no longer other pros who will recognize traditional professional courtesy. Marketing, pricing, promotion, assignments, contract negotiation, and everything else necessary to succeed at photography is different when you're dealing with a base of photographers that don't recognize past professional principles. I won't get into the details of that here; my books and articles from my blog index already discuss these in depth.

Then there's external outreach. I'd recommend pro photographers and trade groups try to recruit consumers, to get them into the fold, to be more and stronger advocates for the cause. Initial tasks would include lowering membership fees to $25/year, advertising and promoting photo trade organizations in consumer trade publications, having photo trade publications highlight and profile consumer-photographers who themselves can serve as role models for others, contracting with mass consumer marketing and PR organizations to help re-educate traditional pros and trade groups to better understand consumer behaviors (as buyers and sellers of photo content), and so on.

In short, one must appeal to non-professional photographers en masse, and you do that by understanding their personal goals and desires, not by trying to change and mold them into the old world.

And it's this very premise that will alienate most pros and trade organizations. Their visceral and palpable response is rooted in the core philosophical rub--a disagreement of gargantuan proportions. Pros and trade groups will not be happy that consumers will not accept the traditional pro photographer mantra. Consumers and non-professional photographers are not opposed to "free" to promote themselves--because it works. They are not opposed to "undercutting competition"--because that's how the open market works. They are not worried about entering photo contests that ask for "rights grab" terms because this is what gets them visibility. They are not opposed to "work-for-hire" contracts, because those pay the bills. They are not going to sign up for a "solidarity" mindset, because a successful market is one that advocates strong competition. Photographers must dispense with the "union" mindset.

Now, I fully appreciate that all this is a hard pill to swallow. But, the climate is changing--the question is, "what are you going to do about it?" If one does not accept that the consumer's role is significant, there's not a whole lot of discussion to be had. But, if one does accept the premise, the industry's philosophical paradigm must shift.

The behavioral economist in me predicts that most pros would simply bow out of the business all together. Their "cognitive and emotional faculties" would not accept such a premise easily, and the cognitive dissonance would compromise their philosophical foundations.

Then again, we could just weather the storm till mother nature swings back to the kind of normalcy that we've become familiar with.

Off-topic: Gift Cards

[ Update: The New York Times wrote this column several days after I posted this entry. It's full of detailed industry data. ]

Though I never talk about it, I had a consulting contract a very long ago with a company that wanted to do something in the credit card business. I was involved for about a year, and the while the idea itself was great, it never got off the ground because of a critical "last puzzle piece" that couldn't be solved. I eventually did (and filed a patent), but it was after the company fizzled, and I had no desire to enter into the "payment" business. So, there it stays in my history pages.

But just today, I was talking with someone that said the following:

"I've heard that prepaid debit cards are really bad gift ideas..."

This prompted me to vent a long-standing issue I've had with credit card companies.

The main reason people don't like gift cards is because when the card gets down to about $10 or less, they become virtually unusable. Although you can go to a store and say, "charge the first $7.43 on this gift card and the rest on this regular credit card," it's very rare that people do this. And you certainly can't do that online. So, your $50 gift turns out to only be worth $42.67, and Visa/MC makes a handsome15% profit.

In this sense, gift cards to visa are the victim of their own success. People see the lack of value in the cards, and don't adopt them nearly as much as the card companies would like (or had expected).

The question is, what can card companies do to raise the rate of adoption while not giving up too much on the margins? Remember, the card companies *don't* want you to use up all your credit--otherwise, they give up the margins that makes them worthwhile (to the card company). And they don't suddenly gain new customers just because someone uses a gift card.

Now, one could argue that, as long as they make the same 1-3% margins on the gift cards as they do with regular cards (this 1-3% is the rate that the merchant pays on the total cost of your order), that should be good enough. Well, administration of the gift card program is a bit more expensive, and besides, there's plenty of room to optimize margins anyway. So, don't get me wrong: I don't fault the companies for using gift cards for profit motive at much higher rates. I fault them for not being more intelligent about this in ways to service both themselves and us, the consumers who could benefit from them. Their challenge is to increase overall revenue by finding the sweet spot in the increased adoption vs. the decrease in margins.

The way to do that is by making it easier to use that unused credit in high margin products or services, such as a visa-run online store where they sell products from co-marketing partners (where the co-marketing effort yields more revenue). This would be especially useful for non-physical goods, such as downloadable products, like music, games, movies, etc.

Or, allow gift card holders to apply unused dollars to their Visa Rewards program, which is pretty good, albeit under-appreciated, largely because most people opt for other programs with their visa cards, like airline miles (see below). This would do more to raise adoption rate of the program and potentially convert users to their "real" card. (That should ultimately be one of their prime motivations, yet it's not effectively promoted that way.)

Card companies should also consider developing helpful payment services that make it easier for online retailers to accept multiple card payments, or partner with paypal or google to allow users to register these cards in exchange for a portion of the margins.

Industry research shows that most "reward" programs usually yield the consumer about 1% of his money back, but getting that value is not entirely easy, nor is it immediate. It takes time. A research study I read in the NYTimes some years ago showed that the best programs are those that simply pay you cash back--even at 1%, this was best for consumers. Ironically, airline miles yield the least return, but people opt for them because having more unused miles gives other benefits like premier status that allows access to airline clubs at airports, and advanced positions when upgrading and other things -- all these require high mileage values creating a disincentive to ever "spend" your miles. This makes the "statistic" that credit card airline programs yield low rates of return a bit murky.

The point about reward programs as anyone in the consumer business knows, it garners much more revenue and profit than the 1% you give up to attract the users. Yet, gift card programs don't even attempt to tie into this. Such programs and co-marketing efforts could be more profitable if the card company was willing to make only 5-6% margins (instead of 15%) and offset that with a 10% increase in the rate of adoption, if they were only kinder to the consumer.

Ok, that's my vent. This is not a topic (or field) I will be watching at all, unless it happens to come across the mainstream press. I'm more than happy staying out of this business.

Why there's no one-stop shop for photo buyers

I got an interesting email today from someone that prompted me to address a question on many people's minds: why hasn't a single website emerged as the "primary" place to license images? As those in the photo industry know, Getty sells quite a bit, and microstocks fall behind them, followed in turn by a smattering of pro photographers and others who do well as individuals. But, with the trillions of photos on the web, and with the sheer magnitude of opportunity, what's really the barrier to growth?

Here's an excerpt from his email:

do you think that there could be an issue with just straight up too much content for buyers (all buyers)? Say for example - there was a website that everyone knew was the place to buy and sell images for any sort of use (commercial, etc.)? Couldn't there still be too many shots of a 'dog'? ... if all the buyers/sellers universally knew this was the place for images - wouldn't the back-end functionality of a site like this take an army of programmers to design? I have to wonder why something like this doesn't already exist or is in development by a major player like google?

Saying that there's too many photos out there is like saying that Google can't index the web because there are too many sites. And thinking that there could be a single go-to site for buyers and sellers is like saying that there's could be single go-to site to buy electronics. There aren't because there's competition, etc. But, the reason why there's a viable, stable market for electronics (unlike photos) is because there are mechanisms in place that help establish price points, distributors, manufacturers, and so on. In short, it's a mature industry.

The same cannot be said of the photo industry for a variety of reasons.

To begin, it's not that there's "too much content" it's that there's no reliable mechanism for sifting through it. Go to images.google.com and type "two men shaking hands" -- a common image search for business purposes. Though the matches are generally accurate, the results are also entirely arbitrary. We have no idea if these are popular images, or they are shot by famous people, or if they are "current", or even whether the source (website) is ranked highly.

The same is true for every website that displays photos--buyer website or not. "Arbitrary results" is why buyers have trouble finding what they want quickly and easily. Yet, despite the huge number of sites that talk about "swine flu", a quick search on that topic usually gets you exactly what you want on the first page. You can even misspell it -- say, "swing flu" and still do well.

So the first problem that people have to solve is search. And this is irrespective of where people go. Now, people can argue about whether real buyers go to search engines or to stock agency sites, but the technology barrier exists nonetheless. Who's going to solve it? It cannot--by definition--be a stock agency. Why? Because they will not (and cannot) return results that are photos they cannot represent.

Whether now or in the future, search engines will be how most people (yes, buyers) find photos.

Now that's not to say that companies like Getty couldn't solve the problem. In fact, they should. To do so, however, they would change their business model from being an exclusive seller to one that acts as a proxy for others -- a grand middle-man, much like how Visa and Mastercard merely enable transactions with an infrastructure. They don't actually participate in the transaction itself.

The reason why Getty won't be coming to the table here is that they suffer from two basic errors in their understanding of the photo industry: first and foremost, they don't see the market outside of their existing world of traditional ad/media buyers. Yes, that's a big industry, and Getty services them adequately. But it's tiny in the broader world of image licensing transactions. And this leads to their second grave misunderstanding: the belief that the best way to service buyers is to have limited content that's hand-edited by seasoned photo editors.

This is not in keeping with the internet today. As we have all learned in the past decade, Web 2.0 means that the "crowd" is the editor, and order among the crowd is achieved by applying intelligent ranking algorithms, tracking their behaviors, and mining user preferences to glean predictability. Getty doesn't do this. No one does this. (Well, google does with their regular text search for non-image content.)

Getty's model of knowing and understanding what buyers want is fine if you have one-to-one relationships with them, and that's what Getty's good at. I'm not suggesting that Getty doesn't keep what they have in-house. It's what they don't have -- what needs to be built -- that they lack, and what the industry needs.

For the industry to become "mature", there must exist two main functions: (1) a search and ranking system that returns reliably accurate results beyond any measure we see today, and (2) a predictable and viable pricing model that represents a true market-maker commodity market.

Granted, these are not simple problems to solve, but there is precedent for similar algorithms. For instance, Google took quite a few years before they came up with just the right mix of variables and weightings to determine which web pages match a given user's search criteria. A similar list of factors can be derived to determine quality image searches in a variety of contexts.

In the photo world, everyone looks to metadata (such as keywords) as the primary factor, but that's quickly morphing into something else. It's a longer discussion to have, but it sums up this way: google stopped looking at web pages' "keywords" field in metadata because it became unreliable--the system can be gamed, and bad players were ruining the reliability of google results by lying about the content of their web pages. Google solved this problem by no longer looking at web pages' keywords settings, and did their own semantic analysis of web pages to determine what keywords should really be associated with them.

It's not that "keywords" themselves will go away in images, but the future of image search will go well beyond user-editable metadata. Factors like "age" (current-ness), supplier, number of views, frequency of (published) use, and automated programmatic analysis about images to assess various conceptual attributes as well. Hard? You betcha. Yet, just as it took google years to come up with their "hundreds of variables" that determine a web site's ranking for any given search term, so too will effort have to go into determining the relevancy of any given photo search.

There are various image recognition algorithms that can begin to move in this direction, but once you get into the science of it, the field is much broader than people think. There are proximity algorithms to determine if two images are the same, there are content algorithms to determine image characteristics (color, textures, emptiness, focus, etc.), and pattern recognition (faces, emotions, objects, and other patterns). Underneath every image recognition algorithm must be a hierarchical database of seed information to spin the world into motion so that trillions of images can be automatically processed from web crawlers continuously.

And this science isn't just to determine search relevancy: it would also be used by an auction-based system to set pricing for a trading system, exactly like how google prices keywords for its advertising system. This is not simple college algebra, but it's also not science fiction. Similar models have been built to create efficiencies for more complex markets than photo licensing. (Personally, I envision a structure similar to the formulas used for pricing stock options. Here, rather than having a big/ask market of quotes, prices are derived from external data based on aggregating a weighting of historical pricing patterns for images with similar characteristics.)

So, who's going to do it? Therein lies the $64,000 question.

Here, there are two problems: As just described, there's a lot of technology here, ranging from all the various image-search algorithms to the pricing analytics. This by itself is already way beyond what any one company has done. So, whoever's going to attempt this must likely be large enough to go on a bit of a buying spree.

Secondly, there needs to be a general realization that there's money to be made. This is difficult when the cultural behaviors around photos is to share, steal, or do whatever you want. Most investors don't really see the "vision" of a viable worldwide market with these sorts of things become further embedded in our online social fabric. This, despite the fact that research shows that photo licensing is still a $25B industry anyway. Comprised mostly of peer-to-peer transactions, it is now precisely how the online advertising industry was before Google.

More reading on the true size of the photo industry can be found here.

Google could solve both problems outlined above, but that would introduce another problem: They are in the advertising business. If they were to enter a business that monetized content on the web, it would bring into question the objectivity of their search/ranking algorithms, which is the only reason people trust their advertising model. That is, buyers and advertisers believe the pricing model because Google currently has no financial interest in monetizing the content on any given site.

What the world needs is a search engine from a company whose business model is not to sell advertising. Yahoo is becoming a much more likely candidate for something like this (as I'd noted in this blog post), but the catch-22 here is that if they were that visionary, they'd have started this kind of development with their Flickr property years ago. Yes, Flickr could be a good launch pad for such an endeavor, but Flickr's too busy with other things to bother with such fantasies.

Then there's Microsoft: they have the money and the infrastructure to actually accomplish this feat, especially given their efforts to build a good search engine. Their physical and political proximity to Corbis (started by Bill Gates) could also be a substantial contributor to the transaction and pricing models that will be needed.

But I dont' have faith that we'll be seeing headlines in these areas anytime soon. That may change with the evolution of Web 3.0... For that, see this post:

http://www.danheller.com/blog/posts/economics-of-migrating-from-web-20-to-30.html

Might Picscout Ultimately Cause Yahoo to Acquire Getty?

I realize the title of this blog is rather provocative. But let me lead you through this.

It all starts with David Sanger's blog on picscout's new Image Registry and Image Exchange, which is the system that Picscout uses to index images and bring buyers and sellers together through third-party licensors. David makes insightful comments on three critical points.

First, his point #2:

Picscout aims to take a percent of sales, noting on their site: “ImageExchange acts as an online affiliate program, sharing image-licensing income between PicScout and licensors.” This will reduce the percent that goes to the photographer.

David is not the first to observe this, but it illustrates how the big picture is being missed. The premise begins with the fact that the universe of images users (some of whom are active buyers, but most of whom are not) use applications that produce documents (digital and print). Those applications are developed by third party Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), such as Adobe or Microsoft. If the applications that ISVs produce adopt the Picscout API to hook into the registry to identify images the user is using in his document, those users will not only be automatically notified they are using copyrighted images, but will also be given the opportunity to license them. This concept isn't far-fetched--exactly the same thing is done when users try to view movies or listen to songs on some devices.

However, because such a thing is not yet done for images, it has the potential to transform the stock licensing industry. If enough ISVs adopt the API and hook into the registry, a critical mass of users will be invariably recruited into the photo licensing economy. The more ISVs that adopt this API, the more applications will be using them, which casts a wider and wider net of users... who themselves become image buyers.

Here's the hitch: those ISVs will not adopt the API unless they have a stake in the game. That is, a cut of the license revenue. Unless someone has another carrot to wave in front of those ISVs, that's the only way to get them to participate in the program. If ISVs don't adopt the API, this whole discussion is moot. No one uses the registry. Game Over.

Therefore, the game is to capture the ISVs. And the only financial incentive they can possibly have is to participate in the licensing model--that is, a rev-share. This has the even greater advantage of giving the ISV even more incentive to get their own users to license images. The more they license, the more money the ISV makes. The ISVs will not just promote these features, but they may make it pretty darn difficult for users to avoid these features.

Imagine what Adobe would do if they had the ability to get a cut of a $10B economy if they just added a feature into InDesign that assured that the photos being used in any given document was properly licensed.... much the same way an iPod assures that the movie it's about to play has been purchased.

This is the same model I've described in my article, The Economics of Migrating from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0: convert the vast majority of image users into image buyers, and sales volumes go way up.

So, that David observes that photographers' percentage of royalty goes down is a true statement, but one that clearly misses the big picture. Obviously the ISV rev-sharing cuts the pie into smaller slices, but a smaller slice of a much larger pie.

David then makes another keen observation in point #7 about Picscout's underlying technology:

Evaluating an entire page of thumbnails is time-consuming. Each thumbnail must be downloaded and analyzed by the PicScout servers before returning index comparison results...

Though David only cites the Google search as an example of how users expect "speed," this is only the tip of the iceberg. Picscout's web browser plug-in that examines google searches is merely a prototype to demonstrate how the API works. Once again, the real goal is to capture ISVs.

But David's observation is more prescient than he may have thought, for performance is probably even more important than rev-sharing by ISVs. If their apps degrade in performance by using the Picscout API, they won't use it, irrespective of rev-share.

The technology Picscout has introduced is clearly first-stage prototypes to introduce the business model and be the first on the map. Yet, it's also Picscout's Achilles Heel, as there is a race about to ensue.

Let's not be naive: Picscout is not the only company on this track. Image-recognition is a science that's akin to text search: there are many ways to do it--some better than others--but it only needs to perform to minimal threshold for the business model to succeed. Many other factors dictate success or failure. Sure, though Picscout may have superior image-recognition algorithms, that part isn't the crowned jewels. Indeed, there are many companies with image-recognition algorithms, Google being one of them.

The real challenge is to build a network protocol that can communicate image information between a client and a server as quickly as possible, using as little network bandwidth as possible. Then, this mechanism needs to scale up to service huge volumes of requests from huge numbers of applications on the net. Picscout may be the first to introduce the proof-of-concept and a prototype, but the real race is on the back-end... as David pointed out.

On the surface, this would seem difficult -- and it is -- but it's hardly new. All large-scale social-network sites do this on a regular basis, from twitter to facebook to Flickr. Though cloud-computing is mature, the real barrier to entry here is the costly capital investment necessary to run such a service. There are many players in the field that already have this infrastructure. By comparison, Picscout would have a harder time ramping up to that level of computing resources than it would for a larger company to find some sort of image-recognition technology (if they don't already have one).

For now, the game is Picscout's to lose, since they're first. But "first" players often find themselves in catch-up soon thereafter. If they even moderately demonstrate viability in the concept, much larger players (such as photo-sharing sites) who have such resources already will be quick to swoop in.

Lastly, David notes in his point #3:

If buyers find it easier to find images through web search they will move away from distributor sites for search, and only use the distributor site for the final licensing.

Yes. Exactly. But that's nothing new. It's been that way since about 2002 now, a fact that I've been pounding on since that time: The vast number of licensed images are done on a peer-to-peer basis directly between buyers and photographers. Stock agencies have suffered because they've missed this point, and have since struggled in trying to figure out how to fight their way out of the paper bag.

But that struggle will end without their having to do much about it. With the combination of image-recognition and web-crawling, the emerging business model Picscout is attempting is now a Fait accompli. That is, David is correct to say that stock agencies of today will become nothing more than hosting sites and clearing houses that supply inventory to other middle-man sites (like Picscout) that do the real job of pairing buyers and sellers.

But is this really a bad thing? He says it in a way that suggests that agencies somehow preserve stock prices. Let's not forget that if ISVs and others realize there's money to be made, they don't want to under-price inventory too. If you want to preserve price stability, convert the social-networks from photo-sharing into photo-licensing businesses.

I've nothing against agencies, but their future will require them to do two things they never did before--in fact, that they avoided: rank well in search engines (so that end-users are more likely to find content in the first place), and attract as much content as possible. That is, stop being editors. Let any and all images in, and let the natural ranking abilities of search engines and social-networks be the real editors. To date, stock agencies have neither sufficient content volume or web-ranking in search results, nor do they employ social-network aspects to their sites to attract users in high volumes. (Again, their head was in the sand for too long.)

So the question is, who can do this? Answer: Photo-sharing social networks.

Back in 2008, I posted an article titled, Stock Photography, the Consumer, and the Future that forecasts this very phenomenon. Once the realization that there's lots of money to be made by creating a streamlined and automated image-licensing mechanism, the sleeping giants of the photo-sharing social networks will awaken and bulldoze over the traditional stock agencies in ways that no one would have believed.

Indeed, I wrote in January, 2008 in an article titled, Pulling the Flickr sword out of the Yahoo stone:

Flickr is one of the very few photo-asset powerhouses on the web that could monetize its content in ways that would exceed even modest expectations.

In fact, I also wrote in an article titled, The Solution to Getty's Woes that Getty should acquire Flickr for this very reason.

But times have changed considerably since then -- Getty has shrunk in size, and Yahoo! has recovered handsomely. Getty could never acquire Flickr now... but if this whole business model of using image-recognition as a vehicle for licensing images shows promise, then I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo! starts casting devious stares towards Getty.

Hmmmm......