Flickr – Page 19 – Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

May 20, 2009May 27, 2009

Is 20% of Something Better Than 88% of Nothing? Flickr, Getty Images, ClusterShot and the Future of Stock Photography

I thought I’d put out a post after I received my first earnings report (which I received today) from stock photography agency Getty Images. I signed up to have Getty represent 60 of my individual photographs as part of the recent deal between Getty Images and Flickr. The Flickr/Getty arrangement is by invite only and Getty initially selected about 90 of my images. I listed all of the images that they asked for that didn’t need model releases (which was 60). Most of the other images that they wanted where model releases were needed are of me or my family, so I’ll probably add those to the collection as well in the next few weeks.

So in my first month of production with Getty I sold two of the 60 images. Those two images totaled $689.97 in fees to Getty and $138.00 (my 20% cut) to me. At the same time that I’d signed up with Getty I also listed 24,917 of my photos with the upstart stock photography agency ClusterShot. ClusterShot, started by Canadian web development company silverorange which was co-founded by Pal Daniel Burka (who is also Creative Director at Digg), offers photographers an ability to list their photos there and pays them out 88% of the proceeds. Unfortunately in my first month or so with ClusterShot I didn’t sell any photos.

Which raises the question, is 20% of something better than 88% of nothing?

While I really, really, really like the ClusterShot model, and especially the fact that the majority of the sales proceeds go to the content creator, unless companies like ClusterShot are able to attract buyers to buy these photos, I’m not sure how successful they will end up being in the end. There is something to be said for Getty’s dominant role as the largest provider of stock photography in the world. Because Getty has the existing customers already signed up, at least today, it seems like they are far more likely to sell more images than ClusterShot. On the other hand, you can sell a lot fewer images at ClusterShot and still make more money because the payout there is so much higher. At present I’m trying both to see how they both work.

I think another area where Getty has a big advantage is in their reputation for clearing images. Especially in today’s litigious environment, image buyers are likely to feel more comfortable with Getty’s vetting of images for needed model and property releases than they might be for ClusterShot’s free for all. At ClusterShot there is no image review process where they determine if images need releases or not. And while in some cases (say an image of flower or a rose) no release may be needed, in many other cases a model release is clearly needed. Since the image buyer is ultimately the one on the hook for publishing images without correct releases, an image buyer might consider an agency like Getty as a safer place to purchase their images.

More than both Getty and ClusterShot though, the majority of my licensing income last month came from direct purchases. I sold five photos directly last month for about $2,000 total. I got to keep 100% of that. I was not marketing those images directly in any meaningful way, they were just inquiries that people sent my way after finding images of mine that they wanted to use on Flickr, Google Image Search, etc. The buyers were natural buyers of stock photography, a couple of magazines (including Popular Photography), a visitor’s convention bureau, a local newspaper and a private company for their brochure.

Now in the future things very well may change. Personally I think it’s more likely that you’d see ClusterShot (or a company like them) gain traction and market share than it is that I’d see Getty raise their payouts. In the meantime I’ll continue in the near term using both and watching and reporting on how things go.

I will say also that I’ve been pretty impressed with things from the service side of Getty Images. I had some initial glitches getting my photos on their platform, but they fixed my problem and I’ve found the Getty staff to be very helpful and responsive in the Flickr/Getty members only forum on Flickr. Late last week Getty also invited all existing Flickr/Getty members an opportunity to submit five new images to Getty in a promotion entitled “It’s Your Turn.” Apparently Getty is also in the process of inviting additional images into their collection both from new and existing Flickr/Getty contributors, although they have not invited any additional images of mine since the first 90.

I think one of the cool things also with ClusterShot is that they can use the Flickr API to pull your photos directly from Flickr for sale. This makes it far easier than uploading your shots directly to their site. They also pull over your tags and keywords in this process so that your photos are immediately optimized for search on their site. You can also set ClusterShot up so that they pull over all your new photos to their site for sale as you upload them to Flickr as well. That’s slick.

If you want to see my Getty Images presently for sale, you can see those here.

If you want to see my ClusterShot Images presently for sale, you can see those here.

Update: I emailed PR reps from Getty, Yahoo and ClusterShot regarding this article and asking for more specific sales stats. Getty said that they are not presently sharing any sales stats on this program and I got the following email response back from Dan James at ClusterShot:

Hey Thomas,
Thanks for the review. Overall we feel it’s fair and well balanced. A few of our reactions in point form:

– We take it as a huge compliment to even be compared to Getty. They are so well established. Our site is brand new.

– We want to build tools to easily facilitate and automate the sale of that $2,000 you sold privately. We’re going to be building more tools and features focused precisely in that area in the months to come. Hopefully they’ll be useful enough for you to use.

– Right now we are trying to not be perceived as a destination to come and look for stock photos. At least initially. There are many people much better at storing, searching, and sharing photos than us. We want to make the service that sells the photo and ties into all of those other great sites. We’re going to building a full API for this in the coming months. This API will also be encourage to be used by makers of self-hosted gallery solutions as well.

– Currently we have ~1,000 photographers with 160K images for sale. Virtually all of our sales (which is in the dozens, not hundreds) are from photographers who are using ClusterShot as a place to feature and promote their work to previously established offline customers.

May 18, 2009May 18, 2009

Update: Kakul Srivastava is Out As Flickr Chief, Douglas Alexander Now in Charge of Flickr

A few weeks back I reported here about layoffs that were taking place at Flickr. Om Malik broke the story originally later adding an update, “we�re hearing that further changes at Yahoo�s Flickr are going to be announced shortly, including exits of some senior/director-level people.”

Well, at least one of the senior/director-level people out at Flickr this time around just might be Flickr Chief Kakul Srivastava. On Friday Kakul held the number one spot on the “about Flickr” staff page but over the weekend her name and avatar were removed from the official “about flickr” staff page. While there certainly could be another explanation for having her removed from the official Flickr Staff page, it does leave one to wonder what exactly has happened to her at Flickr. Interestingly enough, Flickr Staffer Paul Lloyd also seems to have leapfrogged two other Flickr staffers on this org chart and now holds the new number one Flickr staff spot.

Flickr has gone through a number of significant staff layoffs or resignations over the past six months or so. In addition to the high profile departures last year of Flickr Co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the following employees, a number from Pre-Yahoo, are no longer listed on the Flickr team page:

Kakul Srivastava
Eric Costello
George Oates
Cal Henderson
Serguei Mourachov
Ana Zavala
Rev. Dan Catt
Do Kim
Kathleen Watkins
Ashot Petrosian
Sara Wood
Dee Adams

Update: Just received an email back from Kryssa Guntrum at Yahoo:

“After serving as GM of Flickr, Kakul Srivastava is transitioning to a new role developing social product strategy across the Yahoo! product portfolio. Douglas Alexander, senior director of Flickr business development will step into the GM role. Since joining Flickr in 2006, Douglas has played a key role in working with Kakul and the team to help grow Flickr into one of the world’s largest photosharing sites.

Both Kakul and Douglas report directly into Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of Applications products. Lamkin most recently served as SVP and GM of Creative Solutions, Adobe’s largest business unit, comprised of Adobe’s flagship software applications, including Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, the Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Flash and Illustrator.”

So this change in management of Flickr has nothing to do with any new layoffs at Yahoo. Welcome to Douglas Alexander as the new Flickr Chief.

April 30, 2009May 2, 2009

Layoffs at Flickr

Former Flickr Chief Architect Cal Henderson.

Om Malik reported yesterday on more layoffs at Flickr. Most notably Flickr Chief Architect Cal Henderson seems to have left the company and is rumored by All Things Digital to be working on a stealth gaming start up with Former Flickr Chief and Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield (who had probably the best resignation letter of all time when he resigned himself last year).

Engineer Rev Dan Catt, probably my favorite character on Flickr, is also leaving and says on his blog that he’ll be moving back to the UK near Manchester. In his blog post he hinted that he’d like to work for Google. Among other things, Rev Dan did a lot of work on the geotagging of images. I think that’s one of the more exciting areas on Flickr and am disappointed to see that he won’t be working on that directly anymore. I’ve got thousands of my own photos geotagged on Flickr at present.

In looking at an Apr 23, 2009 23:58:04 GMT cached version of Flickr’s about page, which includes who they list on the Flickr team, it looks like others who are gone include Ashot Petrosian, Sara Wood, and Neil Kandalgaonkar. An updated version of the team can be found here.

Silicon Alley Insider reported that Yahoo laid off 600 in total yesterday. Yahoo had announced on their most recent earnings conference call that they were going to lay off about 700 employees. In December during a previous round of layoffs, Yahoo laid off three other Flickr team members including Flickr Designer George Oates.

Last month San Francisco magazine reported that Flickr had recently become profitable for Yahoo.

Update: Earlier this morning I listed Kevin Collins as one of the Flickr employees whose name no longer appeared on the about Flickr page in error. I’ve corrected this and removed his name as one of those absent. It was also brought to my attention that two additional names who are no longer on the about Flickr page are those of Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, both long-time Flickr team members. In September of last year both Costello and Mourachov were listed on the about Flickr page, today they are not. I suspect that both may have left Flickr prior to this most recent round of layoffs. Or they could both still be at Flickr but for some unknown reason removed from the about Flickr page.

Update #2: Another Flickr staffer, Do Kim, now appears to be gone from the about Flickr page. Also Om Malik is now also reporting that “we�re hearing that further changes at Yahoo�s Flickr are going to be announced shortly, including exits of some senior/director-level people.”

March 30, 2009March 30, 2009

Should Yahoo/Flickr Be Advertising Paid Pro Memberships as “Ad-Free Browsing and Sharing” When They In Fact Plan on Advertsing at Them?

Last week I blogged about the latest advertising campaign that’s shown up on Flickr, the McDonald’s “Show us What You’re Made Of,” campaign/group sponsored by McDonald’s “quality” group. The group is clearly commercial and designed to promote McDonald’s on Flickr. The group links directly to a McDonald’s page and encourages members to submit “tough questions,” to a McDonald’s owned forum where you can ask McDonalds “anything” about their food quality and get “honest, straightforward answers.”

Somehow I’d imagine though that you won’t find questions like this one from the U.S. Politics and the World Group on Flickr entitled, “Why I Don’t Eat Clown Meat.”

Now whatever you think of McDonald’s (personally I’m a huge fan of the Shamrock Shake) the fact that McDonald’s is advertising on Flickr does raise an interesting point about truth in advertising. And that is, why is Yahoo / Flickr promising you an ad free Pro account when you pay up with an annual fee and then turning around and advertising at you?

And it’s not just McDonald’s. In the past few months several additional companies have now started advertising to paid Pro Flickr Members. In addition to the “Show Us What You’re Made Of” Mickey D’s group. Today I noticed that I could also now share with “Team Visa” what inspires me to “get moving.” By the way, someone should show the “Team Visa” admin how to change their default avatar from the blank flickr face to something more cool looking.

From the Visa campaign:

“What inspires you to get moving? Send in your photos of people in action� whether it�s an everyday activity like going to the movies, or a titanic event like scaling the Matterhorn, whether it�s swimming with dolphins, or walking the dog. And your pics could appear for Visa campaigns all over the world.

Have you ever been surprised to find out some place takes Visa? (Places like your neighbor�s lemonade stand, or a traveling noodle shop in Tibet.) If you have, send those pictures along, too.”

That’s it damnit. Cancel that American Express card pronto. The traveling noodle shop in Tibet now takes, yep, you guessed it! VISA!

But if McDonald’s and Visa are not enough for you, maybe you ought to check out the Nikon Digital Learning Center. Or how about the Kiss and Be Kissed Group (sponsored by Nivea). Or you can tell Kodak what your story is here. Or you can hang out in the uber cool “Life’s for Sharing” group sponsored by Deutsche Telekom (warning it’s in German). Or check this out. Ford Motor Company is now inviting a few very lucky select flickr members to be a guest editor on their “This is Now” blog through their “This is Now” group on Flickr (your bailout dollars hard at work I guess). All of these groups, by the way, are now prominently displayed on the main groups page for all free *and* paid Pro account Flickr members.

Now. I’m as much for Yahoo/Flickr making money as the next Taurus driving Nikon shooting hamburger hawking clown. But the point is, why are they pumping all these adverts out at paid members when they promise you an ad free experience on Flickr if you pay and upgrade to Pro. Whatever happened to, in the words of the immortal Hunter S. Thompson, “you buy the ticket, take the ride?”

My own opinion is that paid members ought to be exempt from having these adverts directed at them. Either that or Flickr ought to drop the “ad-free browsing and sharing” claim from their own advert above.

And this post was *not* brought to you by Burger King.

March 25, 2009March 25, 2009

McDonald’s Launches Social Media Beachhead on Flickr

“Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed Canon 5D Mark 2?”

It’s interesting to see king of the fast food jungle McDonald’s showing up sponsoring the latest group on Flickr. The group, “Show Us What You’re Made Of,” sponsored by “McDonald’s Quality,” would appear to be the latest attempt by corporate America at making inroads into the vast world of social media.

I’m not sure how much money Flickr/Yahoo is making on the deal, but I’d assume that they are making at least some as the group says it’s “sponsored” and Flickr has a clear policy against people using Flickr for commercial purposes.

From the Flickr Community Guidelines: “Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr. For more information on leveraging Flickr APIs, please see our Services page. If you have other open questions about commercial usage of Flickr, please feel free to contact us.”

This is not the first attempt by a major corporation to establish a presence on a social network (Pepsi has a room on FriendFeed for example and lots of companies are using Twitter), but it is one of the first that I’ve seen on Flickr.

A couple of interesting points about the new group. The forums normally associated with Flickr groups are closed in this group. The group reads: “Note: Group discussion has been locked, so no new topics can be posted.”

McDonald’s does direct people to their own off-site forum for conversations. The pitch for their own forum on their McDonald’s site comes with the invitation promise: “We also think you deserve honest, straightforward answers to your tough questions, so we’ve opened a forum where you can ask us anything about our food quality.” Of course, I’m assuming that this forum will be highly censored and once you get there has a disclaimer that, “please note, not every question will be chosen for a reply.” At present it looks like there are just four questions. I’d assume that questions by animal rights activists or others who might oppose McDonald’s corporate mission might not be among the “tough questions,” that they choose to answer.

It is also interesting that by submitting photos to the official McDonald’s photo pool you are basically giving McDonalds a free unlimited irrevocable license to use your photographs any way they’d like to both now and in the future. From the group rules:

“and further, you agree that McDonald�s and its assigns shall have, without further obligation to you, the royalty free, fully paid up, non-exclusive right and permission to copy, publicly display, publicly perform and use, worldwide in any online media now known or hereafter developed, including but not limited to the World Wide Web, at any time or times…”

Thus far a little over 400 people have joined the group, but because the discussion threads are locked it does not seem very vibrant. The photos in the group’s photo pool generally seem to have nothing to do with McDonald’s and appear to be just random photos submitted by various users. Apparently all photos submitted to the pool are moderated by McDonald’s and already some photos have already been not approved for submission.

Certainly corporate American’s foray into social media has begun. In addition to several well known (and in some case suggested) Twitter accounts, it would seem that Flickr may be the next place that Corporate America is looking to sell you more and more of the American fast food dream. And it may be the next place that Yahoo begins looking for to further monetize your Flickr experience.

In addition to the “official” McDonald’s group on Flickr, there does seem to be a much more active unofficial McDonald’s group on Flickr here.

Thanks for the heads up Eric!

You can see my set of McDonald’s imagery on Flickr here.

March 23, 2009March 23, 2009

Yahoo’s New Marketing Chief Elisa Steele Doesn’t Use Flickr and How This Signals That Yahoo Management Is Out of Step With Innovation

The Wall Street Journal today reported on Carol Bartz’s (Yahoo’s new CEO) latest executive appointment, Elisa Steele. Steele joins Yahoo in a newly created Chief Marketing Officer position.

“Yahoo’s marketing strategy and teams have become decentralized over time– hiring Elisa in the CMO role will quickly mobilize our plan to integrate the function globally and more effectively represent the Yahoo brand,” Ms. Bartz said, according to the Journal.

When I first read about this appointment, the first thing I did is went and did a search for Elisa Steele on Yahoo’s photo sharing site Flickr. It turns out that there is a single account under this name (completely dead and inactive) going by the handle Kangas. There is also a single photograph of Steele on the site as well.

After Bartz was appointed as CEO of Yahoo I did a similar search on Flickr to see if Bartz was active there after Bartz mentioned on a Yahoo earnings conference call that her daughter used Facebook to share photos. Like today’s appointment Bartz also was not active on Flickr. There is also a lone Bartz account on Flickr, like the Steele account also completely dead and inactive. If you do a search on Yahoo’s bookmarking site delicious for either Bartz or Steele, neither of them show up there either.

Now some people say “so what.” Who cares if Yahoo execs don’t use Flickr personally. They are busy people and have plenty of other more important things to do than to play around on a photo sharing site. But I think that having Yahoo executives not use their company’s most innovative products sends a message both to the product teams that manage those products as well as the broader public about how Yahoo executives view innovation.

Both delicious and Flickr are two of Yahoo’s most popular services. More significantly, however, both are considered to be two of Yahoo’s most *innovative* products. When delicious founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo he made a very significant comment over at a post on TechCrunch explaining his departure:

“I was largely sidelined by the decisions of my management. So that was mostly the result rather than the cause, if that makes sense. It was an incredibly frustrating experience and I wish I was a lot more like Stewart in terms of pushing my point of view.”

Even more damning an indictment came in the form of Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield’s incredibly creative, but crpytic, letter of resignation to the company.

Now I guarantee you that both Carol Bartz and Elisa Steele have photos that they could share with the rest of the world if they chose to use Flickr. C’mon, kids, everybody’s doing it these days! Even if they don’t have personal photos of friends and family that they want to share, they undoubtedly have photographs of flowers or kittens or of the Grand Canyon from a vacation or whatever. Even if they had zero photos to possibly share on their hard drives they could at least mark a few photos of others as favorites of theirs on the site. Feel free to fave some of my photos here Carol and Elisa.

Over the years executives at Microsoft have been big proponents of the idea of dogfooding. Hell, Bill Gates won’t even let his kids own iPods and in one of his most entertaining email rants of all time rails on Microsoft’s own developers after his own frustrating experience trying to use a Microsoft product.

From wikipedia: “To say that a company “eats its own dog food” means that it uses the products that it makes. For example, Microsoft emphasizes the use of its own software products inside the company. “Dogfooding” is a means of conveying the company’s confidence in its own products.”

Now I’m not suggesting that people like Bartz and Steele ought to use every single Yahoo product. There are hundreds of different products that they could possibly use. But more importantly than them not using some of Yahoo’s most *popular* products, in the case of sites like Flickr and Delicious, they are not using some of Yahoo’s most *innovative* products. I think that this is likely both demoralizing to some of their most talented employees on some of their most important teams and that more significantly it sends a message to the rest of the world that Yahoo Management *still* does not get the innovation represented by services like Flickr or Delicious. A further confirmation of the very reason why the founders of both delicious and Flickr both left the company.

Even worse than simply Bartz or Steele not using Flickr, a quick Flickr people search of the 12 current executives listed by Bloomberg for the company (Roy Bostock, Carol Bartz, David Filo, Jerry Yang, Blake J Jorgensen, Aristotle N Balogh, Elisa Steele, David Windley, Michael J Callahan, Venkat Panchapakesan, Hilary A Schneider, and Michael A Murray) shows that not a single one of these individuals carries any sort of significant presence on the site whatsoever.

Now maybe Flickr is not the most profitable business unit at Yahoo. And maybe the $35 million or so that they bought it for is mere chump change for executives at a company like Yahoo. But Flickr nonetheless represents one of the most significant properties ever on the internet. Flickr breaks news. Flickr has some of the world’s most amazing art. Flickr represents the largest organized library of images in the world! That is something. And the fact that Yahoo executives, even in some small way, don’t really want to have anything to do with that is sad.

More here as well.

March 20, 2009March 21, 2009

Why Do Flickr and Firefox Hate Each Other So Much?

For the past two years Firefox has had repeated trouble in loading Flickr images for me. I’m not sure why and I’d love to figure it out. Here are some clues.

1. I can load every flickr image in Safari, but not Firefox. What I get (especially when loading image intensive pages are random image loads like the screenshot above).

2. I only have this problem when browsing Flickr on DSL or broadband wifi. When I use my fiber uVerse connection at home all images load 100% of the time in Firefox.

3. It seems that once this behavior starts happening it progressively gets worse and worse. Sometimes if I close a page with images that are not loading, other pages that won’t load images suddenly populate the images.

4. If images are not loading in Firefox, Flickr thumbnails in FriendFeed also load sporadically.

5. I’m using Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021906 Firefox/3.0.7

I’m not blocking flickr in any way. (update edit: I don’t use adblock).

When I use Flickr’s test page, it has a red x for Global Farm 4 images. When I right click on both the images that are loading and not loading and check the image properties they appear to be coming from Global Farm 4.

Appreciate any help or feedback.

March 11, 2009March 11, 2009

Flickr and Getty Images Launch Their Flickr Stock Photography Collection

Earlier this morning Flickr and Getty Images announced the launch of their new joint stock photography offering called “The Flickr Collection.”

“We are thrilled to provide our customers with this ground-breaking collection,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and chief executive officer of Getty Images. “We are impressed with the talent from the Flickr community, and are proud to once again lead our industry in this exciting new direction. We are eager to hear what our customers think, and look forward to their input in shaping this ever-expanding collection.”

I haven’t had a good chance yet to try out the new service but thought I’d offer some of my thoughts on the service here. I just received an invitation from Getty Images to participate in the collection on 95 of my photos, but only yesterday, so I haven’t had a chance yet to either decide what to do or sign up for the service.

My first observation about the new service is that I’m surprised at how limited it is. Out of the billions of images available on Flickr, as of this morning’s launch it would appear that Getty is only offering 4,284 flickr images for sale. Back in July of last year I reported on the collection based on comments made at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit by Joseph Jean Rolland Dube, iStockphoto�s VP for Content Development. iStockphoto is 100% owned by Getty Images. Dube told us at that time that the collection would initially launch with about 2,500 images. That number was later disputed by Getty’s Bridgett Russell who said that the service would be launching with “tens of thousands of images.” �You have in fact been given an incorrect number,” said Russell last year. “We intend to launch our Flickr collection in the coming months with tens of thousands of images, with thousands more added to the collection each month.�

I contacted Russell this morning about the difference between the 4,000+ images on the site this morning vs. the tens of thousands number reported last year and got the following answer back from her:

“Today, we have more than 10,000 images accepted into the Flickr Collection. Several thousand are available on gettyimages.com today – as you noted – and within the next two weeks, all of them will be available. We are just finishing up some final processing. As a “living” collection, we’ll also be adding thousands of new images each month and Getty Images’ editors will continue to invite Flickr members to participate. “

Although the number of Flickr photographers invited into this program has not been made public at this point, the private “contributor only” group at Flickr currently shows 6,890 members. This is a group that you get invited to when you accept their agreement.

Doing a couple of quick searches, at least as of this morning, in the new Flickr collection you will find some reasonably popular search subjects somewhat sparse. For the search “San Francisco,” the new collection only brings up only 60 flickr images for sale. Another search for kitten (something Flickr of course is famous for) only brings up nine images for sale. One the positive side, it does appear that some of the Flickr images for sale have made their way to first page search results for broader image search requests across all Getty images collections. A search for the term “San Francisco” across all Getty collections shows nine Flickr photos on the first page of 67 pages available for sale. I’m pleased to see that Flickr photos seem to be getting good placement across Getty’s overall search engine.

I suspect that I will probably end up licensing at least some of the 95 photos that Getty has selected of mine to be included in this offering — if for no other reason than to try the service out and see how it goes.

The thing that I like about this offering is that Getty Images, as the world’s largest stock photography agency, has amazing reach. Although I’ve sold lots of stock photos myself, I wonder how much better of a job Getty could do selling them than I can. I also think it’s interesting that as part of the contract with Getty that they also will go after copyright infringement settlements for you on the images that they represent.

What I don’t like as much though is the payout split between the photographer and Getty images. At present the payout grid looks like this:

Rights Managed / Rights Ready Still Images and Footage: 30 percent
Royalty Free Footage: 25 percent
Royalty Free Still Images: 20 percent

I also don’t like the fact that by signing up for the service are committing to a two-year contract with Getty Images. During that two year contract Getty has the exclusive rights to market the images that you offer through them. So, for example, if you have an image that is not selling through Getty and say a magazine wants to buy it for $500 you can’t sell it to them. Of course you could always point them to Getty to buy it, but you would not be able to offer it.

Another issue with this offering is that Getty requires all images included to be registered as “all rights reserved,” even though it would seem that a Creative Commons non-commercial license ought to be sufficient. Ben Metcalfe started a lengthy thread discussion on this issue that you can read more about here. Flickr user Striatic also has a lengthy thread on problems that he has with the Getty contract here. Another interesting conversation (with 94 comments) about the Getty offerings is taking place on one of John Curley’s photos “team getty?” over here.

You can read the official Flickr FAQ on the new offering here. Getty has an FAQ for contributors here. Getty images has a blog post up on the new offering this morning here. There is a private members only group for Getty Images contributors on Flickr here.

Additional reading: USA Today: Online photo services can give shutterbug lucrative outlet. ZD Net: Getty Images, Flickr launch licensing, distribution deal. CNET: Selected Flickr images now sold through Getty.

February 15, 2009

Flickr Looking to Hire a “Senior Community Manager”

Yahoo Inc. has a new job posting out at Flickr looking to hire a “Senior Community Manager.” I’m not sure if this opening is meant to replace current Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ or if they are simply looking to bring on another person in this department, but it looks like a pretty good job if you are in the social media / photography space.

Responsibilities (from the job posting):

“* Engage and communicate with the Flickr community within the Flickr Help forum and on FlickrBlog to communicate news, help solve problems and ensure that every member has the experience they desire;
* Represent the needs and desires of the Flickr community with the Flickr team;
* Developing and hosting programs and opportunities for Flickr members to meet and collaborate online and in the real world;
* Working with the Customer Care team to navigate the occasional troubled waters (ie, abuse mitigation)”

Minimum requirements include:

“* 3+ years experience working with a team developing web-based communities or social software
* 2+ years experience managing and moderating online communities
* Exemplary communication skills
* Has maintained a weblog or other online personal site
* An understanding of web development and web functionality, to be able to explain processes to user and understand bug reports
* Sound judgment”

Personally I think that it’s good news that Flickr is hiring in this area. I think Flickr’s not done the best job with community management and especially recently has been hitting the delete account / censorship button a little too much / hard. Hopefully whoever they hire for this important position will work towards building a new system that doesn’t make account deletions permanent and works a little harder to ensure that flickr remains as free from censorship as possible.

February 13, 2009February 13, 2009

Using the Flickr API to Make DeleteMe Uncensored Even Better, Photoratr

One of my favorite places on the internet, and really the only place that I hang out regularly on Flickr is in the group DeleteMe Uncensored. DeleteMe Uncensored is a group on Flickr where users submit their photographs into a pool and then other group members vote on them along with a short comment. If a photo gets 10 “saves” before 10 “deletes” it is then saved into a group portfolio of photographs called “The Lightbox.” If you want to see what I feel is some of the best photography on Flickr check out The Lightbox.

One of the things about DeleteMe Uncensored though that has always been troublesome for some, is that when you vote on a photo you are often influenced by either whose photo it is or by votes and comments that others have made on the photo. You might really like a photo but because it’s already been voted to delete8 without any saves you might be influenced to vote delete9.

In an effort to make the DeleteMe Uncensored game a little more interesting, Mike Wiacek has built http://photoratr.appspot.com/. What this site does is it takes all of the photos to be voted on in the DeleteMe Uncensored pool and presents them to you in medium sized view all on one page and lets you vote on them without seeing either whose they are or what the current vote count is. By presenting photos for voting this way it creates a more objective way to play the game. This is a tremendous improvement in my opinion and a great example of ways that people can customize Flickr better for their own needs by using the Flickr API.

This page also makes voting on photos in the DeleteMe Uncensored pool a bit easier as well. The only problem is that it in fact makes it almost too easy to leave quick comments on flickr and so sometimes if you are using the site too fast you’ll run up against a flickr imposed comment limit through the API.

All in all though I think the page is really cool. It will definitely be a tool that I use when voting for photos in DeleteMe Uncensored. Thanks for building it Mike!

By the way, DeleteMe Uncensored is not for everyone. The idea of the game is that comments and critiques of your photo can be brutal. People can say anything that they want about your photo — and oftentimes they do. The group is an 18+ group on Flickr and you may find nude imagery in the pool at times. Also, both comments on photos and especially comments in the group forum may not be for you if you are easily offended. If you prefer an uncensored environment though to engage in conversation with other photographers and like the game you might want to check it out. Please make sure you read the rules before joining if you do.