Zooomr: A promising future… on hold

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I’m a pretty impatient person so when someone tells me that something great is on the horizon I’m usually on the edge of my seat. The past few months I’ve been more seriously experimenting with Flickr.com and another great site Zooomr.com.I remember hearing about Zooomr when it first came out and was lured by a free account with a lot of storage space. I totally forgot about it until I found out there was a free promotion to a Pro account when you blogged hosted images. This was smart marketing and it definitely got me hooked and I’ve been paying closer attention ever since. My enthusiasm for Zooomr was also stoked by Thomas Hawk who had been posting about the promise of photosharing sites and stock.

Since that time I’ve had some ups and downs about the notion of these sites with photo sales. Flickr gets huge amounts of traffic, but as noted in my blog entry The Dark Side of Flickr: Photo Phishing By Corporate America there is a big problem with those searching for photos looking to exploit photographers and avoid paying for use. Zooomr with their latest release seems to be attempting to take the bull by the horns.

Although not live yet, I’m eagerly awaiting to see the new site, there is a very interesting hook… the most interesting yet…
“Sell your photos as stock — you keep 90% of the sale!”

I still have a lot of outstanding questions about the process and security, but the prospect of someone getting it right finally is enticing. The question remains at 10% keep for Zooomr will they be able to pull in the traffic of buyers and market accordingly? I’m not holding my breath, but at least its a start. The big question will be how is Zooomr aligning their stock business? Will it be focused on royalty-free sales, rights managed or both? Either way its better than “ZeroStock” as I’ve been calling Flickr as of late. Something is better than nothing, but I have to admit I’ll be uninterested if the model is royalty-free microstock.

The transition from Zooomr to the Mark III build seems to be taking longer than planned. It began Tuesday March 13th and is running behind, but I’m sure it will be worth the wait. Relaunching a robust site and reprocessing millions of photos can’t happen over night and as we’ve seen require more than a few. Until the launch I’ll be sitting on the edge of my seat hitting refresh to be the first to see beta.zooomr.com

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Posted by Jim on 03.16.2007 at 10:30 am
Tagged: Links & Articles, News & Current Events, Photography, Technology, Web

http://thomashawk.com Thomas Hawk

Thanks for the post Jim. We are working feverishly to get Zooomr Mark III out as quickly as we can. Kristopher finally got a little sleep last night after 3 days and is coding in the other room right now.

We have a fairly radical view of the $2 billion stock photography industry. We believe that the majority of the money created by this industry ought to go to the photographers and creators of the images. This is in contrast to traditional stock agencies which might pay 40 or 50% at best proceeds to the photographer or microstock agencies where you might get 20% of a buck for a photo.

We believe that by keeping Zooomr lean and mean that we can operate on just a 10% cut.

We think that if we build a system that truly supports, empowers, and enriches the phtographers, those that truly deseve the bulk of the money generated by this business, that they all will become our advocates and help us get the marketing message out.

It won’t be easy for sure. But this market needs to be opened up with technology and the economic balance of of the profit of this industry needs to shift to the creators of images.

I am CEO of Zooomr. But more than this, like you, I am a photographer. A photographer who is passionate about his work. A photographer who sells his work. And when I see my friends that are so amazingly talented not able to get into Corbis or Getty when I see them struggle to get by day in and day out and see that the quality of their work is every bit as good as things at the Pros that sell I know that there has to be a better way.

Microstock is not the answer. Getting 20% of a buck enriches no one. By providing photogrphers tools to set their own prices on photos and then creating a central marketplace for marketers to buy them, if we can in the end do this, all of the hard work we have been doing will be worth it.

The first step will be for photographers to upload their large size images to Zooomr. On Mark III photographers will be able to designate which of their photos that they would like to sell and at what price, restrict the larger sizes only to be available to buyers, etc.

As we get this library of photos for sale populated, in the next few weeks we will be opening a separate search site for marketers. It will have some pretty cool tools for them.

We hope that photographers like you will support what we are trying to do and will most importantly get the word out to other photographers and marketers about the first open agency, available for all, built by and for photographers.

Thanks again Jim.
http://www.jmg-galleries.com jim

Tom I just finished adding one small addition to my post before I saw your comment. Your reply has me even more interested to see the site. It sounds like the model is quite well thought out. Keep up the hard work and the good fight.

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