Another site dies

Following on from Luckyolivers demise, Geckostock have announced that they are closing down:

It is with great regret that i shall have to close Geckostock.
All images will be deleted from disk this week.
Any payments due will be paid over the next few weeks.

The site went down yesterday and i decided not to try and get things running due to low sales.
I can't see any future in the site.
.......

I never joined this site as I never saw a good reason. It always pays to monitor new sites but this one never had the sales to warrant uploading to.

In other news, Snapvillage has been down since Friday as they upgrade their site. It is taking longer than expected (why do all websites underestimate the time to migrate servers??). This is one I have trialed. Haven't got all my photos onto it yet and it isn't showing the sales for we to warrant uploading the rest. Hopefully this upgrade will attract the buyers to make it another leading site (without stealing sales from other sites).

Dreamstime enters cellphone wallpaper market

A press release was made on Thursday announcing Dreamstime was partnering with Boom Bucket to supply wallpaper to mobile phones.

The release and Dreamstimes website was short on details as to how this will actually work but I ahve always thought that cell phones where an large untaped market. You just have to look at the back of most weekly magazines (in the UK)that target teens/young adults to see that the market is taking off.

I will add more details as I find out.

Press release

Dreamstime partners with Boom Bucket Mobile to provide images that speak louder than words
Global Microstock Agency Enters Telecommunications Arena

Brentwood, Tennessee, May 31, 2007. Dreamstime and Boom Bucket Mobile, two global leaders in their innovative and extraordinary areas of business, have joined together to make images available no matter where you are. Dreamstime CEO and co-founder, Serban Enache, announced the microstock agency’s unique partnership with Boom Bucket Mobile to provide the best-of-the-best photos and images to Boom Bucket Mobile customers.

Boom Bucket Mobile is a mobile content provider that works with carriers, aggregators and other mobile content companies throughout the world. [In addition to the U.S., Boom Bucket Mobile has distribution in the EEU and North America, and is expanding operations in Asia and Japan.] Specifically, Boom Bucket Mobile offers on-demand access to wholly-owned, royalty-free mobile wallpapers, animations, ringtones, and video in the mobile content marketplace.

To meet the overwhelming demand for personalized cell phone screensavers, the partnership with Dreamstime will increase the available images to Boom Bucket Mobile customers to more than 1,000,000 at the very first day of the launch.

A seven-year old community agency designed with the user in mind, the simplistic features, friendly direction and easy navigation will make it effortless for Boom Bucket Mobile customers to discover a “picture perfect.”

Boom Bucket Mobile customers will be able to download high quality candid shots, graphics, sketches, artwork, scenic backgrounds and more on the fly.

"Dreamstime's spectacular gallery of photos will make for one-of-a-kind, individual content for our customers around the world,” said Piper Carr, Director of Strategic Development for Boom Bucket Mobile. “The depth of Dreamstime’s royalty-free collection could make this the largest general catalogue of images available for mobile. Moreover, the ability for our sources to obtain content and communicate with the vast Dreamstime photographer community directly is a visionary, avant-garde business concept.”

With over 300,000 customers all over the globe, Dreamstime provides imagery to a wide variety of clients in the creative market from the private sector to Fortune 500 companies (including the world’s largest advertising agencies, magazines, television stations and production companies).

“This partnership enables us the opportunity to not only expand the Dreamstime community, it enables us to share our photos with new customers to generate more awareness for our photographers,” said Dreamstime executive Enache. “Dreamstime’s dynamic relationship with Boom Bucket Mobile will be ‘explosive’ for both agencies to allow us a permanent place in our respective industries and perhaps even become a household name!”

About Boom Bucket Mobile

Boom Bucket Mobile was founded in 2006 to deliver cutting edge media to the mobile space. With offices in North American and Europe, Boom Bucket was founded by veterans of mobile application development, content and technology. Boom Bucket Mobile is a labor of love created by artists for mobile consumers who love art. In addition to Dreamstime images, Boom Bucket Mobile provides the largest customizable royalty-free sound library in the world, material from local artists, flash animations, video libraries and custom content development.

Another article on Corbis

While Corbis doesn't do microstock yet, I keep posting these articles as it is clear they are on a big press offensive trying to get their name out there. They have just changed CEO and it keeps being reported they will be starting microstock shortly. I imaging that once they strat, they will start with a bang.

As always, Extracts from the article with a full link at the bottom:

A Photo Trove, a Mounting Challenge
By KATIE HAFNER
Published: April 10, 2007

“Think about how visual the world is,” said Barbara Coffey, a senior research analyst at Kaufman Brothers in New York who follows the stock photography market. “We have pictures on our cellphones. If I can get a reasonably clear picture and the rights are cleared and I pay $2 for it, then why would I pay Corbis $200?”

The rise of the microstock companies has been of particular concern to Corbis. For all its new lines of business, the company still gets some 88 percent of its revenues from image licenses, yet commands only about 11 percent of that market. Getty Images dominates the market with a 40 percent share.

Getty, which has grown quickly since its start in 1995 with the backing of its wealthy co-founder, Mark Getty, has a foothold in microstock thanks to iStockPhoto, which it bought last year for $50 million.

Mr. Shenk said Corbis would announce its plans for the microstock business sometime this quarter. As for the question of how a high-end company enters that business without cannibalizing its more expensive products, Mr. Shenk said the idea was to find a new kind of customer, people who would never envision buying pictures from a Corbis or Getty.

In that vein, Mr. Shenk said Corbis would make its service as easy to use as the iTunes store of Apple and hinted that Corbis would also be following the crowdsourcing model.

“More interesting and innovative things are happening on the pages of Flickr these days than on Corbis and Getty,” said Mr. Shenk, referring to the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo. “If we can use this type of opportunity to find the next great group of Corbis photographers, that also makes it a great opportunity for us.”

Link

iStock to sell images to mobile phones

iStock have just announced a new deal to sell photos as wall paper on mobile phones. The plan is for a pilot scheme in the UK with 5000 photos but to roll it out worldwide with their full library.

No work yet on how much they will be sold for but I assume it will be the same as a small photo - $1.

I have always thought this is a huge market ready to be exploited.

Extract from article (full link below):

iStockphoto and AMUSE launch UK Mobile deal
April 10, 2007
Calgary, Alberta – iStockphoto®, the world’s most visited stock imagery and video site, has selected AMUSE Entertainment Group B.V. to take its stock photography images into the mobile sector. The pilot phase of the program will be launched in the UK and will allow mobile users to download wallpapers from a selection of 5,000 of iStockphoto’s quality images. Images will be found within a dedicated mobile storefront accessed through the iStockphoto website, and marketed and promoted jointly by iStock and AMUSE. Images will be made available to UK mobile phone subscribers on the 3, Orange, O2, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone networks and will be delivered via mBlox, the world’s largest mobile transaction network.
“People want their gadgets to feel uniquely theirs, including their mobile phones,” said Garth Johnson, vice president of business development at iStockphoto.

LINK