Microstock falls into the UGC classification but when one tries to define UGC to someone who has never heard of it, you realize that the designation doesn’t totally apply to Dreamstime. A friend in the industry who works with professional advertising photographers on assignments asked me to explain UGC when she found out I had attended the UCGX in San Jose, CA earlier this week.
I said the users of the content also generated it. She replied, “You mean like art directors buy in-house photographer’s work?” No that’s not it and so the conversation went on. And in fact in many ways as micropayment stock photography matures, it seems that quite a lot of the users don’t generated content and a lot of the content makers have no need to buy it.
I was asked to moderate a panel on Business Models in UGC in the photography track in San Jose. (There were also sessions on music, video and social networking). The audience was primarily composed of photographers in my sessions rather than users of photos. There was a scattering of faces familiar to me from the Dreamstime world: Yuri Arcurs, and Andres Rodriguez were panel members. There may have been others from Dreamstime’s collection but I didn’t recognize them. Among the traditional photographers I spied John Lund, Trinette Reed, Jack Hollingsworth, Trevor Lush and Shalom Ormsby…all photographers worthy of study for shooters with a passion for great images.
It was good to catch up with Leila Boujnane with whom I shared a seat on a panel the second day of the conference. Leila’s company is the developer of TinEye. If you haven’t played with TinEye to find your images scattered over the web, take a break and give it a whirl. Great fun but also potentially valuable to the revenue stream for some.
Dreamstime partner, Lee Corkran ( Brightqube founder and CEO) was seen in deal making discussions on both days.
Forum host Taylor Olson from Microstockgroup was in most panels and on at least one and blogger Lee Torrens (microstock diaries) was actively involved as one of the leading voices behind the conference.
