I make no bones about it, the current stock photography market is a dying monster. The industry has become a corporate beast of greed and market monopolization. They big names in the stock game, sift on average 70% of revenue from the content producers, with the worst of them (G****) taking 85% from non-exclusive contributors. The head count of professionals in the world of stock photo production is dwindling, as mediocre hobby photography become the industry stock standard.

The current system for distributing digital content is broken. Creators get only a fraction of their content’s real value and give up many of their rights. Content marketplace are getting more and more dominant, while creators are being left behind. The current system must be replaced.

[% of content sales going back to the creator]

How Do I Know All This?

I know this because i’m a stock photographer, well kind of……. i’ve been working the industry since 2006. During this time i’ve blood-sweat-teared through more business hours that a overworked barrister to build a stock portfolio in the vicinity of 14K images. My stock folio however, barely nets me enough to afford my monthly grocery bill. Because of this, i’ve had to make a transition to promoting and selling fine art to keep my full time status and carry on doing what i love… Creating art

New Stock On The Block

Being an advocate for the decentralised world of blockchain, and seeing its disruptive possibilities to change disjointed centralised business models, i’ve been keenly keeping a watchful eye on the crossover between Block — Stock.

One of the new stock photography projects entering the blockchain space is a company named Wemark. Wemark caught my eye with its professionally presented, highly experienced, capital backed and economically fair offering. Could Wemark be the disruption we’ve all be waiting for in the arena of stock photography? Let dive in.

Higher payouts, better prices. Wemark offers 85% royalties versus an industry average of 15–30%

[https://www.wemark.com/]

What is Wemark?

Wemark in its most basic form, is a peer-to-peer blockchain startup focusing on disrupting the current sales models in digital media. The team hope to accomplish this by disintermediating the greedy middleman out of the supply chain, where artists can sell direct to the customer and avoid paying the excessive fees gouged by stock photo agencies. Wemark is backed by venture capital firms from Silicon Valley and Israel with an advisory board of industry experts.

Our vision is a growing and thriving economy of digital content, powered by a blockchain-based protocol that is aligned with interests of the entire community (creators, customers and marketplaces alike).

[Wemark — The No Middleman Revolution]

Using Blockchain To Disrupt The Supply Chain

Centralised power corrupts, absolute centralised power corrupts absolutely. The Wemark Protocol, powered by the Ethereum blockchain, will be used to decentralise the systems behind the stock photography market. Removing the 3rd party agency from the equation, the Wemark Protocol will ensure a higher standard in transparency while ensuring all transactions and licenses are registered on a public ledger and in turn are immutable from manipulations. Smart contracts will be implements to assist in the exchange of digital content as with the automatic distribution of revenue between all parties involved.

Ultimately, the blockchain becomes the middleman in direct transactions between creators and customers. Some part of the value created will be paid for distribution, but creators will never have to give any of their rights or lose control over their content ever again.

[A decentralized trustless system that benefits all relevant parties]

Wemark Photographer Benefits

• Control of pricing and licensing models of all creative content
• Photographers keep all the rights to their content
• Fair 85% of royalty payments — a complete industry flip
• Benefit from full transparency in image sales and tracking
• Photographers can rely on a trustless system without the worry of ‘hidden’ sales

[Our first distributed marketplace (Wemark.com) allows photographers to reach a global audience, while still keeping most of the benefits reserved for distributing their content without a middleman. Customers will be able to license curated, commercial photos directly from leading photographers.]

Wemark Customer Benefits

• The WMK token wont have a expiration date like traditional stock credits
• Supporting a sustainably fair economic model
• Better quality of content due to a less economically drained ecosystem from non-value adding entities
• Customers can rely on a trustless licencing system connected with ID validated content contributions

Photographers licence their photo directly to customers with no middleman involved, hence customers get better prices.

[At Wemark, creators are stakeholders of the ecosystem and the interests of the entire community are aligned. This incentivizes the entire community to assist in spreading the word and attracting new customers.]

Wemark Token (WMK)

Wekmark will be based on the Ethereum network with the ticker (WMK). The total supply will sit at 135M with the token sale kicking off May 7th, 2018. The minimal funding allocation sits at $1.5M(USD) with a very reasonable hard cap locked at $8M(USD).

The total supply of Wemark Tokens is fixed and no new tokens will be generated after the TGE. Any unsold tokens from the TGE will be burned, reducing the total supply of token

[All tokens allocated to the founding team, advisors and partners are locked for use or transfer and will be released gradually over a 12 months vesting period.]

ICO Funding Goals

The lions share of funding raised during ICO will be used for research and development and marketing for the Wemark Protocol and platform.

[Wemark will finance its future development by selling some of its reserve tokens to customers, by selling tokens collected as fees, and/or by additional equity investments.]

Wemark Team

The Wemark team is comprised of 9 highly motivated and very experienced members incorporating diverse industry backgrounds in tech, dev and finance from leading organisations such as Wix, SAP and Intel.

[Prior to the TGE, Wemark raised a bit over $1m in equity funding from some the leading angel investors in Israel, and notable seed stage investors from Israel and SIlicon Valley]

Ideas & Critiques

While i love the majority of the Wemark offering, every business model can be tweaked, and if i were to make additions or slight amendments to the Wemark offering, it would be this;

1. Remove Content Reviewers
   As the saying goes, ‘one mans trash is another mans treasure’. Stock photography in its very basic form, is art, and art is very personalised to each individual viewer. Trends in art (and stock photograph) change year-to-year. What was once rejected for compositional errors a year back, can top the bestsellers search the following. One year it was cool to have angled compositions, the next year — disjointed focal points, then it was overexposed flares and light leaks. Point being, who can determine what is art-worthy for the buyer. The expenditure on reviewing images is very costly and time consuming, the team would be much more productive working on search algorithms to elevate quality trending content, while down-trending the undesirable. To mitigate excessive image spam, the team could do a folio review on a photographers initial application to determine the quality, while assign a max upload limit based on the review. Mostphotos.com has the best uploading system in the industry IMO (FTP, metadata extraction) and their customer image zoom gives buyers desired details on graininess and focal points, (you could even throw in a histogram to cover all bases ;). This would align more closely to a true peer to peer stock photo system, again IMO.

2. Incentivise Investors
   The ICO world has been a crazy roller coaster ride, some of the ICOs in 2017 smashed through the $200M funding mark, but following the market correction of Jan ‘18, funding for initial coin offerings has dropped quite considerably. Current stock photo blockchain projects in ICO are struggling to find investors. This in my opinion is tied to current market conditions, along with the lack of incentives for investors. Many of the current stock photo coin offerings are tied directly to purchasing utility in the project. A large majority of investors are not stock photography consumers, so having $10K tied up in a photo purchasing utility obviously doesn't seem all that appealing. There are many pathways forward to incentivise investors (obviously all needing legal opinions to bypass the ‘security’ minefield). One strategy could be a optional percentage donation set on each image sale, allocated to a pool that could used in a 50/50 — advertising/investors stake. From a investors point of view, this would give the token more than speculative value, for the contributor it would add value in the form of future sales sustainability.

3. Different Licencing Model — Separate Content Portals
   Being only active in the Rights Managed market at the moment, while still having a existing micro RF folio floating around, i can see the need for segregating the licensing models that target differing niches in the stock photography market. I see these content niches working better in separation as opposed to jointly mixed. Having a $5 RF image next to a $500 RM premium image will only confuse and frustrate buyers from both niches in the market. That why i believe separate portals for premium and micro is a must. The team could also investigate the feasibility of implementing a (optional op-in) subscription based portal. While i immensely dislike this pricing model, it may be the necessity evil needed to break the current market dominance.

Conclusion

It’s no question that stock photography will be disrupted, the real question is, who will front run it. Wemark with its VC backed, contributor friendly offering will definitely be at the head of the charge. I'm very excited by what positive effects Wemark could bring to the stock photo market. ICO starting May 7th — https://tge.wemark.com/

Website: https://www.wemark.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/_wemark
Whitepaper: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/tge-website/Wemark_Whitepaper_v1.1.pdf

-CryotoBlockBits Signing Out-

As always use this information as a guidepost for further research. Never take anyone’s advice on investments (not even financial advisers). Delve into the project via their social media profiles, search the project on bitcointalk.org, duckduckgo.com and reddit.com and only put money in that you can afford to lose. Cryptocurrency is risky — Fiat is a dead man walking.