Long time no speak all. Just wanted to invite some of the Filmwasters people to an closed beta test on a new free service I've been working on for the last few months.
As you all probably experienced first hand, the photo business is not really in the best shape right now. In a recent survey called "Industry Survey of Photographers 2010" by the British Photographic Council, 74% of the surveyed professional photographers felt threatened by amateur photographers, because they charge less or worked even for "photo credits".
In the USA, the median annual wages of salaried photographers were $29,440 dollar in 2008. It never looked better to become a plumber than being a photographer, because clients don't expect plumbers to work for free.
My partner Juergen (The founder of D1scussion and OpenRAW) and myself thought very long about all this and started in July the work on a new service we call "Shakodo". In a nutshell, Shakodo is an advanced Question and Answer service with the main focus on pricing evaluation for photographic services.
In our experience, most photographers just don't know how to price their services. Some photographers resort to tricks to send fake requests to other photographers to find out what they charge, but since prices are all kept kinda secret, there is an incredible insecurity out there when it comes to pricing of photos or photographic services.
We must have reviewed just about every price guide or business web site out there, but if it comes to exact prices, they all become also very vague.
Shakodo, with the tagline "the road to profitable photography", wants to be a new tool for photographers, a new community which focuses on pricing only. You can ask questions and "people in the know" (which can be YOU) can give answers with exact price ranges to help another photographer to nail a price for licensing, assignments or anything in between.
Why would somebody share a price with somebody else? Easy, take this scenario:
Professional Photographer A lands a magazine licensing job and gets XXX amount of money. Never tells anybody how much. Amateur Photographer B uploads a fantastic photo to Flickr, gets discovered by the same magazine, which offers "Photo Credits" as payment for a license. B is flattered and agrees.
A never can get the same rates again, because B undercut him for a picture which is also fantastic. B got screwed by not knowing that magazines have budgets (gasp!) and would have happily paid at least XX if B would even have known.
The result: Its as much as A's fault for not sharing how much money you for example could have made, as it is B's fault for leaving money on the table and screwing the market.
The gist of my little example here: Knowledge can turn 100% into money. Sharing of knowledge can do the very same.
Based on this simple principle, I like to invite you to have a look at Shakodo, which we will reveal to the public in about 7 days from now:
http://www.shakodo.com/Username: shakodo
Password: aliveco
Please don't share this access information in public yet, because we are still in beta and still fix some things. But you all have the opportunity to have a look, register (if you see value in it) and make up your own mind if Shakodo can be useful for your own business.
With this said, I hope you all join us on "the road to profitable photography".
Thanks,
Ken
