The world’s top selling stock photographer Yuri Arcurs has had enough with low commissions and launches his own direct sales platform to pave the way for other creatives.

www.PeopleImages.com

As of today www.PeopleImages.com is officially out of beta testing mode and live! For years, the major stock agencies have been pushing commissions lower and lower, reaching an all time low of 15% last year making it almost impossible for photographers to gain profit from selling their images online. This can be seen in comparison to Apple’s iTunes store where the artists receive a 70% commission for their work. Furthermore, with the introduction of micro prices in 2005, the stock industry has been under enormous pressure and few photographers have been able to survive of their meager earnings.
With www.PeopleImages.com Danish born Yuri Arcurs has shown that it is possible to make it on your own and sell directly to your customers. His site introduces services that all other artists would be able to offer clients, but which agencies would have a problem providing: Custom retouching, image exclusivity options and the ability to request more images of a specific model or particular style.

Quotes:
Lee Torrens (stock photography journalist – microstockdiaries.com)
“With the launch of PeopleImages.com, the hard work and smart decisions of Yuri's stock photography career come together in a lucrative business model that no other stock photographer is positioned to pull off. What's more, it pulls market power back from stock photo agencies who have been dropping photographer royalties for years.”

Jenan Mujkic (10 years experience in buying images online – sneezr.ca)
“This site makes all other sites look like they are from the last century. Take note, PeopleImages.com just jumped a curve!“

Yuri Arcurs (Photographer, creator of PeopleImages.com)
“Very few people that buy images know how small a percentage of the actual sales price the artists receive. It’s a shame, because the small artists have a hard enough time already.”

Yuri Arcurs gives his personal take on the challenges of managing IT projects… with no previous experience within the field!

“Managing six IT guys would prove to be more time-consuming and more difficult than managing my entire business.”
“Very few people will tell you to your face “this will not work” or “we need to delete 1,000 hours of code work because it will create bugs.” Especially not if they are hired by you.”
“News of the launch was leaked to the media three days before our original launch date, and it was posted on the front page of the biggest newspaper in Denmark. It became quite clear what we had to do. We had to launch now. Not in in three days. Not tomorrow. Now.”
“All the tools that a normal manager can use to direct a project are inaccessible to an IT manager that is not a developer themselves.”
“We, as artists, are perfectionists, we have to be, but for a perfectionist to ever create anything great, you must be able to say: “Stop – Enough with the details!” and settle with the less attractive option.”
“Programmers love detailed planning, and most other people do, too, but great interactive design was never arrived at from the very first go-ahead. It is, by its very nature, an experimental process and you will find yourself often arriving at the best solutions when you start using the interface yourself. The only problem is at this point somebody has already had to build it and be ready to discard it.”
“We discarded the whole site two times and had to start over. Most people would consider that a total flop, a loss in all ways, but it ended up getting us closer and closer to having a thorough understanding of how the site would need to behave.”
“Preparing for the launch event, I had a 6min live TV spot lined up on the launch date in front of 1.5 million viewers. I was extremely lucky to get this pitched to the editor in such a way that they ended up running the story. But when it actually was about to unfold I was more nervous than I have ever been prior to any interview. I only had about 15 hours of sleep the last week before the launch, and had to be ready to go live at 8am in the morning with 4 hours of “airplane sleep” – and, naturally with all the stress involved in the launch, I fell ill the day before the TV spot. It was simply madness, but it had to be done and it had to be done well.”

Full Story here: http://arcurs.com/2012/06/www-peopleimages-com-has-launched-a-post-about-how-it-got-there/