Wemark, a new way to share (and sell) your creativity
Until today photographers had to rely on photo agencies to sell their work. Things may be changing now thanks to Wemark, a new platform based on blockchain and cryptocurrency
Let’s say you’re a good and talented photographer. Let’s also say that your drive is your passion for photography. Since you’ve been taking photos for a very long time and you have all of them sitting in your hard drives, you have few options: watch them alone or share them on the net, hoping that someday someone will notice you and maybe give you an assignment. Or you can sign to a photo agency like Corbis or Getty Images and sell your work on their markets. Well, in this case you are not only selling your work, but also the rights on your work. These agencies keep also a lot of your earnings for selling your photos and they decide the price. They basically own the market, they can decide prices and that means the money they ask to sell your work and the money they give you back for the same work, and it could be up to 85% less than the original price paid by those who bought your photos.
This is why these agencies are also called “middle men”: they operate between you and the final client and they keep a percentage of money for their work. This is well accepted because, until today at least, this is how things are supposed to work.
How does a traditional stock photo agency work?
Photo agencies are also known as “Content marketplaces”: places where people can sell or find photos that suit their needs. These market are nevertheless operated by people who concentrate the power to connect creators and people who need their creativity. For a share of money for their work. What if there could be a different kind of content marketplaces where there’s no middle men and where you can decide the price of your work? This is possible today with Wemark, described as a place where it’s possible to “License photos directly from top photographers”, paid in cryptocurrency and with no middle man involved, which means photographers can keep 85% of the photo price. More important: the transaction is based on a blockchain system, which might still be a puzzled concept today, but basically means that the process of selling and purchasing is autonomous (no broker or middle man required) and keeps the agreement safe between the creator and the client. An example? When the purchaser buys a photo by Phographer X for a publication the latter owns anyway and forever the rights on that image and he’s sure it will be used only for that specific publication.
Some technical stuff now (hold on, I’ll be short): Wemark is based on a particular iteration of the blockchain that’s called Ethereum and it uses a dedicate cryptocurrency named Wemark token. The main difference compared to Bitcoin is that Ethereum is based on smart contracts signed between parts: when someone buys a photo from you the transaction not only involves money exchange (in cryptocurrency) but also a contract which regulates how much the photo costs and what it is used for (where it will land, in other words). This is the part usually handled by stock photos agencies but now, thanks to the blockchain, it can be automated, compressing prices on both sides. What’s less known is in fact that selling a photo involves not only an exchange of money but also an agreement on how, when and where that photo will be used. A contract, in other words.
You sold your first photo, now what?
As mentioned before, photographers don’t get dollars or euros selling their work on Wemark and that could mislead a little bit. They get paid in the company’s cryptocurrency called “Wemark Tokens”. This currency is traded as any other cryptocurrency,: it means that its value can go up or down but it fluctuates, according to the growth of the platform. It’s important to know that it can be converted in any other cryptocurrency, even if it’s better to keep it inside the platform, in order not to devalue it at least in the early stages, up to the time when it stabilizes.
Not only photos
As the name itself suggests, “Wemark” can stand also for “the place where we market ourselves”. It started as a place to sell and buy photos but its ambitions go far beyond that towards everything which involves creativity: drawings, art, music, videos, projects. In other words, photography is only a starting point.
This is only the beginning
Things are changing at a fast pace lately. Up to few years ago cryptocurrencies were considered weird and hardly known things but lately we got much more accustomed to them. And the market itself is changing: more and more people have become or have always been creators but only today they’ve found ways to share and sell their work.
I personally adopt the early-adopter technique: I’m curious and I try to form an opinion on what’s new on the net. Wemark is new (actually: really new, just few weeks old and backed by solid VCs and Silicon Valley’s big names) and promising. It’s a clever way to put new and good things together: blockchain and cryptocurrencies and the good old creative skills of men and women, with no middle men involved. It means that people pay less for creative stuff and creators get paid better because they can keep much more money. At least in its first stages I don’t see it as my main potential income but I tend to consider it as a source of side incomes, so to say: if they come I’ll be happy, if not, I won’t bother.
The good thing is that today me, you and everybody have another and different option to earn money from our creativity. And this is good news.
