As anyone in the photography field would've thought to incentivize the photos that they take and there are basically two ways they could go about this: one is to create a website or blog for themselves and sell their photos there and try to obtain ad-revenue for the website itself; other is to try selling their photos on a online marketplace like Shutterstock or Getty Images.
But most of us don't have the time and expertise to create and maintain a website or blog and it requires you to invest some amount and you must stay committed to it. So most of the photographers out there choose to sell their photos on the online marketplaces as it just requires them to sign up for the service and start posting their photos and also tag them properly for it to get recognized.
But these platforms have a major drawback in the fact that the content creator/owner loses their ownership and rights of their own content. Also, another major drawback is that you have to obey to their terms and conditions that they tend to change frequently and make it suit their needs.
Also the prices of the photos are fixed by the marketplace and they usually tend to take 85% of the total in sales of the photo as a fee for using their platform. All the above reasons combined with the fact that the companies getting to decide the pricing of the photos has led to ruining what could be a very lucrative field.
A fellow photographer myself and have got a lots of friends who work as professionals in the field all agree on the fact that this field has become too centralized and unfriendly to the content owners. But as you know, with the introduction of blockchain and it's easy of implementation for solving problems that couldn't be solved traditionally could be done easily.
We were wondering if anyone would implement the blockchain to solve the problems that mentioned above in the online market for digital content, and then came along a lot of projects related to it and one such is Wemark.
Wemark Platform
With the inclusion of blockchain into the online marketplace for digital content field by projects like Wemark, they are trying to make the market a lot more decentralized, giving the ownership of the content back to owners and not the other way around. Also, this could lead to content owners/creators get their fair share of profits. While the above mentioned problems plague the whole field as such, Wemark would like to start focusing first on the Photography field and then move on to other digital content such as music and videos later on. This removes the middlemen in the process, in this case, the Stock Photography Marketplaces.
ICO & Team
The TGE has been completed and crowdsale is yet to begin. You must be registered and whitelisted in order to participate in the crowdsale. They are introducing an Ethereum based ERC20 Token for powering their platform and they have mentioned that they'd burn all the leftover tokens from the TGE. This a good sign that they're not trying to make a quick buck and their whitepaper is well written.
To say Wemark has got a good team is an understatement. It has got an phenomenal team and talent. Usually, this is where most of the projects tend to lack a bit while their vision may be grand, they would not have the team and guiding members for it. That is not the case here. All the 3 Co-Founders: Tai Kaish, Pavel Elkind and Roy Meirom are well experienced in Marketing and the rest of the team have a lot of knowledge and experience with UX, Software and Development.
They've also got killer Advisors backing them. To see Lars Perkins, Founder & CEO of Picasa at Google backing them is great in itself but they've also got two advisors from the very services that they're trying to disrupt, Michael C. Lesser, Former VP at Shutterstock and Keren Sachs, Former Director of Content Development at Shutterstock. There are many more industry standard people as their advisors.
Conclusion
This could bring about a real big impact on the current drab and monopolized online stock content market, helping the creators get their fair share that they've always deserved. We all are just early-adopters of this and the faults and problems will be ironed out in the times to come. The applications of blockchain is immense and we are at the dawn of a new way of solving the problems that the current world faces in the digital side.
Website - https://www.wemark.com/
Whitepaper - https://www.wemark.com/whitepaper.pdf
ANN - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3293253.0
Telegram - https://t.me/wemark
Written by - Alexanderdaniel
Profile - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2163421
useful project ..i like reading about ICOs...
I also write about new ICOs