anyone heard of Antidull.com ????

05/24/2008 10:06:03 AM · #1

I recieved this e-mail yesterday and did some research on their website and checked the BBB for any complaints. Seems to bring up nothing on them, and the website looks pretty good. Just wondering if anyone has recieved the same e-mail and/or they have heard about this magazine company. Is this a scam or not?

This is the e-mail:

Hello Jennifer.

My name is John, IÂ´m an Art Enthusiast and Editor of Anti Dull, a new online art photography magazine dedicated to providing artists with high quality promotional opportunities in an ad-free publication. Our first edition was designed for the Photography Community and published during the beginning of the year. We have since branched out with 5 issues to date and will be publishing our next issue of this edition on June 1st.

I have taken some time to look through your personal website and I am very impressed with your portfolio and would be interested in featuring one of your pieces in the upcoming nude-art issue. Our magazine is "by invitation only" so you can be assured of the quality of the work (alternatively take a look through our recent issues).

You will receive good exposure from our site visitors and we will place your name and website address very clearly within our website and our publication. Although new, our website attracts up to 400 uniques / day and is steadily growing. What is more, there will be no fee for publishing your artwork.

Please let me know if this is something that would be of interest to you and I will send you more information regarding artwork selection and link partnership options. The next issue will be published June 1st so please respond as soon as possible to ensure we can make the necessary arrangements!

I hope you are having a great day and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Take care.

John.
Art Enthusiast and Magazine Editor
//www.antidull.com

So what do you all think. I value the opinion here at DPC. Should I respond?

Message edited by author 2008-05-24 10:08:11.

robs

Canon EOS R6 Mk II

Sony 24-70mm F4 Vario-Tessar T* FE OSS

05/24/2008 10:14:58 AM · #2

Never heard of them... Assuming it's legit... They want to start an online mag with your images used to help attract an audience. Do you get part ownership in the site? Are they a registered charity? Anything for you apart from your name attached to the image? What is the target audience? Best of all, they will not charge you - bargain :-/

Seems to me they have far more to gain then you. Depends if you need the exposure in something that MIGHT take off..... each person is different and some like the attention..... personally, unless it's fun for me or puts bread on the table (or aimed at doing that) then I don't see the point.

Bear_Music

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra

05/24/2008 10:16:24 AM · #3

Looks good to me. Seems to be the art equivalent of an online poetry magazine. I used to edit one of those. We never had any budget, nobody got paid, it was all for the art of it, as it were. This publication looks pretty nice to me, actually. I don't see what you have to lose. They have some VERY nice images in that issue #2.

R.

ETA: can't imagine 2 more polar reactions than mine and the one that came just before :-) The art/literary world has always been FULL of "little magazines" that are published for love, not money, and the communities, as a rule, welcome and often actually embrace these publications. Anyway, just for the record, does anyone here think ArtForum, say (that's one of the biggie print magazines in the art world) actually PAYS artists when they include an image of one of their works in their pages? get real! The payout is in promotion, in being taken seriously.

This has nothing to do with the commercial photography world; this is the art world, and promotion wherever you can get it is everything.

Message edited by author 2008-05-24 10:20:31.

05/24/2008 10:24:08 AM · #4

Never heard of them... Assuming it's legit... They want to start an online mag with your images used to help attract an audience. Do you get part ownership in the site? Are they a registered charity? Anything for you apart from your name attached to the image? What is the target audience? Best of all, they will not charge you - bargain :-/

No I get no compensation in return. Looks like a start up website of some sort for photographers. Just questioning if it is legit. So many scams these days. I have know idea if money exchanges hands, can't find any information on anything like that.

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

05/24/2008 10:26:20 AM · #5

This has nothing to do with the commercial photography world; this is the art world, and promotion wherever you can get it is everything.

For me, I agree. I am not looking for compenstaion, just don't want to be sucked into a scam. How does jpeg magazine work? I do know they publish something.....but are the photographers paid there? Just curious.

TCGuru

Canon EOS-40D

05/24/2008 10:28:02 AM · #6

Looks legit, I suppose it is now up to you... from the sound of the e-mail, what they are offering you is exposure in lieu of money. Sounds like you got some thinkin to do :) I would be more worried if they were asking for money (like most scams), but they aren't. So, comes down to what you decide and I truly believe you will be safe :)

Aside: However, use caution and common sense please :) Don't give out your social or CC number ;)

xianart

Canon EOS-7D

Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM

05/24/2008 10:32:12 AM · #7

looks like a good place. my only quibble is the very small size of the images - not a huge impact. the quality of the work is very high, and it seems a good thing.

xianart

Canon EOS-7D

Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM

05/24/2008 10:32:57 AM · #8

i jpeg, if you're published, they give you a subscription.

robs

Canon EOS R6 Mk II

05/24/2008 10:42:00 AM · #9

Originally posted by Bear_Music:

This has nothing to do with the commercial photography world; this is the art world, and promotion wherever you can get it is everything.

That's why I said "or aimed at doing that" :-) Promotion is aimed at getting paid IMO rather then for it's own sake and sometimes it's a great plan and other times it's hopeless... but it's certainly worth doing if you think the audience matches what you need and you have a plan to get some of their $ for your products.

I am obviously not an artist (sheese, my images should tell ya that :-) but have spent a lot of years as an independent consultant trying to get $ from clients in return for my services in order to pay my bills and have no doubt that has tainted my view of the world. I suspect that's why we have completely opposite responses. If the exposure is for the soul or for fun (same thing really) then no prob..... otherwise I think you need more info and a plan.

antidull

05/24/2008 09:43:23 PM · #10

Hello Guys.

Just thought I would sign up and clarify any confusion about the magazine. I'm the one that actually sent the email above. Let me begin by answering a few of the questions or concerns which were raised in the above responses.

As I state in the email, we look for photographers or artists on a monthly basis to showcase in our monthly online publication.

1. The magazine in only an online publication (it is just a part time effort of a few people).There is no offline publiction yet becuase it would require a huge time commtment and require that we seek out lots of advertisers to make printing possible.

2. Our main interest in starting the magazine was to provide photographers with a sort of HUB to display their work on a professional website that mimicked the look and feel of an offline magazine. We wanted photography and art lovers to be able to go to the website and browse through a reasonably large selection of artists and photographers. We publish the phtoographer's website address, usually 1 - 2 images and link to them from our website.

For us, we get to do what we like on a very part time basis. We look for photographers who's work is interesting. Just look through an issue for yourself. The level of professionalism of the photographer's work is very high. it helps us learn more about photography and art and what we find interesting or "good". We also feel it helps other phtoographers to get ideas or learn from other people's work.

We all have other full time jobs but every now and again we stumble upon an interesting photographer and we bookmark their website. Then we agree on who we want to contact. We usually contact about 100 people / month from all over the world. Usually about 50 people respond. This gives us enough to publish our small monthly publication.

3. So this naturally leads to the next most common question.... "Well, if you're not a charity, or not for profit, why do you spend a month on a part time basis for no financial gain?".

Well the answer to this question is quite simple. By keeping it online we keep costs or running the site fairly low. That being said, we do have costs associated with operating the site. Each publication takes about 30 + hours of labor, we hire a web design and optimization company to help drive traffic to the site for the photographer's benifit, we have hosting costs and a few other admin costs. In the end, it does add up. BUT, we wanted to keep the publication ad free. So what we've done is we look for sponsors. This is the "catch". But in the end I think it's the best compromise.

Sponsorship works as follows: A photography or art related company contacts us wanting to advertise. We tell them they can't advertise but they can sponsor an issue. This means they pay us a small fee to help compensate us (very little) for our labor and monthly costs of running and promoting the site. In return we ask that the people who we've contacted link to our sponsor from their site. We will ONLY allow photography or art related sponsors. No unrelated or questionable sites. This month for example we have a photography studio who wants exposure before their company launch in a couple of months.

That being said we will only work with a related sponsor on 2 conditions. They can't interfere with our artistic choice. They have no say in who we publish. Secondly, we reserve 10 spots out of 50'ish for "ad free" photographers. This means if you don't want to, or can't link to our sponsor, we will still publish you in one of these 10 spots spaced randomly throughout the magazine.

Therefore, in very simple terms it works as follows: we get our costs covered for running this small operation (by the end of the month our goal is to break even). The sponsor gets some exposure and our artists get exposure in a high quality online publication.

In the end, it's fairy fair. There is no hidden agenda. For the person who started this thread, I will be contacting you with further details about more specific questions. For example, we just want to reassure you that we don't want any rights to your copyright or anything like that.

This response is running on a long time but I'd like to address a couple of the other responses.

1. Size of images: We keep the images fairly small because we want to protect the artists against image theft. We feel that the size is a good compromise because it's large enough to see, but not large enough to reproduce at high resolution in a larger format.

2. The magazine is flash because it also helps with protecting the artists work (i.e. people can't "save image as").

3. The issue you are published in will always be viewable from our "issues" page. Therefore as we grow in popularity your exposure will grow.

Anyway, I think this deals with the majority of the questions. We do accept emails from photographers who are interested in getting your work published, but we choose the majority of people by "inviting" them. However, if you do send us an email we will look at your portfolio and get back to you.

I hope this helps clear the air.

John

05/24/2008 10:04:52 PM · #11

Thanks for elaborating for us :)

antidull

05/24/2008 10:08:49 PM · #12

Not a problem!

05/24/2008 10:11:57 PM · #13

So, now that you're here, are you going to join us in the challenges? :)

antidull

05/24/2008 10:15:52 PM · #14

Actually I was just spending quite a bit of time checking out this website. It's brilliant. I will take part in the challenges. But my first challenge is going to be publishing this next issue in 7 days! But definitely next month. thanks for the warm welcome. I really appreciate it.

MelonMusketeer

Nikon D7000

Nikon MF 50mm f/1.4

05/24/2008 10:31:20 PM · #15

Welcome to DPChallenge

antidull.
Enjoy your time on line here, and I look forward to seeing your portfolio grow here.
I will check out your on line mag.

05/24/2008 10:37:01 PM · #16

Originally posted by antidull:

Glad to hear it! Welcome to the madhouse :D
And good luck with the mag :)

MelonMusketeer

Nikon D7000

Nikon MF 50mm f/1.4

05/24/2008 11:01:41 PM · #17

I see that one of my long time friends, Jeff Ripple, has an image in issue 2. It must be a good on line project if Jeff is there.

05/25/2008 12:28:47 AM · #18

I enjoyed the diversity of images. My one complaint is the shadowing that enhances the illusion of an actual magazine is strong enough on some images to be a distraction to me.