I've never seen this one before. From my initial observations, there are a couple things that put me off.
1. The quality of the images looks rather poor. I did a few searches (water, victoria, vancouver) and the quality of the majority of the results did not impress me at all. That leads me to believe that this site probably gets very little business.
2. They charge money to sign up as a photographer. $50 for a full application, $20 for a limited app. Granted, the money is only billed to your card when they approve you. But looking at their samples, they probably approve everyone, get their signup money and then laugh all the way to the bank.
I'm not saying it's a scam, but it sure could be a good one. The cost of setting up a site like this if you know some php/mysql is pretty much $0, except for your time. So:
Cost to build site: $0
Cost of domain: $25/yr
Cost of hosting: $200/yr
So they can run this at 225 (cdn) a year.
If they can sign up even 20 photographers with only BASIC memberships, they have already made a profit. They don't even have to sell any photos, just sign people up.
I don't like this model because it allows them to profit from you without actually making you a nickel. |
