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Old 10-30-2017, 10:22 AM  
Paul Markham
Too old to care
 
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Industry Role:
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: On the sofa, watching TV or doing my jigsaws.
Posts: 52,943
Quote:
Originally Posted by OldJeff View Post
I know Max Cash paid 3 dollars a pic for some of them (Were you selling through Gail at Falcon at all Paul ?)

First girl took me way...back, I remember her
I didn't know people by their handles, only by their names. Gayle sold some set for me. Way back when.

I tried selling directly to sites at first because I never knew how to contact enough sites. So used agents. Had 3 of them. On visiting an early show at Vegas it became clear most of the other resellers were under-funded and had no clue what they were doing. So returned to Czech, hired a programmer who built a basic site, found Netflix, then GFY and business flooded in.

If I had visited a show earlier, while I was in the UK, I would have done it earlier and made even more money. People were desperate to get images and videos and were paying a good price for crap. It was shocking how bad most of the content suppliers were and how little they had, digital cameras were very expensive and needed pro-lighting. So most were scanning Transparencies. I had 300 sets each with 100 images each while I was in the UK. Plus 400 videos.

The only people who offered me the chance of opening a site were conmen and shysters. They wanted to take everything, run a site and all accounting and give me 50% of the profit. The people I tried, after telling me how rich they were going to make me, could only come up with excuses why the money wasn't flowing. It was, but not to me.

One guy, who will remain nameless, had a site where he sold banner spaces. Ran 3 top photographers content on individual sites, ran big banner ads on his site and swore blind the sites made less than he would charge for the ad space.

DDF found an honest guy who could see the future, and a few others, you know what they did online. The short-sightedness of online people was amazing at the time. It was too easy to make some money and many lost the big money.

Companies like Score, PRO, etc made a fortune online by finding honest webmasters.
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