Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: amolitor on January 02, 2016, 10:37:51 am
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LuLa's a pay site now, and it certainly appears that the principals want to make it a business. There's some ads and things generating money, probably less and less of it as the water of the internet fills with blood. There's followon business in workshops. Evidently these are not adequate, and the decision was made to add a $12/year fee for the front page content.
None of this is news, of course. It feels to me like the site needs to pull several thousand subscribers for this to make sense, though. 10,000 subscribers might even be enough to operate LuLa as a sort of part-time business. Given the other revenue streams, let's throw 5,000 out there as a sort of back-of-the-envelope target.
That's 5,000 subscribers, parting with filthy lucre. A couple dozen blustery loyalists isn't pulling the train. This isn't a charity project funded by a cadre of the Michael's personal pals. This is pretty real.
What I'm seeing on the front page is pretty mixed.
Tutorials for beginners to panorama stitching and articles about how the best camera is the one with the most pixels, that's non Canon? This is commodity content. I can find this by the double handful on the internet. As the market is wont to do, it has set a price for commodity photographic content, and that price is not $12/year. It is Zero Dollars.
This leaves content that is distinctive and interesting, that is specific to LuLa, that is unique.
The stuff on print has some promise. There's plenty of stuff out there on printing, but it's haphazard and I suspect mostly wrong. So, there's an opportunity here.
Access to interesting people. The videos with Mr. Neil have promise. Again, an opportunity here, to use the LuLa team's personal connections and reputations to get this kind of access, and turn it in to distinctive interesting content.
The urge to turn this kind of distinctive and interesting content into Tutorials For Beginners, into Ten Quick Tips, needs to be fought. One might say "well, we need to make our content broadly accessible" but in reality what you're doing is converting distinctive and unique content, valuable content, into that same Zero Dollar Valued commodity content.
5,000 subscribers, even 50,000 subscribers, is a real market, a real business. But it's not that big. It's a niche. LuLa can afford to be kind of nichey in content. You needn't try to compete with PetaPixel, and to try is a terrible idea. There's already a PetaPixel.
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Andrew,
What Does LuLu Want To Be When She Grows Up
A singer?
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I've been pretty disappointed in the content on LuLa for the better part of the last two years; it seems to be in content stagnation. For a quite while, it seemed that the only new postings were announcements hawking workshops; something that would be more appropriate as a notice in a sidebar. Regarding workshops, it would nice to have one that most folks could afford to travel to, rather than Iceland, Antarctica, West Australia, Iceland, Antarctica, Antarctica, Iceland. Guess there's not as much margin in domestic workshops.
Michael hardly does any writing anymore, and there has not been a worthwhile set of the videos for quite a long time (the Lightroom and Capture One vids of 2012/2013 were very good).
I'm willing to pay $1 a month for access, it's a very reasonable price, but I sincerely hope there is better content than has been present over the last two years. You only have to look at what Tomash Trzebiatkowski has done at Fuji Love in one year to see where things could be.
I'll hang in for a while, but only for a while, I've been disappointed in the lack of substantive content for two years now. I even contacted Kevin about writing for the site, but after an initial correspondence (with me sending him some suggestions on content), I never heard back.
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Amazed at the "value equation" some people apply to a cost of $0.25 a week.
(actually it's less than 25ยข per week)
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I'm happy to contribute my 6 espressos/year to help host the forum, which is a fabulous resource.... even if I only look at about 10% of the topics.
I was going to say that nothing much on the front page interests me, but that's not true... maybe about 10% there, too. So that's fine.
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Who the fuck is LuLu?
This is LuLu... my dog, of course. And she'll bite you for talking like that! ;D
(https://rsadams.smugmug.com/photos/i-mMtCZJH/0/S/i-mMtCZJH-S.jpg)
Rand
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LuLa's a pay site now, and it certainly appears that the principals want to make it a business.
Sheesh, go take some photos or eat a bran muffin or have a drink. I think that $12 a year for LuLa is a great bargain. Cripes, I lose more than $12 in change every year!
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Twelve bucks a year is not a lot of money, no. And if you like Michael and Chris and Kevin and want to help them out, it's basically nothing.
But this place isn't a charity, it is a business. It is a business competing in a brutal market, where the default price for everything is free.
Consider the 4728 people of the target 5000 who do not consider themselves to have a personal relationship with one of the principals. Indeed, consider the friends of Michael, who have wives who watch the budget:
'What is this charge?'
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'Are you getting value from it out is it just because you like Kevin?'
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'So we can cancel it, right?'
The friends and family will silently drop away too, over the years, if the content continues to be essentially the same as everyone else's free stuff. Things are a little tight this year. We change credit cards. One of a thousand other reasons and we just never get around to signing up anew, because the content just wasn't that compelling.
You can't run a business just chucking up 'whatever' on a web site and pricing it real low.
EDIT: I find it telling that the two major positions here seem to be "the content just isn't compelling" versus "twelve bucks is very cheap (usually followed by some sort of personal snipe)".
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It seems that LuLa's business is everybody's business these days.
Speaking about "body" and "busy," there is a combined word that sums it up much better ;)
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Sure, an option is to sit around smiling a lot and saying 'great job, guys!'. And we can award all the schoolchildren participation ribbons while we're at it. It is, above all, vital to avoid the slightest possibility of hurt feelings.
I don't choose that option, though.
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It seems that LuLa's business is everybody's business these days.
Speaking about "body" and "busy," there is a combined word that sums it up much better ;)
Subscribers to the site are surely entitled to comment on its content and direction. We have skin in the game and we want Lula to survive and thrive. Andrew's core argument seems to me sound, and neither you nor any of his other detractors in the thread have had anything of substance to say against it. Even at low cost, if Lula is to attract new subscribers and retain old ones as a paid photographic site in a a world of free sites (some of them probably with more financial resources through advertising) it should surely be avoiding articles that look like low budget versions of what you get on the free sites. The surviving paid sites that I can think of (Sean Reid, Lloyd Chambers) have very clear points of difference from free sites. I am waiting in hope that Lula will manage something similar. The Gear of the Year article was not a good start.
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Well I think Rand's Lulu is very cute, and I found the Met's production of Alban Berg's opera Lulu to be quite splendid.
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Alban Berg's opera Lulu to be quite splendid.
She comes to a nasty end though, doesn't she? :-(
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Subscribers to the site are surely entitled to comment ... neither you nor any of his other detractors in the thread have had anything of substance to say against it...
Sure we can comment. It is a matter of tone, however.
There is a difference between expressing an opinion and lecturing others how to run their own business. If one is so smart to know how to run a business, they should be busy running their own business, not minding other peoples' business. Or serve as a paid consultant, if hired to do so.
There has been a constant flow of almost rabid negativity about LuLa recently. Mean, nasty personal attacks against the founders and frequent contributors. People who proved themselves in business and photography many times over being attacked by armchair critics and Monday Morning Quarterbacks who rarely press the shutter.
There is a theory that mass spectators come to sport stadiums to vent their accumulated frustration with their lives by yelling, shouting, cursing, swearing, fighting etc. A sort of group therapy. But tickets for sport events are rather expensive these days. It seems it is much cheaper to come here for $1 a month and vent one's anger.
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People who proved themselves in business and photography many times over being attacked by armchair critics and Monday Morning Quoterbacks who rarely press the shutter.
Heh heh, he said "Quoterbacks" heh heh, yeah, heh, yeah...
(http://orig05.deviantart.net/f321/f/2012/262/e/c/beavis_and_butthead_transparent_template_by_gmannytheanimator-d5fagfm.jpg)
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I rarely press a shutter button, but when I do, it's awesome.
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Heh heh, he said "Quoterbacks" heh heh, yeah, heh, yeah...
Thanks, corrected.
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And, with respect, it's borderline insulting to assume that I don't know what I'm talking about. I've spent 25 years building products. I've assembled physical devices. I've written software. I've provided close support for various kinds of marketing activities. I've provided engineering support instrumental in closing more multi million dollar desks than I can remember. I've done corporate governance as a board member and a C level officer.
And my resume is, I suspect, nothing special in this forum.
The fact that I'm offering my viewpoint for free is more about how the idea of operating a consulting practice sounds utterly horrible, and less about the idea that I have nothing useful to say.
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Wait, 'quoterback' was a typo?
I'm still stealing it. It's effin brilliant.
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She comes to a nasty end though, doesn't she? :-(
So we'll never know what she wanted to be when she grew up....
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And, with respect, it's borderline insulting to assume that I don't know what I'm talking about...
That's not what I said or implied. I said that offering unsolicited advice how to run a business is in itself borderline insulting. Besides, you are not really offering any useful advice. You are at best bitching and moaning about how they run their business.
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Huh?
I offered very specific advice. It's not particularly original advice, mind you. 'Find your unique value proposition, your differentiators, and press then as hard as possible' is pretty much business 101.
But I did detail a couple of areas where I think the Lula team can bring that unique value proposition, and to a good degree already are.
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Thanks, corrected.
Aw man, that was brilliant Slobodan - I was paying you the highest compliment bro, heh yeah, heh heh.
Quoterback! You need to go and change it back.
Happy accident!
:-)
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... 'Find your unique value proposition, your differentiators, and press then as hard as possible' is pretty much business 101...
So much so that it has become a truism, i.e., says nothing new or interesting.
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Aw man, that was brilliant Slobodan - I was paying you the highest compliment bro, heh yeah, heh heh.
Quoterback! You need to go and change it back...
Had I have Isaac in mind... ;)
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Except that the front page, the thing people are expected to pay for, does not show any sign that the truism, the thing so obvious we needn't even mention it, is being heeded.
Which is why I started this thread in there first place, obviously.
I see a pretty even mixture of mildly differentiated content, and petapixel-grade filler. Do you see something different?
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Andrew, I appreciate your comments. The business model for Luminous-Landscape is our business and no one else's. We operate our business and design our website the way we see fit. Our goal always has been and will continue to be to share our passion with fellow photographers. I hope you and our readers see some of the differential you mention with a number of projects underway and planned for 2016.
You seem to have issue with our content. That's fine, as with other things in life if you don't like it then ignore it. Some content will be relevant to you and some won't. We get your point. For many though we provide good material and information. There are many contributors that have worked hard to provide good articles and essays and we appreciate that as we would hope others would. These contributors feel the same way we do and freely share their experience and knowledge. If this content doesn't fit the standard that you feel it should then I invite you to contribute an article for review and possible publication. It would be good to see some of your images with the article too. And, possibly you'd consider like some others being a regular contributor.
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Recipes are good for cooking. Much less so in business and life. Saying something like "find your unique proposition..." is like saying to someone: "find what makes you happy and go for it." Well, duh!
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I appreciate the offer, Kevin, genuinely, and I thought about it for a moment before throttling the impulse. I have far more than I can handle writing for myself and my own little audiences in some other areas, already.
To be honest, I can't tell if you're gently asking me to drop it or not, so I will adopt the conservative approach.
Slobodan if you'd like to continue to discuss management consulting, you have my email address, and you know I'd be charmed to argue with you. Alas, we shall have to each supply our own drinks, rather than more properly buying the other fellow's.
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Author of Intermediate Photography. "The most important book on photography written in the last 123 years"
Hum...so when is your book coming out in print? And exactly who claimed your book is "The most important book on photography written in the last 123 year".
Asking to find out (and maybe give some shyte your way).
Look forward to you posting critiques of some of my upcoming articles I plan on doing in 2016.
Ya might want to be a bit more careful shitting on follow authors. Alain has a lot more books published than you do. I wonder why? Heck, I have more books published than you do. Course, mine aren't "The most important book on photography written in the last 123 year" although some people seem to like them as modern day replacements for Ansel's The Negative and The Print.
You really want to try to measure your dick length?
LuLa is doing fine trying to provide content to all levels of users. You just aim at "intermediate" users (based on your title)...
So, do you wanna keep playing?
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Honestly it has to be too early to really evaluate Lula's offerings behind a pay wall. The cost is not an issue as has been stated over and over. What is an issue is the quality of the articles in terms of the time taken to read/watch them. If the articles don't educate, provoke or entertain they will be a waste of time. Can really never be a waste of money at current cost.
I am optimistic. I don't like all the contributors styles of writing or presenting and and I don't like all the photography. It doesn't take much effort to learn from stuff you don't like. It takes no effort to learn from the stuff you do like.
Very pleased to hear Schewe will be contributing. Grumpy old git but his books are great. His forum contributions always cheer me up.
I will buy Andrew's book on kindle while I'm at it. Looks interesting. Even though I'm actually really very super duper awfully advanced.
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I have far more than I can handle writing for myself and my own little audiences in some other areas, already.
Are you working on your next book? Maybe you should consider writing "Intermediate e-business, the most important book on running a payed website in 123 years" 8)
Btw, I find all the current content of LuLa pretty grown up and more then worth the subscription fee. The promise of new stuff only makes it more attractive. Not that I like or can use everything published here, but I guess that's true for all subscribers.
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Are you working on your next book? Maybe you should consider writing "Intermediate e-business, the most important book on running a payed website in 123 years" 8)
Yeah, no, I pass...no further comment.
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Whatever LL wants to be, keeping up the content & quality of the Video Journals is going to be a challenge which I am certain " The Team " will no doubt achieve.
I have enjoyed and learnt so much watching them over the Christmas / New Year holiday period I will re-watch, probably all of them, again. :)
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Yeah, no, I pass...no further comment.
Maybe look up "self irony" before commenting?
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Andrew, I appreciate your comments. The business model for Luminous-Landscape is our business and no one else's. We operate our business and design our website the way we see fit. Our goal always has been and will continue to be to share our passion with fellow photographers. I hope you and our readers see some of the differential you mention with a number of projects underway and planned for 2016.
You seem to have issue with our content. That's fine, as with other things in life if you don't like it then ignore it. Some content will be relevant to you and some won't. We get your point. For many though we provide good material and information. There are many contributors that have worked hard to provide good articles and essays and we appreciate that as we would hope others would. These contributors feel the same way we do and freely share their experience and knowledge. If this content doesn't fit the standard that you feel it should then I invite you to contribute an article for review and possible publication. It would be good to see some of your images with the article too. And, possibly you'd consider like some others being a regular contributor.
I think you've missed the point of Andy's post. As I read it, it is not so much about what he personally likes, as about what would form the basis of a successful business. He is perfectly aware, I am sure, that he can ignore what he doesn't like. Again, the point is, are there thousands of people who will do otherwise? Maybe you already know the answer. If you don't, I guess you soon will.
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I am astounded when, occasionally, people do not understand that my signature line is a joke. The quote is ridiculous and is unattributed because nobody ever said such a ridiculous thing. I am poking a little fun with it.
My photography book will not be coming out in print. That wasn't the point of writing it.
I am in fact writing other books, but they have nothing to do with photography.
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I think you've missed the point of Andy's post. As I read it, it is not so much about what he personally likes, as about what would form the basis of a successful business. He is perfectly aware, I am sure, that he can ignore what he doesn't like. Again, the point is, are there thousands of people who will do otherwise? Maybe you already know the answer. If you don't, I guess you soon will.
This thread deserves to just fade away, but I'll risk adding one comment to those who are second guessing our business model.
Firstly, between Kevin, Chis and me we have some 100+ years of real-world business experience...not just running web sites. This includes founding and building at least three publicly listed technology companies; one of the world's biggest labs, and being senior executives at major corporations in the imaging and communications business. We may not be among the smartest, but we're far from the dumbest.
Our move to a pay model was the result of long and serious analysis of the rapidly changing nature of the web model. After running LuLa for some 17 years, we know a thing or two about how these things work, how they used to work, how they work now, and how they're likely to work in future. We're betting the ranch on that.
Though the pay model is only a couple of weeks old it isn't too soon to say that it is meeting our highest expectation. Customer feedback is excellent (with a few notable exceptions, of course), and take-up rate in well above forecast.
So... we're as excited about the future of this site as we can be. We see our new ideas starting to come to fruition and we believe that LuLa will continue on its new evolutionary path and become stronger and with greater and wider appeal. We may stumble along the way, but so many people seem to be rooting for us (and we DO listen), that I'm confident that the months ahead will prove our plans to have been worthwhile.
Michael
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I rarely press a shutter button, but when I do, it's awesome.
He's a legend in his own mind. :o
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I am astounded when, occasionally, people do not understand that my signature line is a joke.
I didn't. I read it and took it at face value.
Thanks to Shewe for asking for attribution, saving me the effort.
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I didn't. I read it and took it at face value.
Thanks to Shewe for asking for attribution, saving me the effort.
I have a bridge you may be interested in.
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He's a legend in his own mind. :o
In a world where Donald Trump is a potential candidate for public office it can be hard to tell joke from reality, I agree. However, you have to cling to the hope of some sort of rationality in the human race, so I would assume that Andy was being funny.
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However, you have to cling to the hope of some sort of rationality in the human race, so I would assume that Andy was being funny.
I agree but will add: know the old saying about assumptions?
The next question becomes, based on the 'joke' and then further writings from that author, should one take anything written seriously? That is on topic IMHO.
Perhaps Andrew will provide a chapter from his amazing book for LuLa content.
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What an interesting idea. (EDIT: submitted for the amusement of the editorial board)
But seriously, let's stop taking about me. This isn't the coffee corner.
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...Kevin... I can't tell if you're gently asking me to drop it or not...
I don't know about Kevin, but IF I WERE HIM, i'd respond probably like this:
"Andrew, dissent is fine, even encouraged. I won't necessarily get into an argument with you, but dissent is fine.
Being an insulting dick is not fine. Use your head. It's our site, we don't have to put up with anything we don't want to."
:)
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I think you've missed the point of Andy's post. As I read it, it is not so much about what he personally likes, as about what would form the basis of a successful business.
I doubt anyone has missed it. And that "point" is exactly the problem.
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This thread deserves to just fade away...
Michael
Amen, brother, amen.
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Amen, brother, amen.
And yet you chose to make it a little bit longer.
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I doubt anyone has missed it.
Aah, OK, they're just acting like they did.
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Michael, Kevin . . .
This pitiful thread argues heavily in favor of your original plan to have all of LULA be by subscription only. It might remove some of the dross from the forum to have it subscription only. If not, at least you'll be paid for being insulted.
Rand
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We are done here. Topic Locked.
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I will add that further threads regarding LuLa's current business model will be moved to the Coffee Corner