Wemark – A Decentralized Marketplace for Stock Photography

Wemark is a blockchain based marketplace for stock photographs. The main project’s statement is that it offers a more fair and profitable for the photographers platform than, for example, Shutterstock. The key difference is that the latter as a middleman acquires all the rights to the photographs, submitted by its users. The photographers relinquish all their licensing rights, and the platform deals with photograph buyers on their behalf. This way, photographers have very little control of how their work is used, they technically don't own any copyrights anymore, and the lion's share of their profits is taken by the Shutterstock platform. The Wemark project offers an alternative paradigm; it doesn't appropriate the rights for any uploaded content, photographers keep all the rights. The platform allows them to license their work, protects it from unsanctioned copying and distribution, but otherwise, it doesn't stand between the photographer and the client. It's not a middleman. It's just a tool, helping sellers and buyers to find each other. The platform takes a fifteen percent fee from each sale, so the content creators keep up to 85 percent of the profit, minus commission that goes to the referrers, promoting the content. It's significantly smaller fees than that charged by Shutterstock. Another advantage is that photographers can decide whom they are going to sell their photos and purposes for which their work can be used. As I mentioned above, the photographers own all the rights for the content they submit and can stipulate the terms of its usage; for example, buyers might not be allowed to re-sell the photograph, or use it for alcohol advertisements, and so on. Also, the Wemark project gives the photographers freedom in setting prices for their photos. Project founders believe that low fees and freedom of artists in setting their prices will inevitably lead to lower prices. There are two strong competitive advantages here: First, the photographers apparently would prefer to migrate to this platform, if it manages to catch on the network effect, because they would have to pay smaller commissions and as a result earn more, even if they set lower prices. The second, customers will be drifting toward Wemark being attracted by lower prices.

Several other things worth mentioning. The platform developers apparently don't plan to store the photographs on the blockchain. So the content will be stored in cloud storages or on IPFS attached to the blockchain through hashes. They seriously talk about legal protection, although Wemark doesn't promise to enforce copyrights outside of the marketplace. A couple of other features, making the platform attractive for customers: The platform will include an advanced system of ratings, annotations, and search, in other words, it will be easy to find relevant photos of appropriate quality. The second advantage is purportedly lower prices, which I mentioned above. Another aspect is that all the terms of all the agreements will be written in Smart Contracts, so what it means is: first, immutability of the contract terms; the moment Smart Contract is recorded on the blockchain, it cannot be altered afterward. And the second, the contact is triggered automatically when its conditions are met. This way, all the business communications between photographers and their customers are going to proceed smoothly. Also, another advantage of the platform is its transparency because blockchain is transparent by definition. The Wemark project founders have ambitious plans of turning this platform into a universal hub, integrating into it everything related to stock photography. For example, the photographers will be able to buy equipment directly on the platform, hire models and legal services; there will be communities and fan-clubs, surrounding this ecosystem around photo content.

To sum it up, Wemark explores a promising niche. Project founders have a clear business model that has obvious advantages over existing solutions in this field. Considering that Wemark also has a working platform with several thousand users, it has a good chance to succeed.

Starting from May 7, 2018, Wemark will conduct a TGE, aiming to distribute 38% of its total supply of 135,000,000 WMK tokens. The hard cap of the sale is $8M