I spent the evening down at the fair yesterday – I’d never been and really wanted to see what it was like. My imagination runs more toward a Stephen King vision of a county fair than the aforementioned Garrison Keillor; the images probably reflect that…

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For attendees looking for their photos, including finish line photos, you can find the full gallery of images here. These are free to download for your use – just use the “add to cart” button (the “download image” button is for high-rez originals – contact me if you want a higher resolution version of your picture). Enjoy!

http://daveblock.photoshelter.com/gallery/Furry-5K/G0000atwgFd7.mnk

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It has become a fairly common practice, sadly, to create “photo contests” that are thinly-veiled tools for companies and publishers to get content for free. Some of these “contests” are judged, some are popularity contests (i.e., get your family and all your Facebook friends to vote for you! Yay!).

So why don’t I enter most of these – and why do I think that they have a much more self-serving purpose than encouraging community, building a brand, or just sharing great photos? Take a look at the fine print about what rights you’re giving up when you enter an image in a contest. In many cases, when you submit your image(s), you are handing over ALL rights to the contest owner. Forever. No compensation. In any form. EVER. Not just the winners. ALL the images.

I’m going to be specific and call out a company that should know better, because they make products for photographers: Really Right Stuff. They’re currently running a contest that is a horrid rights grab, and they ought to be ashamed. Don’t believe me? Read the below, taken from RRS’s rules page for the contest:

“By entering the Contest, all entrants grant an irrevocable perpetual, nonexclusive license to Authorized Parties, to reproduce, distribute, display, and create derivative works of the entries (along with a name credit) in connection with the Contest and promotion of the Contest, in any media now or hereafter known, including, but not limited to: display at a potential exhibition of winners; publication of a book featuring select entries in the Contest; publication in Really Right Stuff magazine or online highlighting entries or winners of the Contest. Entrants consent to RRS doing or omitting to do any act that would otherwise infringe the entrant’s “moral rights” in their entries. Display or publication of any entry on an Authorized Party’s website does not indicate the entrant will be selected as a winner. Authorized Parties will not be required to pay any additional consideration or seek any additional approval in connection with such use. Additionally, by entering, each entrant grants to Authorized Parties the unrestricted right to use all statements made in connection with the Contest, and pictures or likenesses of Contest entrants, or choose not to do so, at their sole discretion. Authorized Parties will not be required to pay any additional consideration or seek any additional approval in connection with such use.”

This is just insulting to RRS’s customers. RRS builds great products and I use them, and love them, but this just offends me. Are they the only ones doing this? Absolutely not, it happens all the time. But maybe, with smaller companies that are closer to the photographic community, my voice can have some impact.

Hey RRS! How about demonstrating your commitment to your customers by not screwing them with your contest? Fix your rules!

So what’s the fly in the ointment? Social networks need to make money. So who pays for all those servers and hard drives spinning in a data warehouse in Utah, Eastern Washington, or whereever? Right now the answer is no one – they’re all losing money at an astonishing clip, funded by incremental investment and huge valuations that right now feel to me more like the internet bubble of a decade ago than anything real.

The user base of social networks is huge and growing fast, and the belief is that more eyeballs means more revenue. That’s how Google makes so much money. Yes and no – it’s only true if the site has an effective way to monetize the user. There are a couple of ways to do this and serving ads is the big one. But as important as the number of users a site has is what the industry calls click-through rate (CTR) and cost-per-thousand (CPM) – essentially these numbers report how often a user actually clicks on an ad. Right now, for most social networks, these important numbers  are abysmally low. A couple of days ago a report came out indicating that Facebook’s CTR is 0.038% and average CPM is$0.23. These numbers are, to put it bluntly, terrible – average CTR is not a meaningful metric (there’s simply too much variation in types of campaigns, targeting, and customers to make it a real stat) but 0.038% is very poor.

To address this, they’re all juggling the ad model and trying to get better at delivering ads to users. So here’s the rub – in order to do that, they need your information, so they can serve up targeted ads that are relevant to your interests, so that you’ll click on them. This has turned into an interesting debate on privacy, and as much as I like Facebook, I think that as of the December update in FB’s privacy policy they’re over the line in what personal data they’re started mining and publishing. Did you know for example, that if you accepted the new default FB privacy settings, your status update “headed to Central America for 2 weeks, yay!” is visible to everyone, not just your friends? Do you really want the world to know that your house will be empty for the next 2 weeks?

But there is a way to fix it, and the NY Times posted a great article a couple of days ago on what settings you may want to change in order to manage the amount of information that you share. I highly recommend you take a look at it – the link is here.