Are you a photographer or designer? Zymmetrical.com provides an online marketplace for anyone to sell digital photos, graphics, fonts and video.
Based on Dotnetnuke, the MS Open source platform. Leverages latest in web technology to deliver a seamless stock art experience to clients and artists. Users can search for photographs they like arranged in different groups (architecture, people, nature, etc) and then buy them directly from the website. The prices range from 2 to 100 dollars. It is a pretty cool website.
Zymmetrical.com In Their Own Words
“Zymmetrical is an exchange platform for artists and buyers at the forefront of creative design. We feature a constantly updated selection of digital art submitted by people from all over the world.
We’ve been involved with digital art from the start. From ASCII art, to Photoshop 1.0, to Flash and beyond, we are lovers of all that is good in design. Our core idea: wouldn’t it be nice if every talented photographer, designer, typographer and VJ could connect to clients from all over the world?
We occupy the middle ground between the generic $1.00 photo or membership download stock sites, and the ‘big 3’ corporate stock agencies selling photos for hundreds of dollar at minimum.
We allow Artists to choose their own prices, from $2 to $100, as well as add their own keywords, via their private Art Manager area. This let’s the artist be their own salesperson, using their local knowledge and language to reach markets that might be otherwise untapped.
We hope you find new connections here, as a buyer, seller, or as both. Connecting to great Artists from hard-to-pronounce locations has never been easier.
Our support is top notch and, typically, shockingly quick. If you have any questions at all, please drop a note, and we will get back to you right away.”
Why Zymmetrical.com It Might Be A Killer
It might become a killer because it is a good website for young photographers or designers to sell their work. It also gives users the chance to buy good pictures at a good price.
Some Questions About Zymmetrical.com
Why would people buy the pictures when the can download them? By setting the price between the corporate stock agencies and the 1 dollar agencies, don’t you think that you won’t capture neither the clients of one or the other?
Updates
Thanks for the question. The higher end agency pricing is out of the price range of people who need to decorate their blog, or a small magazine needing an image for a photo spread.
The cheaper agencies have taken a McDonald’s approach to their business model, where the consumer is king at all costs. Art is however one of a kind, and you can see a saturation effect in the current $1 photo business model – Artists don’t earn enough in sales, so they take the same photo to the top 5 agencies and upload them there.
So Joe the webdesigner buys a photo for $1, creates the site for a client, then the client gets pretty upset because they see their competitor’s new website with the exact same photos.
In the end, what occurs from the cheap model is a devaluation of the concepts involved in these photos and designs. The big, billion dollar agencies such as Getty and Corbis have teams of corporate drones working on how they can, too, milk the ‘el-cheapo’ photo market. In fact, Getty just bought the biggest player in this cheap model, Istockphoto, for $50 million.
The truth is that the -price- of a photo can be changed by any agency, however the -value- of a photo is an intangible thing. Art and business have never been the best roommates, but now it’s clear that the more big business tries to get it’s hands in the whole spectrum of buyers, the more there is a need for a democratic approach to pricing in the industry.
Web technology has caught up and allowed anyone to open their own ‘stock agency’, there are dozens of pre-made scripts for such sites. The real winner in the business will be the one that can balance the need for the content creators to earn a living, and the clients to get good -value-. Zymmetrical is our attempt at this. 
