Some great points. I too worry a little that CGT looks more like a 3D print service (of which there are several already bigger than here.)
The best future for CGT should be as competition to Turbosquid. Can someone from CGT tell us what sort of advertising is currently done by CGT?
Hi Everyone!
First of all I want to thank iterateCGI for sharing your ideas - great out-of-the-box thinking! Also it is a pleasure for our team to read that you see so much value in what we do, really appreciate that! To make such initiative we need to be sure we will have enough support from the designers. We will discuss it internally how we can approach it. I'm not sure if such type of marketing kickstarter projects have been arranged yet, does anybody knows anything about it?
Regarding the 3DP vs CG thing, I want to assure you that we won't go anywhere where is no money for 3D artists. Our plan is to continue growing CG side, because right now this is where all 3D designers are - and we are not going leave this market. On the other hand, 3D printing holds huge potential as a mainstream market and we think it will bring a bright future for all 3D designers.
Current homepage representation doesn't affect sales nor CG community growth. Also, right now we are working on the next version of design, where we will integrate both industries.
So stay tuned, exciting times lies ahead!
I to think CGtrader is a viable competitor to Turbosquid 3dartisan ;-)
Marius, I will not argue against 3D printing to "possibly" be a great deal for a spesipic group of 3D artists in the near future. Best thing is to leave that open to see how it goo's. After all it is closely related and al lot of 3D models can potentially be used after some tweaking. However, 3D printing for consumers is still a relatively expensive endeavor and not al lot of people have such a printer.
I am completely convinced 3D printing is a revolution for design manufacturing, engineering and medical purposes. Mass consumer application will probably follow a bit later. Personally I think a strong argument against 3D printing for mass consumption can be made looking at the current state it is in. Isn't there a problem with the idea that big masses of people are going to start printing large volumes of stuff they are going to get bored with in a very short time and then start throwing away big piles of plastic?
The impact to the environment can probable be minimized with special dissolving materials, but as far as I know current consumer printing technologies all relay on plastic melting ore metal laser scanning techniques.
I personally will not fully embrace 3D printing until this and the problem of high cost is solved. Maybe it is better to let the manufacturing industry develop these technologies a bit more before it goo's to mainstream.
That is just my humble opinion and I have no problem with people thinking differently.
However currently most 3D artists will probable sell more goods to production houses and game manufacturers so it is normal they want to advertise more in that world. As a 3D artist I am a bit more in favor for the prospects of virtual reality. I can go on forever in argumenting that this is the future for a 3D artist but that's beside the question right now. I admit it also remains to be seen whether ore not this is going to boom.
To come back to the Crowdfunding marketing subject.
The idea came from thinking about this deeply rooted Turbosquid model. I can imagine there hefty 60% commission delivers them a very big marketing budget. This is good for the artist but other aspects of Ts are not so good for the artist and sellers as well.Ts makes a lot of efforts to make sure everything is strongly connected to their products. Maybe CGtrader falls a bit short due to having less resources? However we have this strong community that maybe can get united in a common goal. I think it just needs a strong action from CGtrader part (and members) for a short period to get this thing going hard (Crowdfunding can help in this regard). Most of us would probable agree this service is very cheap compared to others, so I guess there will be some willingness to throw something in so we can leverage our selves a bit more into view.
Marius, I see you are unfamiliar with the Crowdfunding consept.
If so then it is maybe better to use an existing platform in contrast to organize it on your own. May I however point out you already have a this strong community so there is no need to go somewhere ells. I advice you to implement it in your already awesome website system. Here's some information on a possible solution to do that. (https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/lifecycle/crowdfunding/) There are some technicalities to overcome so in the meantime it may be better to use an existing systems to get a bit more familiar with the concept. Here's some possible solutions (http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/crowdfunding-sites/) Feel free to ask me any question on how to move forward on this. I'm not a supper expert but I will do my best to be of any assistance. Al sorts of projects are getting funded on Crowdfunding websites so I see no reason way a given marketing campaign or promotion project can't be funded. CGtrader has over 30.000 email addresses of mutually beneficial parties, if I'm not mistaken? (you may call them a sort of stakeholders) That is a real power ad your fingertips, you can send all this community members a link to your Crowdfunding incentives.
Note: you may want to extend this to CGtrader members as well, if they have a good idea they can make a request for a fund raising as well.
There isn't really a lot to know about the Crowdfunding consept, except that it is the way of the future to get things done. It basically is just letting the Crowd in explicit detail know (on a public forum) watt it is you intend to do for them, and tell them exactly watt you need in order to make it happen and watt they are going to get in return if it actually gets done. There are a lot of well organized service to do just that. They manage the payment system and add a counter for a funding period. They however take a small fee to run their services which is understandable, in turn you get a well organized set of tools to publish your plans of watt it is you want to do.
The good thing of a Crowdfunding project is that people can follow along and see how it goo's. For example one can say I throw in 50 dollars ad start, and as the funding round moves toward the end one may decide to throw in another 30 dollars depending on how hard he/she wants the campaign to succeed. In general most Crowdfunding rounds start off peaking and slow down a bit towards the end relying a bit more on the people hoe want it to succeed more. There must be something in for the funders, so mostly every fund seeker works with rewards. A reward can be anything, it can range from a full product to certain benefits. In our case it could be CGtrader credits for example. I propose 50/50 because the artist can get more sales and CGtrader will get more transactions in return. These days more and more large community driven web services begin to work via these sort of thing "with success" so I suggest to hop on this boat as well.
Make sure however if you consider using a Crowdfunding platform you are picking one that is capable of paypal receiving's, the amazon thing is not working for citizens outside the US.
Sorry the reply is so long,
Best regards to all,
We at NoneCG agree with most of the opinions expressed here.
However, I think you are missing one important point regarding Turbosquid and CGsociety:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/beau-perschall/1/12/4a0
Beau Perschall
bperschall@turbosquid.com
Vice President of Business Development at TurboSquid, Inc.
Has maintained solid relationships with the major players in the 3D arena including Autodesk, Adobe, Maxon, Luxology, Newtek, nVidia, Alioscopy, AMD and cgSociety among many others. Is also A MEMBER OF THE Advisory Board for the cgSociety team.
Like many other people, we already suffered censorship at CGsociety.
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