In business a photo can often make the difference between a sale or no sale, or more important, which shop the sale goes to. Some businesses, like fashion, are almost entirely "photo" based. Others, like food, cars, etc. rely on it extensively.
Here's an example in which, for arguments sake, we state that all non-photo factors are equal and the best they can be.
Your business spends $100,000 a year to have top quality photos taken for the products you sell and you find the photos lead to a five to ten fold improvement in sales vs. stock or no photos. Now say all your competitors just steal your images and use them for their sites. Your sales drop back to where they were and your advantage is gone. And now you've got to make up the $100,000 to top it all off.
Having a watermark won't stop lesser competitors from sealing your image, but other "on par" competitors will likely not due to potential litigation. If you don't have a watermark everyone steals it with the line, "I didn't know it was something I couldn't use ... my web guys just found it on the internet. I'll talk with them." (or whatever) So now you have to constantly police the internet for competitors using your images, deal with take-downs, and lawyers.
... Then don't use advertising services like Google Shopping.
It's a pretty easy equation--do you make enough money through Google Shopping that it makes up for any potential losses from others stealing your image (which you can of course still go after legally)?
I think you're missing the point, which is that not allowing watermarks _is_ the problem (and what the OP was trying to say through his frustration). There should be no need to do any sort of cost benefit analysis nor to police the internet.
In other words, a cry for Google to change the policy to minimize the problem rather than just abandoning Google Shopping.
I hate this attitude that 'If you're using it, you have no right to complain'. Sure, you can always vote with your feet, but there are often times when I really like a service, but a certain feature, or a certain decision really irks me. In this case, using google shopping increases OP's revenue, which is great, but the "don't watermark your images" rule means losing out on one part of their competitive advantage (i.e. having the best product pictures which show exactly what the customer wants/needs to see).
The answer isn't to stop using Google Shopping, and the answer isn't to 'put up or shut up'. I would hope that someone at Google Shopping might be able to figure out a resolution with OP that is the best for everyone involved - i.e. doesn't break google's TOS, and doesn't leave OP paying to produce high-quality photos that his competition will steal.
Can you explain in more detail? I am actually curious, because as a customer I hate the watermarks. Do you think they help with brand awareness, or driving traffic to your own site?
If we publish our home brewed content without watermarks and it is lifted off google and used to compete against us, we have no effective recourse.
Detail:
In our company, one advancement track is from Customer Service to Products. It seems like a good and obvious thing to do, but typically photos and product materials in our space are produced by teams without direct experience helping customers make CPAP equipment work for them. We often find that the stock images and materials available to us are ineffective for internet customers, as they are often designed to target physicians and the owners of traditional brick and mortar CPAP retailers.
We have spent a lot of time and effort to do better. I believe we have. Our product presentations are end CPAP user driven and focused. We view both the images produced and the knowledge that produced them as an earned competitive advantage.
We've had instances where we woke up to find anothercpapco.com copying our product catalog verbatim. I think software patents slow innovation and that the DRM situation in the music industry is bad. Yet, I made the decision to water mark our images in order to prove them stolen.
> If we publish our home brewed content without watermarks and it is lifted off google and used to compete against us, we have no effective recourse.
Sure you do. Compete back. Preferably on price and quality of your product rather than the prettiness of your pictures.
Anyone can take a picture of a CPAP machine. Yours aren't special, and if that's what's harming your business, you're doing something wrong. Probably a lot of things.
Anyone can take a picture of a CPAP machine but not every can do so after 5 years experience serving customers using them. What angles do they want to see, what zoom shots make things most clear, how do those zooms relate to the specific features and usage of that machine/mask/product.
CPAP is unfamiliar and visuals are the guide. It is important to do it right and hard to do it right. I think they are special as are the people who made them.
As to the "prettiness" of photography, it is special. If I take a snapshot of a product with my camera-phone and post it, versus a well-staged photo with pro equipment and lighting, I can guarantee as a photographer that the higher quality photo will sell more product, all else being equal.
Decent photography has a real-world cost attached to it. Why should the fact that anyone else can do it be a reason I give it away for free, with no attribution?
Lots of things have a real world cost to them, that doesn't mean everything that costs anyone anything to make or do should be restricted and withheld from the public.
Presumably there was a cost to figuring out the angles and zooms that showed these machines in the most informative way. Do you think that particular, informed camera setup should be patented?
If not, why should the particular photographs be copyrighted or otherwise excluded from use? Presumably when setting up your business (or the OP's), they looked to other more successful businesses as an example to follow. Should those other businesses be compensated for contributing to the OP's success?
What makes one idea, or expression of an idea, exclusive, private property, while other, often more valuable ideas, are free for the taking?
Sounds to me like the OP is trying to suppress competition through rent seeking, rather than competing on an even playing field by providing more value to the customer.
It's not about patents, angles, lighting, or whatever. Anyone is free to take as close as they can to the exact same shot. It's just that that person also has to pay the costs for that image too and not just take them from the OP.
Why do you want the watermarks to be visible? ig1's suggestion of invisible ones should work just as well for proving that a particular image got copied from you.
Visual watermarks are a deterrent to theft. If I find two similar images, and one has a watermark I'll have to edit out, which am I picking? Unless the one without the watermark is terrible, I'm taking it.
Google Shopping that is, not Google. Google Shopping is the paid eCommerce inclusion service. If you break the rules in AdWords you'll also be kicked out.
This is a sensible rule too--if everyone had watermarks the pages would be hideous.
> This is a sensible rule too--if everyone had watermarks the pages would be hideous.
So as a merchant, I have to invest a ton of money into getting quality photography of my products ... only to have my competitors use those same images for free?
"I have to invest a ton of money" did you miss the bit where this is an optional service? A service which you (and your competitors) should only use if you consider the value offered to outweigh the cost?
I think the parent is saying that without the ability to offer better service, via better photography than the competition, the benefits do not out way the cost for his use case.
If your competitors wanted to use your images, they'd just remove the watermarks and use them anyway. Also, who cares if your competitors use them? Aim for better service.
I am not sure to agree with the parent post, but I guess the point he/she tries to make is that the merchant will spend the time/money to have a product image, but this image will be reused for every other merchants selling the same product. It creates a situation where no merchant has an incentive to invest in having original or specific product images, as it won't make any difference relative to the competition, and if a product has a shitty image, tough luck.
The basic stance would be "that's Google's policy, deal with it", and I undestand it. At the same time, there are so many product with really awful images (for a coat, there would be no view of the inner fabric for instance). If a merchant would take the time to take relevant pictures of the right functionnalities of a product, I'd also understand wanting clients to know they're the one who cared about it. With google shopping's system, the product maker has the burden of providing decent images of it's product, or no one will care to make something better.
The maker/producer/distributor should provide advertising materials and they usually do. The system where every little shop selling the same thing takes its own photos of the product is terribly inefficient.
Often a maker's product image will be a single image taken at the best angle, hiding properties of the product that are not 'sexy'.
You'd see some really cheap goods but the image doesn't give any information about why it would be so, what trade-offs you're making. A shop can show these details and let people buy a better product if they feel like it, or buy the product without feeling betrayed at delivery.
Should every small shop care about product images ? of course no. Most of then should be OK with maker provided images. Would I value a shop showing even crappy but real images of the products ? Oh yes !
In other words, you'll only sell through venues which allow you to use DRM? That's your right, of course, but I don't know that you'll get much sympathy.
The consolidation of eCommerce & product advertising to a 2 primary platforms makes this anti-competitive and an anti-trust issue. I sympathize with him as he has the right to compete and to not be unduly constrained from competition .
Even if there really are only two primary e-commerce platforms, I would say that Google Shopping is definitely not one of them. It's a terrible experience and nobody I know uses it intentionally.
"I would say that Google Shopping is definitely not one of them. It's a terrible experience and nobody I know uses it intentionally."
UI/UX aside - it and Amazon are the largest online sources for product promotion, information and purchasing (when Google finally launches their marketplace). Google Shopping is heavily used.
I really wouldn't have guessed. When I think e-commerce, I think Amazon, eBay, NewEgg.... Do you happen to have any numbers on it? Finding e-commerce numbers is already pretty hard, and finding numbers for an aggregator like Google Shopping seems just about impossible.
I see so many people in this thread who are extremely disconnected from the reality of what it takes to be successful in ecommerce. They haven't had to deal with the fly-by-night sellers who set up, steal their product data and images from you, blow out everything at below MAP price and then shut down when they get caught only to pop up next week under a different name.
Third party sales channels represent a HUGE portion of the market, you can't afford to ignore them as a reseller. Often your only advantage in a third party channel is the quality of your data and images. Your company name is never allowed to feature prominently, and if you think good customer service will convince somebody to pay 20% more for your product than the guy who's breaking MAP policy you are kidding yourself. Good customer feedback is the minimum bar for selling successfully through third party channels, not a differentiator. In many marketplaces, sellers who have bad feedback will simply set up a new account and start over, seeding themselves with good feedback from day one.
What all this adds up to is a lose/lose for honest companies that play by the rules, make no mistake, protecting the images that you've invested capital in to create is very important.
While that all sounds perfectly fine and reasonable, the fact is that you can basically s/ecommerce/music/ and your post would be right at home in a thread about sleazy DRM tactics by RIAA members.
That is a completely specious argument and I think you know it.
A: We are not talking about a product here. We aren't selling an image to somebody, then slapping a watermark on it. We are creating material, at our own expense that we are using to advertise a product. Do you think that Coke should be allowed to use Pepsi's marketing as their own, or is not allowing that some sort of draconian DRM tactic too?
B: We aren't actually talking about consumers here at all - the issue is the inability to control how other companies use the materials you've created, and hold the rights to.
Talk about specious arguments! Where did I ever say that other companies should be allowed to use your images? Please remember that DRM is completely unrelated to legal permission to violate someone's copyright. Confusing the two is a favorite tactic of RIAA-type people, though, so your post just makes the parallel all the stronger.
I'm not sure why you are conflating a watermark with DRM in the first place, or how you could possibly think this has anything to do with 'RIAA-type people'.
I'm honestly not sure what to even say to you because you aren't making any sense.
Watermarks are definitely DRM in my book. A technological measure used to prevent or at least discourage copyright infringement. It's the same basic idea as e.g. the coded anti-piracy dots you see in movie theaters.
My point is quite simple: the arguments being made defending watermarks are the exact same arguments people make to defend DRM on movies and music. That doesn't mean they're wrong, of course.
Ah, I think I understand your position on this, thank you for explaining. Even if the arguments sound the same, they are valid (or not), for very different reasons, because the situations are very different.
No one is forcing you to pay for ads on Google Shopping so you're free to do whatever, but why would you invest a ton of money into quality photography and then cover it up with a watermark?
If you're selling exactly what everyone else is selling the competitive point is customer service and price--I'd worry much more about that than someone copying your image. Such stores generally use the manufacturer's images anyways.
> No one is forcing you to pay for ads on Google Shopping so you're free to do whatever
Did I say otherwise?
> why would you invest a ton of money into quality photography and then cover it up with a watermark?
To make sure that this quality photography stays as a competitive asset or if used by others, turns into advertising for my store.
> If you're selling exactly what everyone else is selling the competitive point is customer service and price
When you're selling something online, photography is most certainly a differentiator. It is also a substantial barrier to entry for the competition, because quality photography is difficult and expensive.
> Such stores generally use the manufacturer's images anyways.
Manufacturer images, when they exist, are almost always terrible. Having good photos to clearly show off the product and everything included is the difference between a buyer clicking BUY and having them wander off.
Use a digital watermark. You lose the advertising edge if competitors use it but you can prove that the copyright belongs to you and force them to take it down.
Getting them to take it down is more trouble than it's worth, even if it works. You'll be playing whack-a-mole all day long. Ideally you want them not to use it in the first place, and a visible watermark accomplishes that.
No-one's forcing them to pay for ads on Google Shopping, it's just the only way to show up above the fold on Google searches for the products you're selling, which happens to be one of the main ways potential customers will look for sellers. (Google's the best-known search engine and set as the default almost everywhere, in large part based on their reputation from back when they actually tried to provide the best results rather than the most profitable ones.)
> why would you invest a ton of money into quality photography and then cover it up with a watermark
I can't speak to Google Shopping, but Amazon requires a high-quality image before you can list a product. So if you spend money on the shot you don't want others stealing it. EXIF data and other non-watermark solutions are easily removed.
This is pie in the sky thinking. The realities of the marketplace right now just don't match up with what you are saying. Often, your product image is one of the key factors in your conversion rate when your products are in third party marketplaces, and it's also not tenable to simply ignore a huge sales channel such as Google shopping.
Nope, you're covered by copyright laws there. You give Google an (implicit) license to use your photos, but not your competitors and you can send your lawyer after them.
You're "investing a ton of money" into getting a high quality image, only to then turn around and slap a watermark on it, which more than likely has now downgraded the quality of the image.
To fully deter your competitors from using it, you have to place the watermark in the center of the image/over the product so that they can't easily crop it out.
Now from the potential customers perspective they want to look at those quality images you took and visualize having that product, however now they have to look past/around your watermark which kind of puts a downer in their customer experience.
TLDR: So you've spent tons of money on photos to slap a watermark on top of them and hinder customer experience?
As a person who has purchased things, I couldn't care less if there were a (mostly transparent) watermark on the picture of the thing, and I appreciate high quality photographs.
It is only recently a paid service. It started as part of the organic search results. The fact that it is now pay-to-place is shady because your average consumer still thinks what they see is organic when it is not.
I think the reasoning would be that by putting your URL in the image, you are potentially encouraging people to enter it manually instead of clicking Google Shopping's link to the product.
It doesn't have to be most people, with the traffic levels that Google probably deal with, even a small percentage doing that could add up to a lot of 'lost' click revenue.
Seems perfectly reasonable, if you want to supply an image for a product via a shop feed it should reflect the product and not be an advertisement for the shop.
They don't seem to prohibit non-promotional (invisible) watermarks if the concern is image theft.
Because it looks like Google is using one merchant's carefully photographed image of a product for all the merchants selling that product. This seems a bit unfair.
They should probably compensate the merchant who's photos they use with adwords or shopping credit for each photo that they use. Otherwise it seems too scummy.
I was curious what size these images are being displayed within Google Shopping, so I checked it out. They're displayed at a standard thumbnail size during search and a larger size in the detail view. At thumbnail size, the watermark is barely noticeable. At the larger size, it's clearly there but isn't gaudy or anything.
I understand the merchant's motivation for putting it there -- they don't want their images stolen and reused without attribution (although I wouldn't imagine there are a ton of people out there trying to steal images of CPAP masks).
I don't really understand Google's motivation for banning such watermarks. So long as they're not the type of full-image watermarks that cover the entire product and make it difficult to tell what you're looking at, I don't think they significantly degrade the user experience.
I guess what I'm saying is: Not all watermarks are created equal. The kind that make for a bad user experience should rightfully be banned ... but this is just a tiny credit line in the bottom right corner and isn't really covering up the image.
I was working on Google Shopping.
Lots of images are checked by a combination of machine learning and humans (still, errors happen, as it's lots of data to deal with).
The main problem with the watermarking is that the images can be shown in product listings where an image like this wouldn't look nice and also the image can be used for a product that is sold by multiple merchants.
So in short Google wants to use merchant's product images, which they've worked to produce or paid for as generic product images without compensation and if merchants don't like it their account is banned.
And that's why I'll be cheering the EU regulators that will sue Google into the ground should their shoppy-thingy ever gain the marketshare of Amazon or Google search.
No. They would be sued for forcing merchants to let Google and others use their copyrighted material using the threat of banning them from the store. But that is only relevant if they are one of the dominant players.
The reasoning is that they would then be using their market dominance to force merchants to forego their (IP) rights, which is in conflict with EU anti-trust regulations.
This. Search for a product in google shopping and multiple merchants will be clustered around one product image that is chosen from 1 of the merchants. That's the main reason, but it also avoids the ugliness of an ebay search where seemingly every other merchant has bright/bold text claiming free gifts or other such offers.
>the image can be used for a product that is sold by multiple merchants.
This is the issue. There's no incentive for me to invest a huge amount of capital to create good product images if I'm forced to basically give them away to my competitors.
The end result for Google shopping will be lower image quality because you've created a disincentive for us to create better looking images.
The real reason may be that Google wants to use the images itself. It sure would make things easy if they could force their merchants to provide definitive and reusable images for all products ever, particularly to compete with Amazon.
I would prefer my images not have watermarks, but I'd also prefer the best images. This seems counter to that goal. I know some merchants like Newegg invest money into having their own photos done and it is very valuable for making it clear what connector components have and the like, but this makes it not quite so valuable to them since others could pretty easily reuse the images without being caught and without quality loss of watermark removal.
If I understand this correctly, I type something like "hard drive" and then see a box to the right with a "Shop for hard drive on Google". The box has pictures and prices. Clicking on that link brings up rows of products. Each row has a picture, product name, and text saying something like "$59.99 from 25+ stores".
It looks to me like Google is going to use one of the merchants images of the products to summarize those 25+ stores in a row. If the image Google picks is watermarked then it is bad for Google.
So, instead of Google getting an image of each product themselves, they get the merchant to provide them with a generic image to sell everyone's products. I guess if you use Google's service, you should provide them with the generic image they want and save the good image with measurements and such for your website.
This seems to be another algorithmic solution for Google.
Not really. You give them a license to use your image by using their service. That's not a violation if you voluntarily license the image to them per the terms of service. If you're not happy with this, go elsewhere with your images and your products.
Given them a license is necessary so they can display the images, but Google using the license to help sell competitor's products because Google does not want the burden of procuring their own photographs is pretty scummy.
Let let me explain why one might watermark their photos. I sell aftermarket car parts for JDM vehicles. Most of these products don't have images from the manufacturer. Why? Well there lots of reasons but it boils down to different configurations. It would be too time consuming to take an image of every product in every configuration for every model they sell. So they may have a generic picture of an exhaust system, that may or may not be the product you're paying for.
I know that consumers like to see what they buy. I want to have pictures of every image I sell. To do that, I need to order 1 of everything I plan to sell so I can take photos of each item. As you can see it gets pretty costly. I'm spending time, money and effort, to give the best possible shopping experience. All while letting the customer know I have a product in my hands that my competitors don't.
My competitors on the other hand. They just signed up for a new drop shipping account with the same distributor but guess what? They have no images of the items they sell and have no capital to order the item in. So where do they get those images? You guessed it, from everyone else.
When I first started I remember giving discounts to customers who would allow me to open their package and take showcase photos before sending them. I would be upset if someone used my photos without my permission. I don't have time or money to police the internet. So I protect my investment through the use of the water mark. If not, it'd be like Ebay where you see 40 different sellers using the same exact product image, atrocious.
Thanks for the interesting perspective.
This doesn't help you since you already have a catalog of photos, but I wonder if you might get around this rule if you took pictures of <part> on a backdrop with your logo repeated.
That way, sure, I could try to crop it to get rid of your logo, but if it's an irregular shape I'd have to Photoshop your stuff out. Or maybe a sticker with your logo on an unimportant part of the product.
That does restrain them a bit though - with a watermark, they can batch-change the nature or obtrusiveness of the watermark, they can resell the unmarked images, they can update their logo freely.
None of that can be done with the real-world-logo appearing on the product.
It might be possible to use a greenscreen, though.
You do your photoshoot with a greenscreen in the background/part of the background, then digitally replace the grenscreen with your logo. Since your logo and the product are mixed at the edge pixels, it will look crappy if cropped, whereas you yourself have the greenscreen originals and can change the background whenever and however you like.
If you wanted to be really super-fancy you could apply some image recognition decals to the greenscreen that would allow a program to determine the orientation of the platform below or background behind the object. Then you can actually do a more sophisticated projection of your logo onto the surface and keep the shadows provided by your subject. But at this point it's gotten a little sophisticated for a small seller.
Funny how we destroy file-formats and screw up the very HTML standard itself and muck up YouTube all to protect video and audio content, but nobody gives a crap about images and we're left with a Wild West. Look how many above-board publicly-run sites are based on the trading of copyrighted image content. Ask a webcomic author what they think of Funnyjunk and the like.
I don't know what the right solution is, but it seems absurd that one form of copyrighted content lives completely without protection because that's the content that's created by small businesses instead of global megacoporations.
That said, Google probably could at least protect your image content from being filched by other users within the Google platform if you could "register" your image with them as the original - they have image-matching algorithms to enforce that.
I don't care about Google fun bucks (Tm) or whatever reward they feel is fair for forcing me to not protect my images. I should be able to protect the images I created.
Could you send the FTC after competing "merchants" who are advertising products they not only don't have in stock but have literally never seen? It sounds like a scam, and I wouldn't knowingly give money to an outfit like that.
> Could you send the FTC after competing "merchants" who are advertising products they not only don't have in stock but have literally never seen? It sounds like a scam, and I wouldn't knowingly give money to an outfit like that.
I hate to break it to you, but a HUGE amount of e-commerce sites are nothing more than front-ends to drop-shipping accounts with suppliers. This is the dominant pattern in the industry. Actually holding your own inventory is a rarity that would put you at a major competitive disadvantage.
Unless you're dealing with a very large, well-capitalized site, or a company that makes their own product, you're almost certainly dealing with this kind of store.
The inverse holds true here as well. Manufacturers are constantly battling with unauthorized & shady retailers to maintain the integrity of the images - as well as with the 2 major platforms that own eCommerce and online product advertising. This is seriously some anti-competitive action, on the whole. See the Amazon model where they monitor the products and retailers on the platform, identify the best sellers and then set their systems to always be the cheapest and always win on integrated services. Eventually no one can compete and only AMZN shareholders will win in the long run.
Just curious are you watermarking to specifically deter unauthorized use of the image?
I ask because I could see how you could use steganography to hide copyright information or simply add the watermark in such a manner that you would only be able to detect/reveal it by a specific method of color alterations. That way you would still have a case if you needed to take legal action.
edit: I just realized that will probably never be answered so does anyone else feel like giving some perspective?
Photographs have a copyright automatically attached to them when created. You could use a copyright enforcement action against your competitors. Look at the DMCA.
We got hit with the same issue just a month ago, and were actually completely kicked out of the Shopping Feeds. We were finally able to talk to the right person at Google and get reactivated for a two week extension to give us a little more time to become compliant...at which point we then just removed all but the newly unwatermarked images from the feed and for the past 4 weeks have been doing nothing but recreating non-watermarked images for all of our products and slowly building up our feed again.
I understand all the arguments...but when you're a company who IS trying to protect hard work in shooting great high def images in-house, it is very personal.
Everything Google does benefits big brands. This hurts small business and that has obviously been their goal since their CEO said the Internet is a "cesspool" and favoring big brands is how we're going to clean it up.
Google has a virtual monopoly on paid and organic search. Nothing converts as well as search. They are severely damaging small businesses right and left. It takes dozens of other sources of customers to replace Google.
Allowing Google to take over the Internet as we know it and turn it into their own personal business is dangerous and unethical. That is why since commerce began we have been warned about the dangers of monopolies. They became a monopoly through the media - both owned by the wealthy elite. The media chooses the winners from the products they built in the first place.
If you use Google Shopping to display your products I encourage you to log out of Google and go see what they actually display. You are likely to find that your products never show up for the money keyword phrases even when you specify you only want to see the products in your store. But search on something general and you'll confirm all your products are in their feed. That is an even larger issue than watermarks. Both are symptoms of Google being far too powerful. I first wrote about that in http://growmap.com/farmer-update-google-competitors/
Each major "Borg" site first hands small business a way to make money more easily and then starts taking it away. That is how AdWords worked, and now organic, Google Shopping, Facebook, etc. Expect it with Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat - any entity that is "Borg".
Users handed Google all this power and they can take it away, but first businesses and bloggers must offer them alternatives and make it clear why we need to use something else.
I know that sounds unlikely, but the tide does eventually turn. Wal-mart killed small towns across America - but they are making a comeback now that people realize what it cost them to be obsessed with cheap. We can do the same online, but it won't happen overnight.
'"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."'
Notice the absence of the word "big". His statement isn't wrong.
In this new world that worships advertising lingo, Wikipedia is a brand. Archive.org is a brand. Slashdot, HN, iFixit, LWN are all brands. I understand that this is a disgusting thing to say, but do you disagree with the substance of the statement?
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadIs the reply-address one of those "smart" robots or can a real human be reached there?
In business a photo can often make the difference between a sale or no sale, or more important, which shop the sale goes to. Some businesses, like fashion, are almost entirely "photo" based. Others, like food, cars, etc. rely on it extensively.
Here's an example in which, for arguments sake, we state that all non-photo factors are equal and the best they can be.
Your business spends $100,000 a year to have top quality photos taken for the products you sell and you find the photos lead to a five to ten fold improvement in sales vs. stock or no photos. Now say all your competitors just steal your images and use them for their sites. Your sales drop back to where they were and your advantage is gone. And now you've got to make up the $100,000 to top it all off.
Having a watermark won't stop lesser competitors from sealing your image, but other "on par" competitors will likely not due to potential litigation. If you don't have a watermark everyone steals it with the line, "I didn't know it was something I couldn't use ... my web guys just found it on the internet. I'll talk with them." (or whatever) So now you have to constantly police the internet for competitors using your images, deal with take-downs, and lawyers.
Hope I've cleared things up a bit.
It's a pretty easy equation--do you make enough money through Google Shopping that it makes up for any potential losses from others stealing your image (which you can of course still go after legally)?
Not happy with NSA collecting dragnet surveillance on you? It's a pretty easy equation. Renounce your citizenship.
Neighbor making too much noise at night? It's a pretty easy equation. Move out (or kill them?)
Why can't someone that's party to a relationship make a complaint about an aspect of that relationship?
In other words, a cry for Google to change the policy to minimize the problem rather than just abandoning Google Shopping.
The answer isn't to stop using Google Shopping, and the answer isn't to 'put up or shut up'. I would hope that someone at Google Shopping might be able to figure out a resolution with OP that is the best for everyone involved - i.e. doesn't break google's TOS, and doesn't leave OP paying to produce high-quality photos that his competition will steal.
If we publish our home brewed content without watermarks and it is lifted off google and used to compete against us, we have no effective recourse.
Detail:
In our company, one advancement track is from Customer Service to Products. It seems like a good and obvious thing to do, but typically photos and product materials in our space are produced by teams without direct experience helping customers make CPAP equipment work for them. We often find that the stock images and materials available to us are ineffective for internet customers, as they are often designed to target physicians and the owners of traditional brick and mortar CPAP retailers.
We have spent a lot of time and effort to do better. I believe we have. Our product presentations are end CPAP user driven and focused. We view both the images produced and the knowledge that produced them as an earned competitive advantage.
We've had instances where we woke up to find anothercpapco.com copying our product catalog verbatim. I think software patents slow innovation and that the DRM situation in the music industry is bad. Yet, I made the decision to water mark our images in order to prove them stolen.
Sure you do. Compete back. Preferably on price and quality of your product rather than the prettiness of your pictures.
Anyone can take a picture of a CPAP machine. Yours aren't special, and if that's what's harming your business, you're doing something wrong. Probably a lot of things.
Anyone can take a picture of a CPAP machine but not every can do so after 5 years experience serving customers using them. What angles do they want to see, what zoom shots make things most clear, how do those zooms relate to the specific features and usage of that machine/mask/product.
CPAP is unfamiliar and visuals are the guide. It is important to do it right and hard to do it right. I think they are special as are the people who made them.
Decent photography has a real-world cost attached to it. Why should the fact that anyone else can do it be a reason I give it away for free, with no attribution?
Presumably there was a cost to figuring out the angles and zooms that showed these machines in the most informative way. Do you think that particular, informed camera setup should be patented?
If not, why should the particular photographs be copyrighted or otherwise excluded from use? Presumably when setting up your business (or the OP's), they looked to other more successful businesses as an example to follow. Should those other businesses be compensated for contributing to the OP's success?
What makes one idea, or expression of an idea, exclusive, private property, while other, often more valuable ideas, are free for the taking?
Sounds to me like the OP is trying to suppress competition through rent seeking, rather than competing on an even playing field by providing more value to the customer.
This is a sensible rule too--if everyone had watermarks the pages would be hideous.
So as a merchant, I have to invest a ton of money into getting quality photography of my products ... only to have my competitors use those same images for free?
The basic stance would be "that's Google's policy, deal with it", and I undestand it. At the same time, there are so many product with really awful images (for a coat, there would be no view of the inner fabric for instance). If a merchant would take the time to take relevant pictures of the right functionnalities of a product, I'd also understand wanting clients to know they're the one who cared about it. With google shopping's system, the product maker has the burden of providing decent images of it's product, or no one will care to make something better.
They usually don't. To be more specific, their photos always suck.
When you're buying something online, photos do make the difference and having good photos is what makes people click on BUY.
You'd see some really cheap goods but the image doesn't give any information about why it would be so, what trade-offs you're making. A shop can show these details and let people buy a better product if they feel like it, or buy the product without feeling betrayed at delivery.
Should every small shop care about product images ? of course no. Most of then should be OK with maker provided images. Would I value a shop showing even crappy but real images of the products ? Oh yes !
UI/UX aside - it and Amazon are the largest online sources for product promotion, information and purchasing (when Google finally launches their marketplace). Google Shopping is heavily used.
Third party sales channels represent a HUGE portion of the market, you can't afford to ignore them as a reseller. Often your only advantage in a third party channel is the quality of your data and images. Your company name is never allowed to feature prominently, and if you think good customer service will convince somebody to pay 20% more for your product than the guy who's breaking MAP policy you are kidding yourself. Good customer feedback is the minimum bar for selling successfully through third party channels, not a differentiator. In many marketplaces, sellers who have bad feedback will simply set up a new account and start over, seeding themselves with good feedback from day one.
What all this adds up to is a lose/lose for honest companies that play by the rules, make no mistake, protecting the images that you've invested capital in to create is very important.
A: We are not talking about a product here. We aren't selling an image to somebody, then slapping a watermark on it. We are creating material, at our own expense that we are using to advertise a product. Do you think that Coke should be allowed to use Pepsi's marketing as their own, or is not allowing that some sort of draconian DRM tactic too?
B: We aren't actually talking about consumers here at all - the issue is the inability to control how other companies use the materials you've created, and hold the rights to.
I'm honestly not sure what to even say to you because you aren't making any sense.
My point is quite simple: the arguments being made defending watermarks are the exact same arguments people make to defend DRM on movies and music. That doesn't mean they're wrong, of course.
If you're selling exactly what everyone else is selling the competitive point is customer service and price--I'd worry much more about that than someone copying your image. Such stores generally use the manufacturer's images anyways.
Did I say otherwise?
> why would you invest a ton of money into quality photography and then cover it up with a watermark?
To make sure that this quality photography stays as a competitive asset or if used by others, turns into advertising for my store.
> If you're selling exactly what everyone else is selling the competitive point is customer service and price
When you're selling something online, photography is most certainly a differentiator. It is also a substantial barrier to entry for the competition, because quality photography is difficult and expensive.
> Such stores generally use the manufacturer's images anyways.
Manufacturer images, when they exist, are almost always terrible. Having good photos to clearly show off the product and everything included is the difference between a buyer clicking BUY and having them wander off.
As opposed to those analog watermarks that we've all be hand-applying to our JPEGs? :)
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking
http://images.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=watermarked+image...
Regardless, you seem to have missed the gentle humour in my original post.
I can't speak to Google Shopping, but Amazon requires a high-quality image before you can list a product. So if you spend money on the shot you don't want others stealing it. EXIF data and other non-watermark solutions are easily removed.
To fully deter your competitors from using it, you have to place the watermark in the center of the image/over the product so that they can't easily crop it out.
Now from the potential customers perspective they want to look at those quality images you took and visualize having that product, however now they have to look past/around your watermark which kind of puts a downer in their customer experience.
TLDR: So you've spent tons of money on photos to slap a watermark on top of them and hinder customer experience?
They don't seem to prohibit non-promotional (invisible) watermarks if the concern is image theft.
Granted, you can catch them if that is your intention, but it more effort for less gain.
I don't understand the reason for this policy.
I understand the merchant's motivation for putting it there -- they don't want their images stolen and reused without attribution (although I wouldn't imagine there are a ton of people out there trying to steal images of CPAP masks).
I don't really understand Google's motivation for banning such watermarks. So long as they're not the type of full-image watermarks that cover the entire product and make it difficult to tell what you're looking at, I don't think they significantly degrade the user experience.
I guess what I'm saying is: Not all watermarks are created equal. The kind that make for a bad user experience should rightfully be banned ... but this is just a tiny credit line in the bottom right corner and isn't really covering up the image.
They want to use the images for other purposes. Shopping merchants are just there to create content for Google's various venues.
The main problem with the watermarking is that the images can be shown in product listings where an image like this wouldn't look nice and also the image can be used for a product that is sold by multiple merchants.
The reasoning is that they would then be using their market dominance to force merchants to forego their (IP) rights, which is in conflict with EU anti-trust regulations.
Clearly the merchant must be getting something out of the arrangement, or else they wouldn't be concerned about Google walking away from it.
This is the issue. There's no incentive for me to invest a huge amount of capital to create good product images if I'm forced to basically give them away to my competitors.
The end result for Google shopping will be lower image quality because you've created a disincentive for us to create better looking images.
If it does it's a better solution than using a metadata watermark.
http://www.cpap.com/productpage/probasics-zzz-mask-sg-full-f...
It looks to me like Google is going to use one of the merchants images of the products to summarize those 25+ stores in a row. If the image Google picks is watermarked then it is bad for Google.
So, instead of Google getting an image of each product themselves, they get the merchant to provide them with a generic image to sell everyone's products. I guess if you use Google's service, you should provide them with the generic image they want and save the good image with measurements and such for your website.
This seems to be another algorithmic solution for Google.
I know that consumers like to see what they buy. I want to have pictures of every image I sell. To do that, I need to order 1 of everything I plan to sell so I can take photos of each item. As you can see it gets pretty costly. I'm spending time, money and effort, to give the best possible shopping experience. All while letting the customer know I have a product in my hands that my competitors don't.
My competitors on the other hand. They just signed up for a new drop shipping account with the same distributor but guess what? They have no images of the items they sell and have no capital to order the item in. So where do they get those images? You guessed it, from everyone else.
When I first started I remember giving discounts to customers who would allow me to open their package and take showcase photos before sending them. I would be upset if someone used my photos without my permission. I don't have time or money to police the internet. So I protect my investment through the use of the water mark. If not, it'd be like Ebay where you see 40 different sellers using the same exact product image, atrocious.
None of that can be done with the real-world-logo appearing on the product.
You do your photoshoot with a greenscreen in the background/part of the background, then digitally replace the grenscreen with your logo. Since your logo and the product are mixed at the edge pixels, it will look crappy if cropped, whereas you yourself have the greenscreen originals and can change the background whenever and however you like.
I don't know what the right solution is, but it seems absurd that one form of copyrighted content lives completely without protection because that's the content that's created by small businesses instead of global megacoporations.
That said, Google probably could at least protect your image content from being filched by other users within the Google platform if you could "register" your image with them as the original - they have image-matching algorithms to enforce that.
I hate to break it to you, but a HUGE amount of e-commerce sites are nothing more than front-ends to drop-shipping accounts with suppliers. This is the dominant pattern in the industry. Actually holding your own inventory is a rarity that would put you at a major competitive disadvantage.
Unless you're dealing with a very large, well-capitalized site, or a company that makes their own product, you're almost certainly dealing with this kind of store.
I ask because I could see how you could use steganography to hide copyright information or simply add the watermark in such a manner that you would only be able to detect/reveal it by a specific method of color alterations. That way you would still have a case if you needed to take legal action.
edit: I just realized that will probably never be answered so does anyone else feel like giving some perspective?
http://www.psdbox.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/4-blue-chan...
I understand all the arguments...but when you're a company who IS trying to protect hard work in shooting great high def images in-house, it is very personal.
Seems reasonable.
Google has a virtual monopoly on paid and organic search. Nothing converts as well as search. They are severely damaging small businesses right and left. It takes dozens of other sources of customers to replace Google.
Allowing Google to take over the Internet as we know it and turn it into their own personal business is dangerous and unethical. That is why since commerce began we have been warned about the dangers of monopolies. They became a monopoly through the media - both owned by the wealthy elite. The media chooses the winners from the products they built in the first place.
If you use Google Shopping to display your products I encourage you to log out of Google and go see what they actually display. You are likely to find that your products never show up for the money keyword phrases even when you specify you only want to see the products in your store. But search on something general and you'll confirm all your products are in their feed. That is an even larger issue than watermarks. Both are symptoms of Google being far too powerful. I first wrote about that in http://growmap.com/farmer-update-google-competitors/
Each major "Borg" site first hands small business a way to make money more easily and then starts taking it away. That is how AdWords worked, and now organic, Google Shopping, Facebook, etc. Expect it with Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat - any entity that is "Borg".
Users handed Google all this power and they can take it away, but first businesses and bloggers must offer them alternatives and make it clear why we need to use something else.
I know that sounds unlikely, but the tide does eventually turn. Wal-mart killed small towns across America - but they are making a comeback now that people realize what it cost them to be obsessed with cheap. We can do the same online, but it won't happen overnight.
When did he say this? Can you provide a citation?
The quote is:
'"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."'
Notice the absence of the word "big". His statement isn't wrong.
In this new world that worships advertising lingo, Wikipedia is a brand. Archive.org is a brand. Slashdot, HN, iFixit, LWN are all brands. I understand that this is a disgusting thing to say, but do you disagree with the substance of the statement?
Sorry about that.
Fuck Google.