The Iferia Techcast
00:14:52 · Gary Pageau
[00:14:52] S1: Well, there's a couple of things that are happening in terms of artificial intelligence. Now, again, the industry has already been through this once in the sense that there was a time when you took a picture, that was it, Right? You saw the picture, and that was the picture. And then in the eighties and nineties, Adobe Photoshop came out. And that was when pictures could be edited as easily as text, basically. So the idea... There was a lot of... People don't remember this. There was a lot of pushback back then. The news organizations were saying things like, oh my gosh, this is terrible because no one will be able to understand what a picture is. No one will believe pictures because they're going to be edited and all this other stuff, which is the same conversation we're having now with AI. And guess what? People adapt it. And, you know, people have been faking pictures and editing pictures and doing all these kind of things for years, and that behavior is not going to change. So what's happening in the world of AI and imaging is it's kind of splitting it off into two areas. There's AI generative AI, which means I write a prompt of some sort and I create an image. Right? It didn't exist previously. And it's, Maybe it's me as a knight on shining armor and I've got a sword. Now that image doesn't exist anywhere, but I can create it using a system. That's entertainment, right? That's not a memory. That's not authentic is the word we'd like to use. So it's not... If there's a place for it, there's absolutely a place for entertainment, but it's generally things that where people don't want hold on to that image. They may share it on social media. They may do wacky TikTok things and things like that, but it's not generally something that's important to people. It's not emotional. There's no emotional resonance. On the other hand, there's been a whole kind of swing back towards real photography, print photography, whatever you want to call it. Gen Z and the kids, air quotes, are very involved in photography. Film, which we all thought was gonna be dead by now, has now come back. Kodak is now making a lot of... They're now back producing film six days a week, eighteen hours a day, and which you know, five years ago, they were ready to shut shut it down. There's no one...
00:17:27 · Gary Pageau
And because what's happened is people have discovered that film photography is a more real expression, authentic experience. It can't be faked. So this whole swing towards authenticity is kind of where my segment of the industry is going, which is like, you know, it's not a real memory, a real story if you're not preserving it in a physical form in some way. And I think that trend's going to continue because people are having a backlash to some of this AI stuff, right? So you've seen in the music industry, there's AI music on Spotify. People don't like that. They may listen to it because it's there, but they're not thrilled with it. Artists have had to make money on tour. Taylor Swift made a ton of money on tour. She also makes a lot of money actually making physical LPs. She's gone back to pressing albums, which a lot of artists are doing. It's like, you're not a legitimate artist now if you aren't physically making long play records that are sold back in record stores. That's coming back. People are now going back and buying DVDs of movies because they don't want to deal with streaming services anymore. And, you know, is it gonna be as big of a market as it was? Absolutely not. Is it going to be, you know... But it's gonna be enough of a market where people are gonna be able to wanna engage in it because I think, you know, as more AI content is generated, people want real authentic alternatives, if that makes sense. So, you know, I think people are looking for opportunities to have, you know, real connection, and photography and printing is certainly one of those things. It could also mean you're in a... You know, you'll go to a concert and support an artist that way through a live performance. It may be instead of seeing a movie where three quarters of it is CGI and AI generated stuff, you may go see a play or a theater performance right, to get that sort of real experience. So I do think there's gonna be a resurgence in that. And again, will it be as big as it ever was back in the day? Probably not, but it's certainly gonna be... It's not gonna disappear completely and entirely.
00:19:53 · Ezekiel Iferia
[00:19:53] S0: So, Gary, you know, you... Let let... Let's talk about the Dead Pixels Society. You you you you you build this, you know, you build this leading niche community, you know, in the imaging space. Right. So what exactly is the Dead Pixels Society? And, you know, why did you focus on such a specific community?
00:20:17 · Gary Pageau
[00:20:17] S1: Well, I focused on it because I knew it. I mean, that was literally what I already... I mean, I knew the market was there because I had spent twenty five years in the industry. So it started as a joke. So the name comes from around 2009, there was a conference that we, as our industry organization, had, or it's sort of like a TED Talks kind of thing. Was like an executive conference. And one of the speakers who was one of our drinking buddies got up there and he was from one of the software companies, and he was talking about how there's images that are on a screen that are live pixels, and then there's pixels that are printed that are dead pixels. And he was trying to talk about how there's a different relationship to the viewer between what's on a screen versus what's printed. But 80% of the people in the audience made their living printing pictures. And so they took it as not as an offense, but they kind of gave them a hard time about it. So as a joke at the next conference, we came up with Dead Pixels Society pins, which were basically, you know, a pixelated skull and all that other stuff. And it was basically... And so it sort of became like a club sort of idea. It's sort of the idea that you only got this lapel pin if you were at this conference, and so we had this sort of little clubby sort of thing. Then when I left the organization in 2012, I kind of took that idea with me and started this Facebook group for my friends in the industry, basically. And then, like I said, one of my buddies after a few years said, You know what? You should turn this into a newsletter. I'll sponsor it. And I said, okay. It's now I like money. I know how to make newsletters. I can... I'll do that. And I really chose the niche because what happened was after the industry association went out of business, the Photo Marketing Association, the the universe kind of broke up. The photo imaging universe kind of broke up in the sense that, there were a lot of different segments in the industry. There was, like, the the the online photo people, and the camera stores, and the retail printers, and the retailers, the matched merchandisers, and all these people were all separate, but our organization was the glue that held them together because we were all kind of in the same business of providing imaging services to consumers.
00:22:39 · Gary Pageau
And when PMA went away, that all went away. So everyone kind of went back to their corners. So I came up with the idea, if to I have a newsletter that addressed that marketplace, I would look at it from the standpoint of how do I cover all of those areas and connect them back together. And that's what I've been doing. So really the idea is that, yes, I'll cover your segment, but if you read my newsletter and you're a camera store, there may be one or two items that apply to you, but that's okay. It's really designed to be skimmed and really designed to be kind of a top line read of what's going on so you're fully informed. Again, it was designed as a very niche product. When I first started it, I figured there's about maybe 500 subscribers, maybe, because it's a free one. And I'm three times that on one platform and almost double that on Substack. So I've obviously exceeded my expectations there. And remember, these are companies, not people. So the idea there is, you know, it doesn't sound like a lot of numbers, but then you realize, you know, some of those readers are responsible for companies that are making tens of millions of dollars, right, in terms of revenue. So it's really about the quality of the audience as opposed to just going after numbers. I just want to reach X number of people, and I've got to have 10,000, I've got to have 15,000. It's not a numbers game, it's a quality of audience game. So when I talk to people about sponsoring my newsletter, I always say, you know, they go, Yeah, they always say things like, Yeah, I know everyone reads it because all the leaders of the industry read it. And I know from my email provider that I give a 40% open rate. So as a result of that, I know I have a highly engaged audience that likes what I do, and I could just double down on it. I just try and over service them. That's really the key to any of... Anything like this is, you know, not just putting out stuff because it's trendy or topical. Right? There's a lot of things that I don't cover. I get pissed a lot. Right? I'm on all the services, all the directories, so I get a lot of press releases that are just like, you know, you know, they just... If it's AI, I probably get the press release versus camera. So part of my job is to filter that stuff out and just know what my audience wants and deliver that because I'm saving them time. They don't have...
00:25:05 · Gary Pageau
You know, I don't expect people to do my job and read everything. That's my that's my job. My job is to distill it, condense it, edit it, and give it down to, you know, what what I think they need. And that just comes from years of experience. I mean, that's literally. And then what happened for the podcast was during COVID, I was really concerned about, you know, me losing sponsors because everyone was concerned about that. Right? There was a pandemic. Who knows who's gonna be in business anymore? And so I said, I need to do twice as much content. So I started the podcast, and that's been great. I don't monetize that specifically. It's more of a... But it it get... It create... It's an... Another engine for content. I... I'll get CEOs of rather sizable companies who will wanna be interviewed for a podcast. It's it's it's it's kind of an ego thing, and it's it's great for me, content wise, when I can get the CEO of one of the leaders of one of the companies to want to sit down and talk for twenty minutes, and people will listen to it. We're coming up on our fifty thousandth download. So, I mean, again, not huge numbers, but it's the right numbers. And then we then branched out two or three years ago into in person events. So we do, again, do a very, very small conference of about 50, 60 people who just trade ideas and things like that, and it's never gonna be big. It's... I've told the people, I've said I'm gonna cap it at a certain number, and the whole point is that it's not a big event. But it's it's again an event that people wanna go to because it's not it's not like a trade show where there's booze you gotta visit and you're pressed for time. This is you've got time to talk to people and interact. And if anyone's looking at approaching a community like that, you know, number one, make sure it's big... The business is big enough that, you know, there's enough sponsors there who wanna sponsor it. Right? And two, make sure that you can provide content that's gonna engage the readers, that they're gonna become extremely loyal to you. And, you know, once you have that, you can you can build a revenue stream from it.