Model Mayhem restructures membership levels and limits Basic accounts
Mar 16, 2017
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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Model Mayhem, favorite among many creatives, has recently redefined its membership structure. Starting from this month, they have limited many perks they used to offer with the free account. This, in a way, forces you to pay for membership, at least if you want to reach more people and find more work.
While this move is promoted as an “improvement,” it’s not how photographers and models see it. Negative feedback comes from all over the place, and many photographers are reevaluating their decision to use this website further.
Before the restructuring, Model Mayhem was mostly free and open social network for photographers, models, make-up artists, wardrobe stylists and other creatives to connect and cooperate. For example, one of the changes they’ve implemented to the free account is entirely canceling the messages you can send out of your network. Before this, you were able to send five messages to people out of your friends’ list. This new limitation means that you either need to subscribe for Premium or VIP membership, or send a friend request, wait for the response, and then send the message.
On the other hand, it affects paying members, too. They can send the messages, but they can’t receive messages from free members any longer before they befriend them on MM. Also, artists can’t exchange experiences and get references about models or photographers. All this raises another issue – security. I suppose you don’t want to add everyone as friends simply in order to exchange messages.
As for the prices, Premium account costs $6 a month, and VIP comes with a price of $10 a month. Now, it’s not that this is too expensive and unaffordable. But if you used to have something for free and now you have to pay to get it – why would you do it?
Personally, I find things like this very annoying. I’ve seen it in tons of apps and websites I’m using, and it’s always getting on my nerves. Of course, sometimes you get all you need with free accounts, only in smaller amounts. But changes Model Mayhem made are limiting, and they basically force you to pay if you want to benefit from having the account.
I’ve heard many photographers rant about the change and trying to find alternatives to Model Mayhem. Frankly, I can understand them. What about you guys? Do you still plan to use MM with the free account, will you be upgrading, or find a new way of connecting with models and other artists? Share your thoughts in the comments.
[via FStoppers]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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8 responses to “Model Mayhem restructures membership levels and limits Basic accounts”
I’m a paid member with my yearly payment just taken out. I’ll certainly reevaluate this next renewal. I don’t want to have to accept friend requests just to receive an enquiry. This change affects paying members too.
While I understand the push to paid accounts, I question the value of tiered systems. The cost to MM for the number of saved messages or casting calls is near zero. It’s silly to make those selling points. Charge one, fair, price to keep things simple, and move on.
MM is hardly worth the money. The are the only photo related website I know that can have the same HTML java mix site for over a decade and still make money.
Clunky interface, they give less and less for unpaid but don’t add value, troll central in the forums.
Save your money
Is there other good alternatives to MM? I’d love to know. I’ve only ever had 2 good leads and no shoots.
Purpleport, PureStorm, OneModelPlace.. i can’t vouch for the quality of those but MM isn’t the only site offering this service..
What if I pay for it, but many other people don’t? Then I’m paying for a site that has far less active users that I can communicate with than it did before when it was free. Hm, probably just gonna find another site to use.
I just noticed this today when I tried to contact someone that I was interested in shooting and noticed that I couldn’t. I’m an amateur photographer and in my opinion, it hits models who get paid for their time and pay a subscription fee since it will mean a lot less people contacting them for paid work. For me, one good thing is that it cuts down on the unsolicited retouching/spam that I receive. Even if a photographer pays, if he/she sends a message to a model that he/she is interested in shooting, that model can’t reply unless he/she is also a paying member.
Model-Mayhem is now a joke. I am an artist looking for models to pose for my artwork and so far most of the models I have seen bring a ton of baggage with them. Or they have massive amounts of ugly tattoos on them. Most of the women I have met do not understand what i am doing because it is not the Next Top Model Treatment. They see my work and “Oh That Is Nice” and then they see my photography (I use amature point and shoot style images for my artwork because I can get what I need. The drawing is the finished product not the photos) anyways they see my work and think I am just a guy with a camera. Why do artist not get respect like in Vargas day?