Prove It !!!

February 17, 2007 by pmelcher.

So the Corbis Corporation posted their revenue and claim $251 million for 2006. I say, “prove it”. Corbis should start behaving like an adult company and show its real face. How much did Corbis spend to get to that number ? $500 million ? And what is their level of profit, or loss ? That is the only real indicator of a company’s health.
Maybe it is only me, but haven’t you noticed that Corbis always, always announces their revenue after Getty, even when Getty reports them late, like this year. It seems to me that Corbis’ numbers are always a percentage of Getty’s revenue. If Getty had a bad year, Corbis had a bad year. If Getty had a great year Corbis had a great year. It’s the “Hey, me too” syndrome.

I took the numbers posted on the State of the Art blog and ran a little analysis. Over the last 5 years, Corbis has regularly posted revenues about 30 % of Getty’s:

Corbis Getty
2006 $251.00 $807.00 31%
2005 $228.00 $733.70 31%
2004 $170.40 $622.40 27%
2003 $140.00 $523.20 27%
2002 $463.00 N/A
2001 $128.00 $451.00 28%
2001 $135.00 $484.00 28%

(there is twice the year 2001. This is how it was posted on State Of The Art)

Corbis fired a bunch of people again at the end of 2006, in the traditional end of the year Corbis management reconfiguration. At this rate, by then end of this decade, Corbis will have employed all of the US population.
And now they cry high and loud that they will enter Microstock. Can they mess that too? It is going to be another funny example of an US corporation at its worse. After literally destroying some of the most prestigious collections of images by applying their ridiculous rules of management, they will now attempt to destroy the microstock world.

Maybe Corbis genius idea will be to price all their current images at $1 a piece? Or purchase one of the existing companies for an excessive amount of Bill Gates retirement savings, fire everyone, replace them with incompetent MBA’s, add layers and layers of red tape, and wonder why they are not making any money. After a while, they will get bored and buy a new toy. Corbis is like the big fat dumb rich kid at school that everyone likes to pick on. Besides offering temporary shelter for people in search of a real job, Corbis has yet to enter the photography market seriously and professionally.

Come on, now. Any other photo agency would have been profitable by now with the images that Corbis currently represent. How do they do it ?