September 27, 2007 by pmelcher.

It is such an interesting time to be around the business of photography. A once very established , entrenched community of image sellers ruled the landscape of the licensing world by applying rules and regulations on term and pricing. They were doing so in their egg shell and tottally oblivious to the rest of the market. A little like photography warlords.

They somewhat ruled in their territory, whether it would be lifestyle, animal, sports, or celebrity. Sometimes they would encounter competition that would try to steal their territory, understand market share, by price cutting. Shields where raised, whistle would be blown, terms like “not fair” or even”crook” were heard. But, pretty much, everyone had enough of a piece of the pie, thanks to customer service, that it did not matter too much.

A little bit like a popular street would have its restaurants, each with their specialties and kind waiters. Some faithfuls would not go anywhere but to their favorite place, regardless of others’ promotion, while others would try a new one everyday.

and then came the chains. Not only acquiring one restaurant after the other, but mixing kitchens so they could combine customers into one big location. The size grew bigger and the menus longer, but some understood that customers service was key to keeping the customers. Cooks, attracted by  a percentage on each dish they would sell, would obviously be looking for the places with most customers.

But then, something happened in the kitchens. It use to take a long time to cook a dish and involved a lot of helpers. Suddenly, all cooks could do everything alone, like they had a portable, self containing kitchen. And much faster too. The restaurants owners, even the small ones, were happy because now they could offer more on their menus, much faster. Furthermore, they could get rid of all the equipment they did need anymore and gain some space. And save money.

The customers were, at first, taken aback by this unorthodox way of cooking, saying it wasn’t real food, it didn’t taste the same and for a while some stayed with those restaurants that refused to use the new cooking system.  But like any major trend, it did last long before these old restaurants either had to close or adapt.

The really cool part of this kitchen revolution that no one really noticed at first, is that you could ship your  cooking anywhere in the world. Your customers were not just from your neighborhood anymore. It look great at first, as promises of healthy and wealthy customers from foreign lands interested in your cooking would poor in. But, as indeed new customers came in, so did competing retsaurants and your customers were attracted by those menu coming from far away.

And the photography warlords lost complete control over their territory. Even the cooks didn’t know where to go and what to do. Pricing followed and was all over the place, trying to match an incompletely unknown landscape of clients. There was no map. The technology to help the cooks was so new that it would evolve every week. Some where welcome additions, some were poorly made scams. Restaurant owners, caught into a whirlwind of pricing, technology, space, customer care, foreign words, competition, data, marketing, tipping points, long tails, and other webs, were loosing their mind.

None  had been trained for this and most were ex cooks.  In came the wizards. The experts, or self proclaimed experts. They visited every single restaurant owner and said, let me take care of your kitchen for you, that is the technology of your kitchen ,while you concentrate on your customers and your cooks. Most restaurants owners were thrilled by the offer. One major worry off their heads. They could fly again.

The big chains had been beating them like eggs in an omelette by introducing new tools in their kitchen, some very expensive. How would they compete, let alone survive? Let us do the work for you, said the wizards, with deep voices and long smiles. We are kitchen technology experts, they continued, we will take care of this microwave thingy bingy for you while you concentrate on what you know best, selling your meals.

Some owners were thrilled and jumped on the offer. Someone else was going to help them have the same technology as the big chains and that will , finally , make all the difference. And at least they could keep up. What they hadn’t realized, and still don’t, is that these tech wizard were taking over their business. They are now the ones who decide for them what tools should be used in their kitchens, thus impacting dramatically on how their dishes are sold. And how well. If something goes wrong, the wizards will blame the cooks, who, by the way, have seen their revenue plummet while they work harder then before.

We are now at a stage where most restaurants owners have decided to battle the intrusion of other restaurants on their street by doing the same and invading other neighborhoods. Problem is, not everyone has the same taste. In order to make their menu more attractive they have asked the wizards to also replace their beloved waiters with new technology. It hasn’t worked too well. Customers love to ask questions and robots do not speak. They therefore added long descriptions to their menu, hoping the customers would find the right dish based on these long lists of keywords. It is hard to describe a taste. So they played with pricing, hoping lower would be better. But even that doesn’t seem to help much, besides making the whole staff miserable.

In the mean time, the wizard, with complete control of the kitchen have now the next step in their hands. All powerful, as they sit at the heart of the restaurant’s business, they control the input of innovation. And their decision are not made for the good of the restaurant, but for their own good.

It is time for Photo agency owners to regain control of their technology. Getty and Istock tremendous success is a living proof that technology well implemented can reap incredible growth . Istock didn’t even do it with a lot of money, certainly much less than most photo agencies have spend in the last  5 years. It is time to shake the wizards out of the kitchen and innovate. technology should not control the business but the opposite. It is supposed to be a solution, not an end.

Unfortunately, a lot  photo agency owners could not be bothered by computers and what they have to offer. They find it demeaning to try and understand. They are above that. And they will not understand why, in a few years, their business will fail. Other embrace every opportunities, as long as they make business sense and they are cheap. They are making a very good living because of these pertinent decisions. But then again, they make these decision, not their wizards.

Posted in Search, keyword, web 2.0, getty, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

September 25, 2007 by pmelcher.

And the  EMMY Award for DOCUMENTARY/NONFICTION PROGRAMMING FOR BROADBAND goes to :

Mediastorm.org – ““Kingsley’s Crossing,” Olivier Jobard, photographer/videographer; Brian Storm , Eric Maierson, producers.

Congratulations to Brian Storm and his team  for this prestigious and certainly deserved award. If you have not seen the fantastic multimedia produced by Mediastorm, please go now before they make you pay to see them.

Posted in mediastorm, multimedia, photojournalism, slideshow | Print | No Comments »

September 24, 2007 by pmelcher.

I am not a big fan of Picscout  myself. Don’t take me wrong. The technology behind it and having a way to monitor usage of your image is great. It’s the business model that makes me very uncomfortable. When you sign up with them, they will monitor your images for you, suing on your behalf any infringer and retain up to 35 % of the obtained legal decision.

Therefore, the more people steal your images, the richer they become. The more people they catch and drag to court, the wealthier they become. They are only interested in signing up big agencies with a lot of content in order to maximize their chances to “catch” an infringer.

Thus, they thrive on this industry’s lack of DRM and on the misinformation regarding copyright. If both were successful, Picscout would be out of business. Now, it seems that their monitoring bots, those little crawling web apps that patrol the internet for illegal usages, are starting to heavily ennoy webmasters worlwide. I recently read a few entries posted by respected webmasters who have decided to block the Picscout blots. The reason ? The bandwidth usage and the near illegal intrusion.

More and more websites have instituted policies to direct blots behavor on their sites as a result of the increasing usage of those on the Internet. Search engines, for example, are constently crawling the web and returing information back to their servers. Multiplied by thousand, that makes a lot of data being transmitted from your site back to the search engine. For a good cause, you might say. But still, since you pay for the bandwidth, you might want to know who and what is being used for.

Picscout blot apparently does not identify itself, nor its intent. A bit like a spammer’s blot looking for email addresses. Very disturbing for someone whose job is to secure a site.

So these webmaster have started a war. A small one that is. They are blocking the blots by blocking IP addresses and refusing to license images from Getty, Corbis and Istockphoto, in order to protest. This will be a game of cat and mouse, with the clients of Picscout becoming the losers.

And I cannot blame them because it is be like a car rental company having someone who breaks the law, follow you around to make sure you return the car on time.

The web is viral by nature. If these webmaster become succesful in their campaign, soon it will be impossible for Picscout to monitor usage.

More on the battle of the bots here.

Posted in google, Search, web 2.0, law, corbis, getty | Print | No Comments »

September 23, 2007 by pmelcher.

First, there is Alan Meckler, master communicator, who jumped on the bandwagon and declared high and loud, if Getty’s celebrity division is falling apart, he will take it over and succeed. Unfortunately for Mr Meckler, not only the editorial space, but within it, the celebrity market, is something you just don’t jump in as easily as RF or microstock.

If the CEO of Jupiter Image has any business sense, he would stay clear from trying to enter celebrity space before the air clears in RF vs Microstock battle. Seems to me that this quasi announcement is more of a marketing plow than a serious thought.

Then, there is the “we will control the world ” Klein who cannot control his own dreams of world domination.

We Will Own The Online Market,

said the ego master, claiming that Getty images licensed 14,000 images a year to MSN. That was before the $49 pricing. Thanks to the new pricing, they will now give a nice break to one of the wealthiest company in the world. Nice job, Klein. Furthermore, we hear from an interview with ImageSouce CEO Christina Vaughan, that Getty launched this price slashing operation without any hard evidence of success : ” And without some hard evidence in terms of what they thought would be predicted revenue for a business our size with a collection our size”, said the CEO who resisted the price slashing, adding “we just didn’t feel comfortable about making a commitment”.

Does Jonathan Klein know that most websites, especially in the editorial world,  never delete an image ? Each page is slowly  archived as new pages are mounted and added. They are just much harder to access and find. On the design side, website keep images for years, as they are part of a banner. Thus, the 3 months limit is a useless and counter productive time constraint to most users. While the pricing has the some of the appeal of Microstock RF, the terms has all the default of RM.

That begs the final question. Who is really in charge at Getty ? This sudden double obsession with everything web, between the upcoming consumer oriented website to this undigested across the board flat fee, smell strongly like something coming out of new Web 2.0 wunderkid Bruce Livingstone. He would be more apt at looking at Getty’s core business and declare it unadapted to the image buyers 2.0. Thus pushing the older management team into digging for a hope of redemption in the endless landscape of the online market. The new Eldorado,  the last photo Frontier, the new hope, or Getty’s only chance to raise its stock price.

Or are we assisting at the Gary Shenking of Getty Images ?

Posted in web 2.0, getty, Royalty free, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

September 20, 2007 by pmelcher.

Jeff Kravitz (no, that is NOT him on the picture above), President and Founder of Filmmagic, bought by Getty Images in the $200 million Mediavast deal, has officially resigned. Citing impossible working conditions within the Mega image distributor, antiquated distribution system, one of the most succesful, and influential, red carpet photographer is slamming the door in the face of the Getty management.

In the wake of the Mediavast acquisition, past competing photographers find themselves using the same resources to distribute to the same clients, diluting their offering in a sea of similar images. However, not all photographers have the same agreement, making some quickly loosing revenue. There has already been photographers defection since the acquisition and many more are on the way. At this rate, Getty faces the risk of, once again, creating its own competition by allowing former photographers to create new, lean and mean, photo agencies. Klein has a legacy of failing to successfully integrate celebrity photo agencies as seen with Online USA in the 90’s and ImageDirect in the early 21th century. Is history repeating itself ?

With a share scheduled to drop and stabilize at $23.00, the arrogant leadership is facing a much bigger challenge here than the microstock rise . As much as microstock remains a subset of RF, as much as celebrity images is the faster growing, most powerful engine of growth in the editorial market. Jeff Kravitz has been instrumental in the growth of Mediavast and his departure is a great blow, especially if he decides to create his own new competing agency.

There will be more defection in the next few weeks and months, as predicted here.

Text of Jeff Kravitz’s email :

Subject: Bye

–
Jeff Kravitz
President
Www.filmmagic.com

Posted in editorial, getty, Royalty free, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

September 18, 2007 by pmelcher.

“BrightQube is not only providing creative professionals with innovative technology, we are providing access to a collection of over two million images including leading brands of royalty-free and a selection of high quality, lower priced microstock imagery for everyday.”

With two ex VP’s of DigitalRailroad under its hood, and an undisclosed series A funding, BrightQube just launched a very web 2.0 RF portal mixing microstock and pro photographers. Offering already more than 2 million images, BrightQube offers a new approach to search results as it displays hundreds of very small thumbnails on one page, a bit like the old electrical traditional lightboxes used to, in order to rapidly zoom in the appropriate image.

This is the first time, to my knowledge, that traditional RF and microstock find themselves together on the same platform. 17 RF companies are listed, including Corbis and ImageSource, but no microstock agencies are officially present. A quick search with main microstock companies name only made Dreamstime content appear.

The engine is extremely fast, very appealing and seems to return the right content. Some of the functonalities are still a little buggy, at least on a Mac Firefox platform.

You can play around with it here.

Posted in Search, web 2.0, corbis, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

September 18, 2007 by pmelcher.

In France, and maybe in other European countries, there is a new marketing initiative, that mostly seem to affect food and other imported goods, called “equitable commerce”. Having been “Green” and “Eco friendly” for a long time, probably before Al Gore was born, the French companies, most certainly as a reaction to the Big Bad Greedy US corporations, have launch an initiative to properly compensate their suppliers.

As an alternative to the mass produced, worker exploited products, where labor is crushed to accept unfair low wages, especially if they live in third world countries, “equitable commerce” products divide the proceeds of sales equally and thus help in the development and growth of small local industries. Socially correct and morally responsible consumers pay a bit more ( think health food in the US) while knowing their money will help a lonely local farmer somewhere in the forest in Sri Lanka to make better tea. A happy worker makes for a better product. A concerned consumer makes for a happier customer. The company, suddenly becoming a social conduit between the have and have-nots, is regarded as powerful agent of positive change.

You want to change the world, buy an “equitable commerce” labeled product. You will no longer help a greedy corporation get filthy rich but your money will go directly to the supplier, who will finally make enough money to avoid destroying the environment or use cheap but highly toxic ingredients. What the company looses in commissions, it gains in higher prices and hopefully, volume of sales.

The corporations of the photo industry (Corbis, Getty) seems to have taken the opposite approach in trying to squeeze out the most out of their suplliers. After all, there seems to be an unlimited amount of photographers out there, only confirmed by the recent explosion of week-end hobbyists brought forth by file sharing sites and other microstocks. Reducing their supply force to an under compensated, unhappy, debt ridden army is very Wal Marty of them, but also maybe very past century. History has shown that the business model of the Robber Baron is bound to failure ( see 1929). Socially responsible companies creating a generous working environment (think Google) generate the most creativity, thus the most profit.

Just think : A photo agency that would return a higher commission under the condition that some of the money has to be reinvested in the photographers business, thus forcing greater creativity ? Higher licensing prices to help create better content ?

Getty Images is cutting the wood off its foundation to build the higher levels. It is feeding on itself to aliment its growth. By squeezing revenues from the same photographers that were responsible for it phenomenal growth, it is choking its roots.

Istockphoto expansion might be more internal to Getty existing client base than we know, ripping away juicy profits from its mother company from within, like a nasty virus. The last great acquisition, Mediavast, has suddenly overcrowded its celebrity offering from within, internally deevaluating it. It has created an unfair balance of commission rate that sit at 70/30 on the high end (see Contour) to the 30/70 at the bottom ( see scoopt.com). Already, valuable staff photographers are quitting, to escape the unbearable and unfair working conditions. Soon, we should see the same with contributors, if Getty keeps its pricing schemes.

There is profit in fairness. There is something to be said about “equitable commerce“.

Posted in flickr, prosumer, transaction, france, corbis, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

September 17, 2007 by pmelcher.

For all of us who have been questioned while talking pictures, as seen on the PhotoAttorney blog:

purchase your own here 

Posted in photojournalism, transaction, editorial, law, news | Print | No Comments »

September 15, 2007 by pmelcher.

Getty and $49:

How many association of photographers does it take to bring down Getty? Apparently 6 is not enough. After sending an e-mail to Jonathan Klein, they are answered by a posting from Nick Evans Lombs. Personally, I would have been insulted. But that is just me, I guess. The giant was grateful enough to listen and modify the license, but only in duration. A bis slap in the face of these associations who were complaining about the pricing, not the terms.

What we have here is an exact replica of what mega distributor Wal-Mart does : squeezing suppliers to better increase their revenues.

C’mon guys, time to pull out the big guns, not your little whistle. Threaten to pull out your images or start a submission embargo. See how Wall Street  reacts if thousands of Getty contributors band together and stop submitting. I can guarantee that Jonathan Klein, himself, this time, would answer. And where are the trade association like CEPIC, BAPLA, or PACA. Do they approve ?

The photo agency killers:

First Alamy, then a myriad of smaller platforms, and now Photoshelter. The idea? band together enough independent photographers  on a distribution platform to create a global offering that can compete with the agencies. But the result smells very much like an agency to me. You submit, they license. The only difference is that they have no control over what is being submitted and rely entirely on their search engines to do the editing. There is no creative intelligence, nor do they have an editorial desk. By saving money on these key and essential poles of a photo agency, they offer alluring commissions to photographers. But, as much as a photographer needs help in licensing his images, he also needs help in knowing what content to create. None of these platforms offer this service.

Instead, they follow the microstock model of “you should submit in masses and the best images shall win”. That model has proven somewhat effective for the platforms ( does any make a profit ?) but terribly ineffective for the contributors. PhotoShelter insists that the presence of a linguist in their staff will create all the difference. A bad image, perfectly key worded (if there is such a thing), remains a bad image.

However, let’s see how they do as they, once again, follow DigitalRailroad in their every footsteps.

Posted in keyword, CEPIC, PACA, getty, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

September 13, 2007 by pmelcher.

Getty images is not a newcomer in trading prices versus quantity. Quite the opposite. When a company wants to gain market share in an industry already heavily populated with suppliers, it reduces its cost of doing business to a minimum and slashes prices to force the competition into bankruptcy. Economy of scale, it is called.

They did, and are doing it with editorial where their “all you can use” subscription plan has been highly successful. For about $1,000 a month you can use any and all the images they have on the wire. No questions asked. Selling those subscription in large quantities worldwide has shown to be quite profitable for them, while giving the old mom and pop editorial agencies an almost impossible challenge.

Getty was also in the forefront of the microstock revolution by plunging head first and much deeper than Jupiter Images did. Bargain photography is certainly what Getty knows best.

Now, it is all about midstock. While Alan Meckler says “Midstock sounds exciting but it might already be dead.” , Getty responds by putting as much fire power in it as it can. First in Valueline hosted by the sad looking punchstock website ( the last press release posted dates from 2006) and now with the infamous $49.00 web usage pricing.

Someone is wrong here and we will soon find out who. Surely, Getty did not go along with this pricing without extended reflexion and analysis. It is my experience and my belief that most images on the web are going at about that price already. Yes, a corporate usage for a year on a home page could be priced at $1,000 or more but then, who really purchased such a license. Furthermore, Getty acknowledges that Istock and all other microstocks main market is web usage and thus makes these type of high level pricing forever impossible to achieve.

Getty is now trying to canabilize the microstock market and regain market share with its midstock approach . It is competing directly with all the microstock agencies by offering a similar license for a slightly more expensive pricing in the hope that the quality and the quantity of the offering will attract budget conscious image buyers.

In a way, Getty is the first and only agency firing back at the microstock invasion. While photographers have a right to complain, they should do so by pulling out there images instead of posting endless comments. I do not see this happening. And up to know, I haven’t seen any traditional photo agency taking dramatic measure to attract the new breed of customers that the microstock industry has brought in.

Getty is not the guardian of the photography world, nor does it has ever claimed to be the defender of photographers rights to a fair income. Jonathan Klein famously said years ago at a PACA meeting in New York, “Photo Editors pay my bills, not photographers”, or ssomething close to that.  He hasn’t change course.

Posted in PACA, editorial, getty, Microstock | Print | No Comments »