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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 ?

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