October 31, 2007 by pmelcher.

Just returned from 3 days of Paca international conference in Sin city. How appropriate to have held the yearly convention in a gambling town full of hard core, die hard risk takers. Our industry, the photo industry is very similar in its model.

When we take images for stock, we purchase lottery tickets. we invest our time and money into a series of images that we hope we will license, over and over, for millions of dollars. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t . A bit like a poker game, we have some idea if we have a winning hand but we never know what the competition is holding, and if they might bankrupt you.

Furthermore, when we negotiate pricing for an RM image, we try to find out how badly an image buyer wants an image and price it accordingly. Of course, they might pass and move on to another image to satisfy their needs. So we gamble with ours quote, not completely informed of what set of card the opponent carries.

Finally, Las Vegas teaches us that to make money, you have to spend money. As I very shyly approached the slot machines, I only used the ones with one quarter. My losses where minimal but so where my gains. I lost a few quarters. The second day, I boldly tried the one dollar machines and my success rate was a little better. I came out even. I gambled $5 dollars, I won five dollars back. Mmm..what is the point of that, I asked myself. The last night, I went all out and started inserting 20 dollar bills . Things got much more exciting. At some point I was down to maybe a dollar, but all in all, I started winning 65 dollars here, and 50 there. I left with double of what I had played, extremely satisfied.

The photo business is the same. The less you invest, the less your return. You have to be a risk taker and go out boldly, both in spending and in creative investment.

It appears, and some image buyers on a panel confirmed this, that more of the same images are being offered. it is not a saturation of offer that we are seeing, but a saturation of similitude . Everyone copies each other, thanks to the visibility of everyone’s content on each others website, creating a pool of identical thus boring images.

As much as this industry is a business, it is also a labor of love, a pool of creativity. The winners are the risk takers, those who are not afraid to gamble big in order to receive big. Those who do not follow change, but created it.

The PACA Congress was overall interesting, even if the panels where maybe not very exciting in their content. I was part of one, so I can safely say this. On a question by Ron Rovtar of the Stock Asylum during our panel, who asked who was making more money than last year, the vast majority raised their hands. The others where making the same.

The marketing hub, where some companies had tables a la CEPIC, was extremely busy with intense business negotiation , and the hallways where buzzing with incessant networking, impromptu meetings, and extensive conversations.

It would be great to see next year, in New York, a panel, or even a room, entirely reserved to technology companies that can improve photo agencie’s life . To reach out to other businesses that have comprehensive solutions and ideas that will enhance this industry. Have photographers come and talk about their experiences and challenges. Have slide shows or exhibits. Invite editorial photo agencies to connect the bridge between the two very similar worlds. In a word, to open up these congress to the outside world and break wide open the doors of this little private club. Bring in some fresh thinking.

In a word, see PACA gamble.

Posted in license, SIPA, web 2.0, CEPIC, PACA | Print | 2 Comments »

October 26, 2007 by pmelcher.

I went to PictureHouse NY this year, not as an exhibitor, but as an image buyer. It was a very rewarding experience. The first, and probably foremost experience was the terribly empty and deserted video footage room. With at most 5 distributors, but none of the big players, they must have stared at each other for a whole day.

This confirms a little bit more what I suspected. The still photo buyers are not the video buyers. While everyone ( not me) is screaming about the upcoming brutal replacement of still photography by some type of moving footage, it is not here. And quite frankly, by what will a photo of a lonely tree in a green field be replaced by . A 3 minute long footage of the same tree? One has to be very careful in making hasty declaration in how the video will eventually replace stills. As everyone prepares or a starting to license video, no one has an offering of multimedia, which I found quiet strange and a little bit sad.

Another point of interest was the always gently chaotic aggregation of completely unrelated content next to each other, tables after tables of pens, t shirt, water bottles, staplers, stuff and mostly pens. It seemed to be more of a competition of marketing pen than a photo industry gathering. One could get two years worth of school supplies and I would not be surprised if some actually do. The second item is bags. Lots of heavily branded bags, which made some image buyers look like walking Christmas trees.

A lot of the agencies had screen displays showing a slide show of their images, which was nice, but one could get really eye sick by seeing over and over the same type of images. Funny how most of the participant spend more money on heavily branded and rather cool pens rather than creating an original source of imagery. Its the copycat game which, as we all know, is currently eating away this industry. It used to be, when you looked at a series of images, you could immediately tell what photo agency they came from. Now it  seems that  there is only one photographer that everyone represents.

There were more commercial stock photo agencies and the few editorial ones seemed a little bit at a lost, especially since they did not have any of the cool little give away widgets.

Beside the guys from Brightqube and their very sexy interface, there was not much to get excited about. It also unscientifically seemed there were less images buyers than last year.

Interestingly enough, only one microstock company was there, Shutterstock, and while I approached them to ask them a rather complex licensing question, I was abruptly answered that if I didn’t purchase their subscriptions model, there was no way we could work together. So much for flexibility. I didn’t even get a free “thing”, not that I wanted one. I guess they are not used to working with human beings.

Finally, there was a whole section, rather deserted and for good reasons, of trade associations (ASMP, PACA, PLUS, SAA and so on). They looked more like a tax fulfillment center than anything related to photography . It is a great idea to include them, especially PLUS, but it better if they had an opportunity to have their brochure in the general PictureHouse bag. Those who would have missed their stand would have an opportunity to read about them further. Or have them participate in the stamp game which always attracts a lot of traffic.

Hopefully, next year will see new and more powerful features and improvement, better traffic workflow, more new and various agencies, millions of extremely wealthy image buyers who cannot stop buying images and just a little less pens and more great images.

and what about the full moon ? not much.

Posted in multimedia, license, PACA, editorial, Royalty free, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

October 24, 2007 by pmelcher.

“Digital Disciples make up the second-largest group (35%) and consider themselves serious amateur photographers“. According to The Kodak Photo Futures Report, the same Disciples are “the most likely to explore photo editing software and have ambitions to make money from their hobby”. Who knew ?

First who knew that Kodak was still in the photo business and then, according to their report on amateurs, that the second biggest group of snappers where busy finding ways to generate some income from their photography. This means there is a Tsunami of photographers out there ready to break open the gates of microstocks, midstock and traditional stock. Currently, because of a pretty effective brainwashing, they mostly think Creative Commons is the only way to get published. Created by sympathizers of the Orphan Bill and believers in the Free internet (EFF), (”Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain“, boast their website), it creates an incentive to give away rights for free. Supported by Flickr, it has quickly become the only license option most amateurs know. These San Fransisco based free thinkers mix free, as freedom of expression, with free, as I will not pay for it.

And unfortunately, while they themselves ask for donations, they do not provide any education on how to truly license an image for money.

Now, the professional trade association like ASMP, APA and so on could help . But there two issues: they are too busy fighting internal political battles or finding sponsorships, and most important, what would be the purpose of a professional trade association if they started helping amateurs ?

The PLUS coalition could be a great candidate, but it is currently so complicated that ones needs a PhD ( doctorat) in advanced licensing to figure out how it works and what it does. Furthermore, with a board and committees almost exclusively made up of commercial stock veterans, it seems to lack a thorough knowledge of the editorial licensing world.

So where does that leaves us ? Well, once again, we see the microstock and midstock taking charge of these amateurs looking to reap some benefit of their hard work. Not only in offering a simple platform to license their images but also in educating them . The only issue here, is that their are all solely RF, making it seem like the only license available is royalty free.

By not exposing themselves to the general public, the RM and editorial agencies are taking the risk of becoming an exception rather than the rule and let the RF model become, de facto, the universal and only model of licensing. Since no one is required to have any type of degree to purchase images, not even have a full knowledge of licensing options, or even copyright laws, there is a good chance that future photo editors will not fully comprehend the RM concept.

Furthermore, agencies, by not implementing DRM ( digital rights management) solutions or being blind to the necessity to have an image monitoring system will probably feel that RF is just an easier and cost effective way to license of image and completely drop RM. That would be incredibly destructive to an industry that currently makes most of its revenue from RM.

The solution: create a standardize, automated, very easy to use ( a la CC) rights managed tools that could would make it appealing to use. Embed DRM into images or at the very least, generate auto reminders that licenses are about to expire. Go out and evangelize photography newcomers on their licensing options. and mostly, for the photo industry to stop behaving like an old gentlemen club.

Posted in prosumer, Midstock, license, flickr, photojournalism, Royalty free, transaction, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

October 22, 2007 by pmelcher.

The future of the photo industry lies in sales platforms, said  Allen Murabayashi from Photoshelter, in a panel, last Monday. This is something that Getty has been trying to solve in the last five years by trying to change its business model from photo agency to distributor. Companies, like Alamy, Digitalrailroad, Newscom and even the microstock have understood this well and a long time ago. Same goes with Blend, Newstock immages and countless of RF creators who have dropped the sales department out of their equation and has replaced it with a “distribution” branch fully dedicated at finding the right resources to reach their client.

In a world where there is new sources of images everyday, it clearly becomes impossible to drive substantial traffic to ones particular website. There are too many offerings, with perfectly legitimate content, spread out over too many internet locations. A bit like the travel agency industry, clients will now prefer to go to places which will helped them find the right content than wasting a lot of time finding it themselves. Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak.com and so on have capitalize on the travel industry segmentation by offering tools that allow easy compare and purchase options. Who goes to the website of one airline company anymore ?

Thus in the years to come, the photo industry will increasingly follow this trend whereby we will start to see more and more creators and producers of photography pick and choose the appropriate sales platform rather than do direct sales themselves. And these sales platforms will not be creating any content but rather aggregating it into an easy, user friendly website. The photo agency of the future, at least for commercial stock will either be a production facility or a sales company, but not both. Some sales platform, like Getty , in order to increase revenue, will continue to create wholly owned, but through third party creators. They already do. And its not impossible that one will see , one day, an Alamy branded RF collection or a Photoshelter credited RM offering. But the bulk of the business will definitely be separate into two very distinct parts. The creators (photo producing agencies) and the sales/distribution platforms, (aggregations of a multitude of original content) will dominate the market. And those who will continue to desperately try to bring traffic to their sites in order to do remain hopelessly independent will suffer tremendously.

Images need to be brought to the image buyer and not the opposite. It will no longer matter if your site is an award winning, bells and whistle free, work of art. No one will come if all you have to license is your own images. More and more image buyers will expect choice, volume and will care less and less about branding. Corbis, Getty and recently Jupiter have destroyed any value in branding by their purchasing frenzy over the last 15 years. Names have come and gone. They do not mean much anymore.

So, in a twisted form of destiny, you will see more and more agencies for agencies. Photographers revenue should not get diluted as commission from revenue would be spit within the agencies part. And some of these platform already accept direct photographers submission, creating a competition to those agencies they claim to serve.

Even editorial agencies will see a great benefit for this new trend as they will refocus their sales team to first time direct sales and leave the stock/archives sales to one or many of these platforms. The future of licensing belongs to the Ag’s ( Aggregators) while the future of creativity will remain in the photographers hands. Where does that leave the photo agencies ?

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

October 19, 2007 by pmelcher.

After spending a day at Photoplus today, one aspect became really obvious. There were more internet businesses for amateurs and semi pros then I have ever seen. The web 2.0 bubble has definitely reached the traditional photo industry and one can see numerous web based solution for everything photographic. It was interesting to see, besides the traditional giants booth, like Canon, Nikon, and other Fuji or Olympus, a myriad of do it yourself, on line, community based solution for the wealthy amateur. And, a bit like the lotions that will make you a slimmer person or make your hair grow, these websites will enhance your photography to depths and lengths you had never dreamed about.

For just a small monthly fee.

Of different size and with this feel of “we are here to stay”, these stands will offer you anything from do it yourself self-published photo books that, if you listen to their sales pitch, will sell more than Annie Leibovitch ever sold, to others that will make you a seasoned pro, selling more images than Getty has in the last 10 years. So once you buy all the gear, then all the accessories, you are teased by these businesses that promise to build you a career and make you extremely wealthy with what you thought, only just about an hour ago, was a only a week-end hobby.

While Adobe or Apple have magnificent stands with pseudo preachers screaming into wireless microphones in front of a wide-eyed audience on how to turn an ordinary image into a work of pure biblical proportion, an army of recently VC-ed funded start up will grab your emerging hopes to stuff them in a community-based, crowdsource-powered “shlingalabada”.

Rows and rows of false promises with shiny teeth hiding a sharks’ appetite. A little Las Vegas strip full of a salespeople who practically beg you to join them in their fruitless gamble, in the desperate hope that you will give legitimacy to their underlying lies and insecurities.

The most interesting part is that, with purpose or not, the layout of the huge Javitz center is set up as a warning: as you enter, you have from left to right and wall to wall about three of four rows of the companies that make the foundation of this business. The giants: Nikon, Kodak, Adobe, Lexar, etc. As you venture deeper inside, you then hit the accessories guys, long time accepted parasites of the latter: lens companies, bags, lighting, etc. and then, once you escape the peddlers of tangible product, all you seem to see is computer screens. The fabulous wonderland of the virtual world. Online classes, online models, online storage, online archive, online this, online that. Some very legitimate, most, however, probably never to be seen again.

During the first dot com, the amateur world was not digital yet, so it was speared. This time, the market is perfectly rip. In a very compelling way, it is a perfect showcase of the current photo universe. What is the most troublesome is that none of the microstock where present. Why ? A fear of putting a face on the scam ? After all, Mr Corbis and Mr Istock/Getty, Dreamstime, Fotolia and Shutterstock, what better place to meet and recruit more contributors ? And when you think about it, where are the traditional agencies. After all, Photoshelter, DigitalRaiload and IPNstock are there recruiting photographers, why not them. Or is the Photoplus crowd not good enough to be accepted in their closed membership club ? One reason the traditional agencies have taken a beating from microstock is that they have snobily ignored a large part of the shooter community and yet they persist to behave like tightly restricted, invitation-only clubs.

One can see the circus of the double digit, multimillionaire VC funded carpet seller of web 2.0, live at Photoplus 2007. Two days left.

Posted in prosumer, web 2.0, Photoplus, flickr, photoshop, Royalty free, getty, corbis, Microstock | Print | 3 Comments »

October 19, 2007 by pmelcher.

A group of us were invited to discuss the alternate source of imagery as well as the future of stock photography on a panel organized by the American Society of Picture Professionals this past Monday. I have skipped the product presentation that you can see here, if you would like, to go directly to discussion that immediately followed.
Besides myself, you can hear :
Evan Nisselson, CEO Digital Railroad
Brad Kuhns, Co-founder IPN Stock
Allen Murabayashi, CEO Photoshelter
Randy Taylor, CEO StockMedia Corp

Thanks to the ever friendly team from Photoshelter for filming this and making it available to all of us.

Posted in newspaper, HOLGA, Search, multimedia, keyword, yahoo, getty, editorial, flickr, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

October 17, 2007 by pmelcher.

Where does this come from  ?

Yes, It’s Getty’s promotion for their infamous web res $49 sell out. But now, image buyers get to purchase istock images for $49 instead of $1. What a pretty good deal for image buyers.!!!  Getty is probably thinking that they will make up what they loose on pro photographers  imagery by extracting the substantific marrow out of  the UGC.

It’s all a numbers game for them. let’s see how long it will take Corbis and Jupiterimage to also combine their content..

Posted in finance, prosumer, corbis, getty, Royalty free, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

October 16, 2007 by pmelcher.

The future of photography is approaching fast. The fully automated photo agency is getting closer than we think and the cost of getting right image out will be dropping significantly.

Smart Tagging or kewording. A Penn State-developed software called TT or Tagging over Time analyzes the pixels of an image and returns a list of possible taggs. The user just needs to select the appropriate ones. Furthermore, the system learns and remembers interaction so that for future images with similar content, it becomes much easier to select the right tag. but that is not all. If the tagging of an image changes over time because of a change of perception, it will learn that to and change the taggs appropriatly. The authors of the software appropriately use the example of the twin towers.  In the past, they would have had the keywords “financial” or “business”. Now they are more likely to have “9/11″ or “terrorism”. All the image will retro actively be modified, based on user experience. It would probably have a hard time with conceptual words, although similar scenes or situation can trigger the same concept.

On the editing side, the same researchers have also created  a machine- learning component. To do this, the system uses visual features such as contrast, depth-of-field indicators, brightness and region composition from publicly rated photographs to learn the statistical models for high- and low-quality images. Now, just imagine if you could combine this with the technology of a Picscout or Idee. Rather than only going after copyright infringer, it would also learn from legitimate usage and return a huge collection of patterns and trends to be added to the learning algorithm. You would soon have an automated editing program. Great for microstocks, who spend most of their time, and money, manually filtering the images. But also incredibly useful for any photo agency receiving a lot of content. Furthermore, it could work on the photo buyer side, where a website could set up some pre define rules on a photo feed and publish a new image, every hour, automatically.

Funny how these technologies come out of Universities and research centers instead of the mega agencies. On would think that a Corbis, for example, instead of opening galleries on Second Life, would be working on cost saving, efficiency boosting applications. And the  Getty’s , instead  of creating  a  prosumer site for giggling teen agers , would jump on the opportunity to create a Getty lab instead.

The FAWM project I have started last year is all about finding and creating the right tools to minimize human interaction in the photography work flow. The digital age, up to now, has added more work, more steps into the “creation to licensing” process. It is time to put some of our intelligence and experience into the technological soup and come out with a new recipe for the perfectly streamlined photo agency.

 Article on smart tagging here

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

October 11, 2007 by pmelcher.

One has to wonder what is going in the minds of the Getty management. A quick stroll throught their website today reveals some strange discoveries. Follow me for a little tour, I will show you:

Free images for website usage ?: If you go to the entertainemnet images pages and click on any thumbnail, you will get a preview with absolutely no watermarks. Funny part is that this only works with celebrity images, not with sports or news, and only for Getty Images staffers. Go ahead. I will wait for you here…You back ? Has Getty decided to offer free celebrity images to bloggers and fans ? or have they decided to increase their revenues by letting people steal their images and sue them ?

First view: Not quite sure what this is all about but after doing a search in the same entertainment images section, one can see a “FirstLook images only” tab on the top left. if you click on it, nothing really happens besides a message saying that there are no images available for this search. It also refers you to  two options, All Creative images (2213079 images found) or All Editorial images (10789174 images found). If you ever wondered how many images Getty has on line you can now do so by adding these two numbers. At least that was helpful…Go ahead, try it.

Learn German: If you go on the home page of Getty’s editorial section, on the left again, there is a nice picture of Johnny Cash with the words “Inside the Archive. Find out more”. Click on it and you are directed to Getty’s German home page, probably meaning that you will only learn more if you read proper German. Did you see it ? Now, wasn’t that special ?

After spending more than $35 million on their digital delivery platform,  Getty Image seems to have lost its direction with their newly launched websites. This is a good example of what happens when you keep adding more and more features, bells and whistles . There is something to be said about simplicity.

Posted in Search, No sense, filter, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

October 10, 2007 by pmelcher.

What do you do when your business is not doing so well ? you do a deal with Corbis, of course. Webshots, owned by suffering web giant CNET, who has seen its membership decline in the last year and is an embarrassment to CNET for lacking revenue, has, according to Microstock news website Stockphototalk.com, made a desperate attempt to genrate revenue by supllying content to Snapvillage.

Let’s quickly review. Webshots offers the possibility to license ones images, thanks to its’ pro (meaning you have to pay $2.95 a month) version. Thus, people who badly need a wallpaper for their desktop and are willing to pay for it, or would like to purchase a print of a sunset in Maine can do so. Stock companies like Indextock,  LonelyPlanet and many others have their images on webshots pro, probably lured by the forever fledging hope to reach the mythical consumer market. Certainly, they will NOT provide their images to Snapvillage. Now, Webshots offers the possibility to Webshots paying members to have their images on Snapvillage. Yes, unlike other microstock companies, Snapvillage offers to license your images if you pay them. Mmm? Why not submit your images directly to Snapvillage for free ?

Has anyone paid attention to the rest of the images ? Its 400 million images of girlfriends posing together. It’s a 400 million images of pet dogs and cats in crowed backyard. it’s 400 million portraits of overflashed, red eyed, gitzy myspace queens wannabees. It is, in other words, the creme de la creme of user generated content. It is the depositary of those, like the Flickr crowd, who do not want to sell their images but share them.

One cannot imagine how much work the Corbis editors will have to do to extract any interesting images while Webshots will have to explain to their “pros” why their images are being rejected by cart loads.

Genius idea , indeed !

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