The rise of the Ag’s

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 ?

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