A People’s world

November 9, 2007 by pmelcher.

Incredible how the news in the photo industry is going at a burned down speed. Corbis is found guilty of loosing more then 12,000 images from photographer Chris Usher and nevertheless buys stock photo agency Veer. Hopefully, they will not misplace any of Veer’s images.

This will be a very interesting development, however. Up to know, every single acquisition by Corbis has ended in a total failure. In its stubborn obsession to bring everything under the Corbis brand, it has completely destroyed what made the strength of the companies they purchased. The reason is quite simple. Under the old management, the ongoing belief was that an agency was just a big bag of images that anyone could license. Thus, it got rid of the people and teams that had been at the core of its success. Corbis’ management never understood that what makes the success of an photo agency is the people running it. Not the images in its collection. Because, and they have learned this the hard way, you can have the best images in the world, if you do not know how to sell them, it is pointless.

This industry is a people industry. You have to have the right team in place that can not only communicate well with the photographers, but also have a keen sense of what sells and for how much. Getty images has understood that very well, making sure that the influential decision makers stay on board. Let’s see if, this time, Corbis has learned its lesson and this doesn’t turn to be another Sygma, LGI, Digital Stock, SABA, and The Stock Market fiasco.

JupiterImage is suffering a decline, while its RM revenue has grown 30% . Seems to me that the company is getting very expensive to run and that we will see some lay offs by year’s end. For a company that started the year talking to Getty about a possible acquisition, 2007 has not been kind. The very public CEO Alan Meckler has been very busy this year acquiring internet real estate while he should had maybe cleaned up his current operation and cut costs. The upcoming last quarter does not seem to bring any hope for salvation. Will Getty come back and purchase ?

Overall, it seems that the big three, and everyone behind them, has spend too much time struggling on how to integrate microstock solutions into their business model, forgetting that it is only a subcategory of RF. Sure it is sexy : it is very web 2.0, it is new, it is technologically challenging, it’s disruptive ( something Meckler loves), it’s wild , it is community based, and it’s fresh.

But it is not a replacement of RM, nor will it be. And RM is what brings the bread and butter in the house. RM is the route to go to increase revenues, not Microstock RF. A good RM library can out beat and outperform any microstock company with much less staff and images. And RM needs people skills to be efficient, not banks of new servers. It’s the people that matter in RM. Even tech crazy companies like Google know that : The right people.

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