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 »

November 6, 2007 by pmelcher.

I was reading something about creative research. This is a field, for those who might not know, that is particularly devoted in researching what type of images will sell. It is not really a science and it is very similar to what advertisers do when they try to sell a product to a particular crowd. They try to smell a trend when it’s at its peak or just about to break and try to surf it all the way to the shore.

Not an easy task indeed. Too early, no one notices, too late and it’s a backslash. The photo industry, at the least the traditional one, has bought in into this “research” in order to provide the images that will illustrate a campaign, outsmarting the advertising agencies. That makes a lot of people trying to figure out what will be cool next week. However, the photo industry research doesn’t really go outside, in the street, to look what people are doing with their time, money, leisure, vacation, clothes and other things. Rather they look at the images they sold and project that they will keep on selling.

Then comes the micro/mid stock . Absolutly no creative research. No rules. Just a wide bunch of unchained people taking pictures of whatever they feel. “Insane”, would say a corporation. “Crazy”, would add a long time RF photographer who made millions. “Totally immature”, would conclude the research analyst paid fortunes to spread excels into long sheets of numbers.

Well, a bit like the success of the first Napster, the illegal one, Microstock has actually brought images in the market, that no one really had but that people needed. No one took close ups of toothbrushes, or apples, or pens or even computer keyboards because, well, according to the analysts, there was no market. And why would they say such a thing ? well, because they had never seen an image like that sell before, according to their sales reports. No one actually checked to see if such an image even existed. It would have explained why the images had never been sold.

One of the reason of the success of Napster was not so much that it was free, but mostly, it was because you could find one song, that one track that you wanted. Nothing else, nothing more. You would have never, ever gone to the music store to get a whole CD just for that song. But there it was. And you took it. The explosion of I tunes is a confirmation .

Micro and Midstock is the same. No photographer in their right mind would have ever taken a photograph of a cell phone transmition tower . They are the ugliest things in the world. And even if they did, their agencies would have flatly refused, saying ” this is the ugliest thing in the world”. The crowd doesn’t have the fears or limitation that the traditional stockers have. They have no “creative research”. Even better, they have their ears and eyes in the streets because they ARE the streets. Those who take these images are also those who buy-in these trends, fashion, coolness and other ephemeral movements.

So while mister “I am the best stock shooter in the world and I make millions a year” looks at magazines, TV, movies, ads, in order to smell a trend, and ends up shotting the same thing over and over again, the trendmakers are taking pictures.

Everyone knows that, in this industry, it is not the pricing that decides the success of an image. It is the image. A bad photograph, even for free, will never be used. Microstock companies could charge more, and they know that, because they have content that people want to us. They deliberately keep the pricing under the level of the demand, as a marketing gimmick. The recent licensing of an image at Dreamstime for more than $5,000 is a proof.

Thus the lesson of the mid/macro stock is not in the price slashing. It is in the creative research slashing. It is in creating content that is needed, even if it is a snapshot.

Agencies, these days, should stop trying to mimic the Getty’s and Corbis and start looking at their juniors who are reinventing the market. And rejuvenating the content.

PS and unrelated:  Althought they have some of the greatest commercials of people having fun, dancing, enjoying life, all I see are sad looking, empty eyed zombies who wear these I -Pods. They all look like they are listening to a requiem or a general announcement about their salaries being cut in half. Shouldn’t music make you happy ?

Posted in Midstock, prosumer, flickr, getty, Microstock | Print | 2 Comments »

November 2, 2007 by pmelcher.

Not a good time of the year for those of us who are not playing the stock market. All the photo news site change (or is it because it is Halloween ?) from photo buffs to Wall Street experts. Some stayed up all night to be the first to report while others where updating their blogs while listening in. One would have thought a man was landing on the Moon. The giant has stumbled, they say, some even predict its imminent downfall, the lilliputians have finally won against the big bad Gulliver of photography. Getty released it quarterly report.

I personally see a company who keeps on growing, on generating more revenue than any other photo agency in history, that is not afraid to innovate and to take risks and who is now about to redirect its general focus to bypass its own clients to reach its consumers directly. Something I mentioned in Photo agency 3.0.

Hint: It is not because a company’s stock drops that it is out of business or will be. Take a look a Microsoft stock once in a while.

Anyway, while Gulliver scares the pants out of the Wall Street-obsessed lilliputians, its shadowy friends, Corbis the Corbis ( how else to describe them ?) have again taken the world by surprised. A few months after launching Snapvillage.com, they have posted a new contributor agreement, effective August 31, 2007, but only posted a month later, on September 27. Most of the contract is all about changing the legal name of Snapvillage, and adding some very threatening comments that is not particularly contributor-friendly. One would think that if you have a UGC company, you would have an agreement that doesn’t scares the pants out of those Users. Corbis is afraid of no one, not even its own contributors who find themselves forced to fly to Ireland if they need to sue Snapvillage and pay all legal fees even if they win. Furthermore, the agreement makes no efforts to be readable by the common man. Quite the opposite. So much for being user friendly.

However, the really interesting part is that the whole company has been legally moved to Ireland, under a shell company:

SnapVillage Ltd.
Attn: Matsack Trust Limited
70 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay
Dublin 2
Ireland

The Matsack company websites clearly specifies : Our in-house company Matsack Trust Limited acts as Company Secretary for several hundred client companies, comprising public, private, unlimited companies …

Mmm…Now everyone knows that Corbis will do anything to protect its very wealthy and only stockholder, Bill Gates, from any possible liabilities. Fair enough. This agreement does not even mention Corbis at all. But Ireland ? and a empty company ? Well, an article on the American Chamber of Commerce explains it all :

“These [benefits] include Ireland’s open and transparent tax regime, a standard 12.5% corporation tax rate which applies to all companies. Equally important are the double taxation agreements with 44 countries and the favourable [sic] tax incentives given to intellectual property and to Research & Development investment. ”

A tax shelter. Apparently, Corbis’ idea of making a profit is to pay less taxes overall, and none in the USA at all.

Talking about contracts, I was lucky enough to see the one offered by Moodboard ( the one with the cool website). It demands, from a professional photographers, a 10 year, worldwide exclusive agreement with a 20 % pay off.

Even the sleaziest microstock agreement does not fall that low. What is it, I must ask, that Moodboard does with these images that justify them to take a whopping 80 % ? We are talking about images that they have not produced, paid for, arranged, edited, or even captioned and that they intend to license at a midstock price. And who in their right mind would ever sign this ? Where are the EPUK guys when you need them ? The SAA , ASMP and other “P” named association ? how can they tolerate this under the same Union Jack flag ? What is the Queen doing about this ?

Posted in Midstock, license, No sense, finance, getty, corbis, Royalty free | Print | 3 Comments »