May 30, 2008 by pmelcher.

In a predictive move, Uber microstock giant Istockphoto, owned by Getty, is launching a contributor-wide call for exclusivity. The 6 top microstock companies share about 90 to 95% of their photographer, thus their content. In order to leave the pack, anyone of them should request exclusivity in order to offer their image buyers something the others do not have. With 1.4 downloads per second ( General Motors only sells a car every 3 seconds), Istockphoto is in a very good position to dry up the contributors pool by sucking them in an exclusive relationship.

Obviously they will offer a higher commission in order to make the offer appealing and help their contributor compensate for their possible losses. It seems, from the outside at least, that unlike the Long Tail theory would like us to believe, most of the microstock sales comes from a pool, rather large, of the same contributors. Otherwise, Istock would have not bothered doing this move. If Istockphoto can take them out of the rest of the market they will certainly make their competition suffer,  a lot. They will also make it even more difficult for new companies to enter the microstock field, at least with pertinent content.

The reaction from competitors will be interesting to watch . They could go down the same path, declaring an exclusion war that will leave most contributors baffled and confused. One aspect of RF, and a strong one, is its non-exclusivity.Why be exclusive with a product that is sold on a non exclusive basis? After all, isn’t a big part of the microstock game in volume and not on a per image sale. Will an exclusivity with Istock generate enough sales to compensate those lost by leaving its competitor ?Only if a huge amount of contributors decide to make the move simultaneously forcing image buyers to follow them. If 6 or 7 photographers decide to pull out their images from other platforms, there will be not effect. If thousands do so, then image buyers will have no other choice to go where the choice is. Either way, Istock cannot loose.

Some contributors might, however.

And for those who are still confused on how successful microstock is, this traffic ranking from Alexa should help them visual it:

Even Getty Images, with all its fire power cannot even come close to Istock and barely makes it over Dreamstime. Corbis and Jupiter don’t even have a chance. As traditional stock companies continue their stop loss policies, as beautifully explained by Julia Dudnik Stern in Chasing Lost Business Ignores New Markets on sellingstock.com ( subscription only), they fail to understand that they are fighting the battle in the wrong battlefield.

Ever thought why most microstock companies are not attending CEPIC, PACA and BAPLA congress ?

Posted in alexa, technology, commercial stock, Jupiter, CEPIC, getty, corbis, PACA, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

May 28, 2008 by pmelcher.

Apparently Corbis is in the process of building a three floor museum. Called the

Museum of Art for the Arts (MofAA)

Here are the plans, in a building situated right next door to the Corbis offices, at 912 Broadway, in New York.

It is unclear what will be included in this new space, besides maybe a bust in memory of Steve Davis the First, or a donation point to help Corbis be profitable. It could host a history of the destruction of many brilliant agencies. Or a final homage to commercial stock photography. What we know for sure is that it is certainly not funded by the companies profit.

It is interesting to see , however,  that the Bill Gates-owned company continues to be undecided as whether it wants to be a cultural institution or a profit making operation.

On a positive note, lets hope that this new space will host some of the buried treasure of photography that the Gargantua of the photo world has had buried in caves of Pennsylvania.

More info, ( not much) on this project here. I’ll let PDN finish the investigation. Which Daryl Lang did, brilliantly.

Posted in commercial stock, flickr, corbis | Print | No Comments »

May 27, 2008 by pmelcher.

Sometimes it is good to step out in order to better look in. In this 25 minutes video, Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, goes over image search, segmentation and other challenges that face anyone that is trying to built a better search.  What is interesting in this is how he speaks over and over about that its all about working with the data you have and not power coding. If you analyze the data you have ( data can be replaced by images, obviously) then you get a more agile platform.

In the case of photography, we tend to add more data ( think keywords) to an already huge set of information. We wrap data with more data, which never made sense. Google, TinEye, Riya and many other companies seem to have taken the lead in a area where photo agencies should have been the precursors. It is fascinating to see how many companies will sell you a Image Database management system that is really a keyword database management with images attached to them. None even use advance text search technology and let you suffer thought metada building on your own.

On the flip side, Image Buyers are still relying on a guessing game, trying to find the right image with a varied source of words. Very archaic, isn’t it?

Take a peak at the video here :

Posted in technology, Search, keyword, google, web 2.0 | Print | No Comments »

May 23, 2008 by pmelcher.

Just imagine. Just imagine if a company like Google, or Yahoo, or even Microsoft put their hand on microstock and social photography. Not only Istockphoto projections of $171 million revenue within a few years would be pulverized into unknown heights but it would be the end of both RM and traditional RF forever.

Why ?, you might ask. Simple. Right now, the only reason Istock is not growing faster is its lack of reach compared to better known sites like Google. Given that firepower, there is absolutely no reason why the whole market not tip over into a microstock Tsunami.  Let’s face it, Rights Managed is a badly protected island. And part of its protection came from the purposely shallow amount of choice. A lack of choice is what makes  RM potentially valuable, or what others call “bleeding edge” photography. Thus, out of a pool of 10 images, it is important to secure exclusivity. Out of a pool of millions, who cares?

Furthermore, it would be so simple to “retire” an image automatically for a higher price, thus making that image exclusive by automation.

Why would anyone  consider putting their images anywhere else than on Google Stock ? Already, everyone, from photographers to photoagency are taking night courses in  SEO to pump up their ranking. Most will buy huge amounts of adwords. If Google opens the gates and starts welcoming images in order to license them, there will be no holding back. From no one. It would be an act of suicide not to be part of it.  And since microstock pricing has now set the tone for commercial usage pricing, everyone will seek the low-priced volume sale. And, besides the user generated sites, no one will survive.

RF would quickly become  standard and no one would even bother with any other of those complicated and boring licensing  models. The only way for agencies and photographers to survive will be to jump, or stay, on the assignment peak. Those who have created a market for their photography, their personal work ~ the way professional photography first started~will continue to be untouched by this whole stock mess.

Not sure this will happen ? Well, think about it. Why did Getty go private ? and more important, why do you think someone paid $2.5 billion for it ? So it can watch it grow slowly like a small pet kitten ? Not their style. And what do you think will happen when Newscorp, Google, Yahoo, AOL and others feel they have managed to control most of the channels. What will be their next target to increase their appeal to advertisers ? Content, you said ? Indeed. By having the most compelling content, eyeballs will be attracted. And who has the highest volume of well targeted eyeballs will sell the most ads. Like it used to be with the TV network. But this next battle is happening online and will include stills.

Hopefully, some will stop asking me why I think this industry has not yet seen the worst ( or best) of it. Why there is no more reasons to attend Cepic or PACA congress. The waters are retreating already and I am no fool.

Posted in google, Midstock, technology, commercial stock, web 2.0, CEPIC, Royalty free, getty, transaction, PACA, Microstock | Print | 4 Comments »

May 20, 2008 by pmelcher.

I have to apologize. I really do. I usually do not do that. I respect other people’s opinion, as long as they are intelligent ones. But for a few months I have been reading the new blog launched by Photoshelter to go along their Collection. They hired a full time blogger, it seems, which is a great idea, and she has been steady at shooting out blogs at rapid fire speed.

And, as anything else related to photography, I pay attention. But after weeks on, I am still baffled. I do not understand a word she is writing and who she is talking about. Nada, zilch.

I thought I knew a little bit about photography being born in this business and spending most of my awake moments dealing with some aspect of it. I thought I had been a fortunate member of the human race because I have seen so many great pictures in my life that it would hard for anyone to compete.

But when I read her blog, I have no idea what and who she is talking about…really.. I had heard there was a “fine art” photography world out there created on Ansel Adams memory path but had never seen it so active. Didn’t know it was so intense. She even gets really excited when she sits on the laps of a photographer that takes close-ups of green stuff growing up in her garden.

See, in Europe, photography is not considered a fine art and there is no fine art school or courses. There is commercial stock and editorial, but nothing to encourage people to take pictures for wall hanging. Of course, there has been photographers like Jean Paul Sieff and others that have somewhat played around with the concept, but really, more exception than the rule.

But now I see the light. And I am baffled. Nothing against this person who appears to be a nice, smart, well educated and certainly photo enthusiast, but I am really, seriously baffled. The last shock was today when this image ( trust me, not the worst) was shown as part of her favorite :

I spend the day thinking about it and other images posted on that blog. I cannot make sense of why anyone would think it is a good, or great photograph. I might by unbashfully practical but it is a close-up of a badly cooked egg. The lighting is not exceptional, the subject is boring, there is nothing there for me to get excited. about. Not even shocked. Just plainly bored. Sure, for someone that has a big Loft in New York with a 20 Feet ceiling, this image on a really big big print my look cool for a while ( does it come with the smell ?). But to me, hooked on photography, it is just an egg.

Don’t take me wrong : I am really, really glad that there is not just one taste in photography. I understand that I might not like all that is liked by my peers. But that blog has published such a series of awful pictures, I had to say something. And, all this with an incessant name dropping of people I have never, ever heard of.

Every time I read the blog, I feel I open the wrong door and fell into the middle of a party I was not invited to. And for a good reason, I don’t know anyone.

Again, I have an incredible respect for the author of the blog. The only reason I bring it up it is because it is associated to Photoshelter, a commercial entity who is trying to  license images. I would have thought the blog would be related. But it is so off into another unknown direction that I read it with my jaw dropping thinking ” What the hell are they talking about?”.

And how long can they keep posting images of empty dark greenish fields with a dead tree somewhere in the horizon and a little paper wraps on the ground?

Is that what the Photoshelter collection is trying to sell ?

As that blog says…off they go to LOOK3… Hopefully for them they might finally make  it to Eggland !!!

Posted in focus, license, No sense, web 2.0, prosumer | Print | 2 Comments »

May 17, 2008 by pmelcher.

Short commentary by the world press winners about their winning images :

Posted in magazine, technology, multimedia, photojournalism, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »

May 16, 2008 by pmelcher.

  Fotolia, one of the big six microstock company, has somewhat launched the Reseller API, thus reinventing the agency-subagency model. In a nutshell, anyone can start representing Fotolia tomorrow under another brand without actually hosting any images. The API allows you to pretend you are hosting while every search and download is actually done behind the scenes on the Fotolia server. You just build the frame. The unknown, for now, is how the revenue sharing is done. I believe that in the other reseller API models they have, it is 10% of all sales. It just might be the same. Thus, for an image sold for $5 , the “API subagent” would get $ 0.5 ( 10%) , Fotolia’s  $2.00 (their commission is 50% for an exclusive photographer minus the 10% taken by the API Subagent)  and the rest goes to the contributor.

It is a good deal for Fotolia and for the contributors. Both would do nothing more for an increase of revenue. The API subagent, on the other hand, would have to pedal hard to generate substential revenues even if his cost of entry would be exceptionnally low.

One notable change here is the API. Unlike traditional RF companies that still distribute their images to their subagent via CD , FTP or DVD’s  and have their library replicated many times around the world, this model is much, much cheaper. Fotolia will need strong servers to support the huge load increase but they must have calculated they will still come out ahead. After all, the cost of computer power is going down.  It is a model close to what AGE Fotostock has had on the market for a while with their THP fotoservice , an upload once, distribute multiple time central database. The issue  with THP, according to some of its users,  has always been that AGE tinkers with the search engine so that the AGE production always comes out first on any search.

However, the idea of not replicating your database is the next big step in photo agency distribution. In some places, the cost of image distribution to subagents reaches in the hundreds of thousand of dollars  a month with absolutely no guarantee of sales. Most of the time, these package of images are violently edited down making the cost of getting an image to an international market even more expensive. By using an API, like Fotolia, there is no editing and no fees. Picturemaxx and other companies offer this virtual API to existing photo agencies. An agency like Mauritius Images in Germany hardly host any images of its partners anymore relying only on direct connections.

So, what of our friends at Fotolia: Well, they will dilute their brand, one could argue. but with 90% of their content also available on Istock, Dreamstime, Shutterstock and others, who cares ? They have few exclusives thus do not need to protect their brand so much. They will certainly save in marketing cost, the highest channel of expenditure in any microstock agency and probably have an easier entry in smaller markets. It is easy now for someone located in Indonesia, for example, to launch a full-blown microstock agency. It will much more expansive for Istock to customize their interface for the same market.

Is Fotolia going will thus dominate the microstock world ? The subagent model is not new and the past has shown that, while it is the least expensive way to enter a foreign market, it is no guarantee of world supremacy. Everyone in the traditional RF universe uses multiple distributors worldwide with more or less success. There is more to invading a market than the ease of reach. You also need the pertinent content and the right relationship. And even when ImageBank used the franchise model, while doing well, it did not protect them from the arrivals other, better, stronger competitors like Tony Stone.

Furthermore, Fotolia might just cannibalize itself, with those resellers taking their direct clients away, eating itself from the inside. Certainly not what they are looking for as they would end up loosing revenue. It will be interesting to see what type of agreement they put in place ( not on their website at this time).

Finally, the contributors: Fotolia’s agreement does not mention anything at all. It is not  an issue currently addressed in the “agreement”. Thus I can upload images to Fotolia today and have my images sold by someone else. Is that a problem ? In copyright law yes, but I doubt that microstoshooters will see added revenue with no extra work as something negative.

After all, in this world, the more distribution channels, the better.

Posted in alexa, technology, license, finance, transaction, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

May 15, 2008 by pmelcher.

Curators, not photographers, are the stars of the first New York Photo Festival. The poster says it all, four names, big black bold letters, it’s a curator festival, photographers only welcomed to drop by and admire. Situated all around the creators’ neighborhood (Brooklyn), Powerhouse and VII, the festival of “very important images” is a tribute to beautiful pictures on a wall. A kind of mix between fine art photography ( whatever that is ) and intellectually profound photojournalism. There is a lot of thought behind each image and sometimes you feel there is more thought than talent.

This type of photography, and the world around it, is in direct competition with painter or sculpture galleries that love to explain minimalism with grandiloquent words. It’s more about being seen than seeing. Sometimes I wonder what it has to do with photography besides the fact that it was taken with a camera. The motto here is, the more you wonder at what you are looking at, the more the picture is a success.

There is also a lot of ego in this festival. So much so, that one should bring a knife to cut through those excessive layers of self righteousness.  It is as if photography by itself is not enough and one needs to become something, someone in order to make the images more interesting.  Those poor images dangling on a wall seem lonely when no one is there to explain their “deep” significance. They are even lonelier after someone does. There is also a lot of vanity, this sort of social importance of who you know and who knows you  that fill these rooms. A sort of gentrification of  the photography world where you can feel pushed out if you are not in the know of who is hot and who is not.

Everyone and anyone wants to be included in everything while reserving the right to refuse any invitation. The group that becomes the most famously exclusive becomes the most popular. The NY Photo festival feels a bit like that. Even Darryl Lang has a hard time showing images on his daily video feeds. This festival is all about people who organized it, not really about photography.

If an image puzzles you as to why it was selected, don’t ask. You will be looked upon as a complete idiot and forever give up your chance of being part of those “in the know”. Sometimes you wonder if the photographers even know why they have been selected.

However, with all this said, it is a great idea to have launched this festival. Hopefully, it will mature to be wider instead of so eclectic. It will encompass other neighborhoods and different photography , and not try to transform photography into a religion with self-elected priests. It will maybe include more “reachable” images, so that those who are not in this business can enjoy it too. I do not know if it is an reverse effect of Flickr and other Photobucket that some seem to try to take photography out of the masses hands and create exclusive, by membership-only, temples. This festival sure feels this way to us, even if some amateur photography is being shown. It has this “us versus them” scent to it, as if to say : the crowd doesn’t decide, we decide.

There is much to see and probably more to hear and I do look forward to seeing more . To me, the more photography is celebrated, the better, even if I do not always agree with the way it is done. As a famous saying says, “taste and color are two things you should never argue about”. Kudos to the organizers.

Posted in lens, copyright, editorial | Print | No Comments »

May 12, 2008 by pmelcher.

Once again, JupiterMedia has released its quarterly results. Once again they are they loosing money on the photo side ( JupiterImages). Out of the big three , Corbis, Jupiter and Getty, only one has posted profits. Corbis is notoriously a cash hungry beast with a huge appetite for cost while Jupiter seems to be on an ever growing decline. Only Getty Images has been able to pull off the acquisition/consolidation scheme. Not without hurting. No longer the aggressive growth company, it was brutally manhandled by Wall Street and had to retreat into the protective hands of an equity investment company that took it out of the public playground.

There is a lot of resentment inside Guetty these days. Photographers are unhappy : Commercial stock RM revenues are declining while there is too many celebrity photographers rubbing elbows at every event. Something has got to give and it will be a no surprise to see it reduce its snapper staff as soon as the public doors are closed. 2008 will not be a good year for the Getty staff in general.

However, what is causing these monopoly hungry corporation to fail ? A few things:

- No passion : Only Jonathan Klein seems to be passionate about photography. Do you ever see Jupiter’s CEO at any industry event ? or Corbis new CEO ? what about those A21 guys?  NEVER. They sell images like others sell socks: With a passionate disinterest. Like a bunch of accountants recently named CEO.

- A dry corporate culture. It takes dedication to take and license images. It is not a 9 to 5 job. Walk in at the office of any of these companies and you will see rows of cubicles populated by clock-watching workers spending more time surfing job sites then their own. Most of the staff in these photo factories are in a transition job, passionately looking for something else. The only passion you see, or feel, is the passion to get promoted before your colleague. Walk into small or medium agency and everyone is ready to cut their arm to make sure it will work.

- A fundamental misdirection:  Mark Getty has a long term plan that fits in a very long term perception of the world economy. The others just want to make money. Even Bill Gates’ plan was a bit more sophisticated than just making money. Money is what happens when your plan is succesful, not the opposite. I never heard Meckler or Schenk formulate a vision besides “we will be profitable one day”.

- A complete lack of risk taking: Corporation are all about control, prediction and risk management. Everything photography is not.  Spending fortunes on marketing is just not enough. You still need the content. But understanding what is the right content is not something so easily predictable. It is not, for example, because you purchase a successful brand that it will continue to be successful. Without taking risk there cannot be a succesful photo agency. Its all about being one step ahead of picture buyers who themselves are not sure where they are going before they get there.

One could continue on and on why these business structure are inadequate for the photography world. Everyone knows that Jupiter Images is for sale for lack of being successful. No one is foolish enough to believe that Corbis will ever be succesful with its current structure. They will only obtain profitability by downsizing and reducing themselves.  A21, we will not comment as its days are numbered. There is no surprises in these quarterly reports anymore and I doubt there will ever be anymore. The non performers are going to not performed as Getty Images will position itself to be acquired by one of the media giants such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft when these will realize that after owning the distribution channels they will need to control content. As Mark Getty very rightly said ” IP ( intellectual property)  is the oil of the 21th century”.

Posted in Search, Jupiter, celebrity, commercial stock, yahoo, google, getty, corbis, finance, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »

May 9, 2008 by pmelcher.

First, I have to admit I have always been a big fan of everything that comes out of the Ideeplex in Toronto. These guys have the best image tracking system I have ever seen, PixId, already used by the top photo agencies in the world to save countless hours in their billing process. They have a visual search that is incomparable and might just be the secret weapon of the Alamy armada. They also have a color search that is the most proficient out there . You can see and play with all of them in their lab section. These guys are doing for photography what Einstein did for physics, making it progress by leaps and bounds. If you are not using one of Idee’s services these days, you  have a big problem.

So when Idee announced the beta version of their image search earlier this week, called TinEye, I could not wait to play with it. Premise is simple: Take an image that you either upload or find on a website and ask Tineye to  seek any place it is published. That would seem simple enough, but Tineye will also find that image, wether its been cropped, resized, re colored, twisted, bended, you name it. Even with major (and we are talking major) alteration, Tineye will find it. Alterations that would make a human eye miss it. Impressive. very impressive.

That image:

brought up this image, among many others:

Because it is still in Beta, the results are not impressive in numbers. They have only indexed half a billion images and are in the process of indexing the rest. Hey, Google was not built in one day either. If you live near Toronto, you probably can see the smoke coming out of the Ideeplex. It’s those server crunching data under the watchful eyes of master genius CTO Paul Bloore. Or could it be from CEO Leila Boujnane head, fuming with impatience because it is not finished yet ?

I played with many different types of images, using the cool Firefox plug in that lets you perform a search without leaving the site you are visiting.Hard to stop and I know I will continue to use it intensively.

So what it is good for ? Well, for one, speaking of Orphan Work, this image search engine that could will find all usage of an image, including, very certainly, the owner of the image.  It is going to much, much harder to claim that an image is orphan with this guy. But it can do much more. Think of all those micro and midstock  photographers who would love to see where their images have been used. Same with those CC happy Flickr members. Pro photographers will be able to keep a watchful eye over their agencies, as well as agencies can keep a watchful eye for unauthorized usage (Picscout, beware ).

There are many other potential for this free image search which suddenly puts google image into the medieval ages. And it will be a pleasure to watch and grow and mature. There is no doubt this will be one of the biggest success of the internet in recent years. Because people are fed up of searching for images with text. It just doesn’t make any sense. This is just the beginning of the end of keywording, the fall of the controlled vocabulary despotism.

Tineye returns exact matches, for the time being, and that is  maybe its most important shortcoming. It will return the same exact image and not similar. But knowing these guys, that will not last long, and the option to return images that look like the image you are using shouldn’t be that far.

If you have a chance, jump on this as soon as you can. They are taking suggestions and I am sure would love to hear your. It is time to make history . ( oh no, I sound like Obama now…)

Either way, these guys have a reputation: If it is not perfect, its not finished. So, do not expect them to open Tineye to the public before every little crumb of image is properly indexed.

Posted in idee, Canada, technology, copyright, license, editorial, web 2.0, Search, Microstock | Print | No Comments »