The princess’s price

October 23, 2008 by pmelcher.

At the eve of the PACA meeting, where small business owners of the RM and RF photo industry meet twice a year o complain about the state of the industry, Jupiter media just announced that it was dropping the ball and selling all to almighty Getty. Not a fire sale but very close. Jupiter Media stock had been trailing at subterranean levels the last few months and usually vocal CEO Meckler had gone silent and into hiding.

Since the last screw up where the New York Post ( some talk about an internal leak done on purpose to get Corbis to bid) had reveal the potential transaction, it seems quite evident that Meckler chose to avoid writing anything that could damage this second round of talks.

Boy, someone must be biting their nails now. $ 96 million is not badbut certainly not what Getty would have paid a couple of years ago. Furthermore, while it could have been interesting for Getty to keep the brand alive at that time, it certainly not so appealing now. Finally, this makes Getty the leader in Microstock with two top brands, Istock and StockXchnge.

There will be very heated debate at the PACA reunion for all does living in the crumbs left by Getty. The last of the public photo agency ( if we do not count A21) has been absorbed by the crippling giant, making Corbis’ and others stay in the business even less evident. With such firepower and extensive content, Getty is now in a real position to completely asphyxiate the US market and maybe others.

After deleting redundancies, this acquisition will make it nearly impossible for a stock photographers to be successful outside any of Getty’s brand, and for those within,  impossible to negotiate a fair treatment.

It will be interesting to see how the stormtroopers of SAA will react, as well as the surviving independent brand. Sure, there will always be the “niche” market. But how easy will it be for Getty to filled those too if they think there is a profit to be made.

Finally, the last word is always in the customers mouth. Surely, as the content is there and the pricing adequate, they should not care. However, big corporation have been known to make mistakes and Getty is part of those.

The failure of Jupiter to succeed in this industry is another example of how inadequate the corporate world is when dealing with the ever changing world. Getty’s domination of the commercial stock business is also, indeed, scary and troublesome, but yet, not guaranteed.

The only sure thing is that this PACA meeting will be very heated..if not desperate.

Posted in commercial stock, Jupiter, finance, corbis, getty | Print | 3 Comments »