“This is our company together.”

Daryl Lang is a lucky guy. He gets invited to Corbis’s secret meeting on rooftops. And not me. I wonder why ?

Corbis executive team, apparently out for a week-end stroll, decided to inform some lost contributors that, in effort to make the company profitable, after only  15 years of trying, they would cut photographers royalties. Their logic is simple. After an apparently doom and gloom presentation about the future of the industry, how it will shrink to a peanut size, they declare that the only solution is to reduce the commission pay-out to photographers.

Make sense for a Starbucks Latte induced Seattle executive .

The logic is clear cut:   “we (Corbis) expect less revenue thus we will give you ( photographers) even less. After all, we are in it together.” However, there will be no salary cut for the senior management . If Steve Davis legacy is intact, the current CEO must be close to $800,000 a year with other senior execs making in the $400,000. But their salaries will no be touched. After all, continuing to run a company that has NEVER posted a profit and making sure it doesn’t should be rewarded well.

The rooftop meeting apparently welcomed a slide show by Mr Shenk who, according to that lucky, lucky Daryl Lang “  …forecasted that the total stock image licensing business will fall from $2.3 billion dollars in 2007 to $2.2 billion in 2011.”

No mentioned was made about the source of these wacky pretty numbers and what they included or didn’t. But what it shows is that Corbis has no intention of taking more market shares and will just ride the wave of this downfall. Cool !!. What a great company that is. They cut staff, they cut royalty to “some” photographers, the ones apparently most impacted by Corbis lack of sales, and they announce that they will do nothing to grow. However, they will keep more of what is left.

No one mentioned, for example, the web ready Corbis-Veer new pricing at $40, $9 less then Getty’s . It would have been nice to ask if this was a company wide policy to slash prices too.

The leisure, casual, dress-down-Friday meeting was apparently a new corporate attempt to make contributing photographers swallow a hard pill. And it seems it will work. Pro stockers, desperate to make any revenue at all, will seemingly accept anything these days. Even the fact that they could make 70% royalty if they moved to Snapvillage, the midstock arm of Corbis, or if they switch to shooting celebrity portraits and belong to the Outline brand.

There is a class system being instituted at the Bill Gates photo agency with photographers receiving different types of royalty based on what they shoot. You are a complete amateur, you get 70% of a growing market. You are a season pro, you get 40% of a declining one.

It is doubtful that any photographers will leave the paper tiger, as there are no alternatives anymore. If anything, Getty will continue to trim its contributing sources in order to keep the best. With the successive failure of all co op photo agencies models, the ineffectiveness of the trade associations and the impossible tasks left to the medium size agencies, its a grim horizon facing pro stockers. But then again, it always was:  “This is our company together.” Ya, right.

This entry was posted on October 26, 2008 at 7:30 am and is filed under Midstock, Photoplus, commercial stock, prosumer, finance, getty, corbis, transaction, Royalty free. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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