A cacophony of frenzy sellers

It is not the amount of images available to image buyers that is an issue these days, its the proliferation of places you can purchase them from.

It used to be quite expensive to set up a photo agency, back then, as everything was a manual process. It needed a lot of manpower and physical actions to get images in and out the door. Today, thanks to technology, it cost less than $100 to set up and run a fully functional website with a search engine and basic download.

So everyone is doing it. From photographers to Eastern Europeans geeks, it’s a licensing fiesta of multicolored “photo agencies’, a super abundance of sellers, like a giant marketplace gone wild. People are peddling anything for any price and are marveled when they sell one image. They turn “pro” when they sell two, they become “legends” from three and beyond.

As much as it takes years of training to take great pictures, as much as it takes years to know and understand how to sell images. Lured by a ridiculously low cost of entry, everyone with a camera thinks they can become a master seller. They get easily confused by the “field of dreams” business model : “If I built it, they will come”.

Well, they do not come…so they go to step two. The ” I walked on my long tail”  business model : I will make a lot on money on selling at very low price but in huge volume.

Well, that doesn’t really work either. The low pricing is never, ever compensated by high volumes. It remains a hope in the business horizon. That perpetual El Dorado, the land of million and billion of $1 dollar downloads.

Step three is the ” hate your neighbor” business model. You did everything to create a perfect agency with a blazing sexy, top the edge website but no one buys, so it can’t be your fault. Must be that stupid competition. They don’t know what they are doing.

After that, there are numerous additional steps. Like the “Google” business model. If I build a super fast, super good search engine, everyone will come to my website. Or the “wacky pricing” business model : If I find a new way to charge for usage, regardless of what it is, people will rush to my website. Hey, why don’t I let them decide their pricing.

Image buyers are overwhelmed, not by the huge amount of images, but rather the huge amount of places they can licensed them from. Everywhere they turn, there is a new place to find images. They must be flooded by a cacophony of emails requesting their attention. Soon, they will be invaded by image stock sellers as they leave their houses in the morning.

What makes it worst is more and more frequently, it is the same images you find at different places, sometimes for a different price.

The irony of it all is that 10 years ago, Corbis and Getty images had set themselves the target to consolidate and dominate the market once and for all. The result ? There has never been, in the history of photography, so many places you can get images from.

Regardless of all these pseudo marketing schemes everyone seems to put it place, selling pictures is really not that hard:

You just need to have the pictures that someone needs.

This entry was posted on June 29, 2009 at 11:52 am and is filed under No sense, license, technology, commercial stock, google, finance, Royalty free, getty, corbis, editorial, Microstock. 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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