March 27, 2009 by pmelcher.

Lots of people have asked what to do in a down economy ? Some answer with what not to do, like slashing prices, but no one really offers a solution. Yet, answers are everywhere. I know of at least 2 photographers that had a hard time selling their images who created a  multi-million market for themselves and many others.

Bruce Livingston, recently retired from Getty images started Istockphoto by putting some of his images on it and trading them with others. Surprised by its popularity, he decided to charge, not really to make money, but to pay for his hosting bills. He thus invented microstock.  Another ” failed” photographer, Jon Oringer, started Shutterstock with 30,000 of his own images, mostly because he couldn’t get accepted in a traditional stock agency. Both are doing quite well as per the graph below.

Unlike many others, they didn’t rely on traditional outlets to license theirs and others images. Instead they reinvented themselves, and the market.

Others are following the same path. Celebrity photo agency Splashnews, for example, also seeing a slump in image sales, has decided to venture in other markets. They are currently at MIP TV in Cannes selling a full blown TV show based on their production. Not a bad idea at all.

Instead of scratching their heads or worse, dropping their arm to the ground in complete despair, these guys have taken matters in their own hands and have create a new offering that taps in their core business. This should be a good pointer to those who have not yet understood that survival resides in inventiveness and creative solution.

The pattern here is that all of these entrepreneurs have or are going directly to the consumers, a market always avoided by the photo industry. Even Getty Images, with its Jamd.com, has reach half a million visitors and is probably starting to  see substantial revenues. If publications are not doing well, it does not mean the public does not want to see your images.

Posted in alexa, technology, commercial stock, celebrity, multimedia, Royalty free, getty, web 2.0, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

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 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 | 1 Comment »

April 24, 2008 by pmelcher.

Image details: Pope Benedict XVI Celebrates Mass At Yankee Stadium served by picapp.com

It is a blessing these days to see a company that grows by listening to its criticism. Ad supported licensing company Picapp has recently revamped its site and has made some good improvements.  First and foremost, you can decide if you want or not that little pop up figure they call picaboo. You can also choose the size of the image you want to post and what type of an animation.

Thus after selecting your image, you can select between a goofy interface to a more serious one. What the people needed.

A quick down and dirty Alexa ranking shows Picapp  ahead of competitor Gumgum in traffic. No big surprise as they started with a big bang using the Getty  trampoline.

The real question is why did neither of these companies have open their service to individuals.

Sure, it is nice to have access to images from pros, but what about the huge pool of amateurs. This licensing model would much better serve the Flickr community than anyone else. After all, it would be a great replacement to the useless Creative Common scheme. ” here, use my picture for free, in exchange for which I get a cut on ads”. Fair enough, no ?

But neither Flickr, Photobucket, Smugmug and other mass photo storage platform will allow their content to be duplicate on either the Picapp or Gumgum server. The technology has to come to them. And that is the biggest shortcoming of both companies. Because their technology is neither proprietary neither that hard to create.

The second short coming is that neither offer the publisher any income for posting these images. Even the slightest cut would make either company immediately attractive. Imagine, get paid to post images !! Someone is bound to do it.

I can foresee very soon many  agencies offering the same type of licensing model from within their own site, bypassing the “Picgum” middle man.It would not be a problem for Flickr to add that option too. So it leaves both companies in breathless race to create enough critical mass of content to become indispensable. One, Picapp, has concentrate on overall volume, while the other, GumGum, seems to concentrate on just celebrity oriented content.

Let’s see what the future brings them. Either way, a very interesting race to watch.

Photo Licensing by GumGum | © PacificCoastNews

Posted in celebrity, copyright, alexa, technology, gumgum, license, keyword, filter, editorial, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, getty | Print | No Comments »

January 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

Beyond the flashy fancy mini sites that Corbis and Getty Images have throwned to press release hungry industry newsletter and blog sites, I did a little search of my own.

If you click on any or all of these icons below, you will probably find some of the most amazing and less seen USA Election coverage. There is an advantage of being a photographer from a non “accredited” agency like Reuters/EPA for Corbis and Getty/AFP for Getty: you have no rules to follow and you get to shoot what you want.

It makes for some pretty amazing images: (click on any logo below and enjoy)

These are only a few. No Press releases. No mini sites. Just hard and pure work. VII, DigitalRailroad, Magnum, Contact Press and others had not yet made anything visible as I was writing this entry. I am sure they will. There has never been an election like this in the USA before and probably will never be again. While Corbis and Getty have gone the wire service way ( 100 photos a day covering everything and nothing), these guys are going both for the historical and the emotional route. Because the next president of the United States of America, whether the rest of the world likes it or not, is going to be the major news for the next 8 years.

Minimum.

I agree with my friend Pino Granata, Photography without passion is not photography, it’s only bored microstock.

Posted in SIPA, TIME, newspaper, alexa, Cnn, magazine, keyword, google, news, corbis, editorial, wire service, photojournalism, getty | Print | No Comments »

November 27, 2007 by pmelcher.

Just a quick snapshot of the evolution of traffic on the big three ( Corbis, Getty and Jupiter ) + Istockphoto. For those who were wondering where their traffic was going, here is a good indication.

Since Alexa rankings can be a little tricky since they rely only on people who have downloaded the Alexa toolbar, I ran the same analysis on competition site compete.com:

Now, if we take data from both we see:

- Istockphoto is growing and growing fast. It has more traffic than any of the big three. It doesn’t mean, however, that they have more sales but it certainly helps.

- JupiterImages is growing. In both charts. We could conclude that it  is a confirmation of Alan Meckler startegy.

- GettyImages, besides Istockphoto.com, is dropping. In both charts. In the Compete.com chart, JupiterImages  has actually more traffic than  Getty.

- Corbis is flat.

What does this all mean ? Well, not much really. Both Compete.com and Alexa.com work by tracking usages pattern of anyone who has downloaded their plug ins. These plug ins are mostly used by individuals at home because most companies will not allow you to download anything on your office computers. Furthermore, heavy web users, like image buyers, tend to avoid anything that would slow down their surfing experience, especially anything that tracks their movements.

So why post it ? Because I love graphs / charts.  These look very dramatic, don’t you think? it really looks like the whole commercial stock industry has gone Istockphoto crazy. But then, maybe it has.

Posted in Jupiter, alexa, No sense, corbis, getty, Microstock | Print | No Comments »