December 31, 2010 by pmelcher.

Feel small ?

From Gerald Holubowicz  Ebook : Sortir du Cadre (Think Wider) – Future of photojournalism.

(* for 2010)

Posted in magazine, license, technology, commercial stock, Social Media, web 2.0, prosumer, getty, corbis, editorial, flickr, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

December 10, 2010 by pmelcher.

The two sides of Getty Images :

Getty images : “we will drown you with our images”

Getty Images : Cool Year in review

Posted in multimedia, celebrity, photojournalism, slideshow, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

December 9, 2010 by pmelcher.

VII to Corbis is like Magnum to OnRequest and falls into the “what where they thinking ( drinking ?)” category. But hey, who are we to judge. If they think it’s better for their business then let’s give them a cheer. Up to now VII has always been quite savvy in their business decision so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt ( we couldn’t do that with Corbis, could we ?)

But, that is not the important part of this news. What is important here is what we had wrote about a few years back. More and more, producing photo agencies, those that have a sizable roster of  producing photographers have diminished their own internal sales team in favor of agreements with mega suppliers. Earlier, we saw what is left of Gamma drop all of it’s images into the hands of  Getty images. And we could go on with other examples.

Started mostly in the RF area , extended to Commercial Stock RM collection, it is now entering the editorial. The Wal Martisation of the photo industry. Here are the reasons :

- The full  automatisation of sales is not happening, not in  RM. As much as one could take pictures for an entire life without ever talking to a customer in the RF world, the RM world still needs a lot of hands on.

- As licensing prices are dropping worldwide, maintaining a human based sales force is more costly  and less profitable.

So, what does these small to medium photo agencies do ? They engage their collection with existing large to extremely large sales platform and distributors, like Getty, Corbis or AP who already have a huge sales force . These benefit from an economy of scale that the little ones cannot afford.

Thousands upon thousands of staffers that can answer phones, negotiate, discount, read endless contracts and optimize.

It is ironic that those who are responsible for the depreciation in the value of images are actually the ones benefiting from it. The more licensing prices fall, the more the Getty’s and other will see collection coming to them for sales distribution.

Until when? Until the market will be separated in two. The creators and the distributors. Small entities of photographers regrouped in common interest units on one side and large to extra large sales platforms on the other. It’s all benefit for the sales platforms since they have no cost of production to cover in their prices. Think Istockphoto. Think Wal Mart.

So, next time you see another agency sign up for sales distribution with one of the big ones, think how much photography will become concentrated in the hands of a few that will able to set any condition they feel would benefit them. And only them.

Posted in finance, photojournalism, license, commercial stock, transaction, editorial, Royalty free, getty, corbis, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

November 6, 2010 by pmelcher.

Always dreamed to be a Getty contributor but could get yourself accepted? Or did you wish your images screamed “come and purchase, this is dirt cheap ” ? Or you simply thought the Getty Images logo was so beautiful that you had to photograph it over and over ? Well, so did Getty.

Thanks to those genius in marketing,  you can now include a 3D plastic glass self-supporting Getty Images logo in all your images and thus give them your rights without even signing anywhere. In the spirit of ” we own your every images, everywhere”, they built this ugly little logo holding stand that they then decided to place in front of famous landmarks  photo motifs so that anyone could include their logo in their images. How cool is that ?

Instead of your girlfriends, kids, parents, best friends posing in front of a famous building, you can have the Getty Images logo posing.  We couldn’t think of anything more desirable than that. “look honey, I went to Berlin on vacation, visited all these famous places, euh..sorry Photo motifs, and captured them with the Getty logo in the top left of the frame !!!”

We can just imagine how the reaction of your peers will make you feel like a real, honest to G~d photographer.

“Why are you looking at me like that ?” ” Honey ? Honey ? say something..”

We have a tip for Getty Images : Why don’t you buy all famous monuments in the world and encrust your logo on them once and for all ? Not only you get credit every time someone takes a picture of it ( after all, didn’t you guys invented the Pyramids ?)  but you could charge exorbitant property releases . Why not have all your employees tattoo your logo on their foreheads ? If you dispatch them in all the happening places of the world, you can be sure no one can get an image of any event without having your freakin’ name in the frame? Why not beam your logo on the moon  a la Batman ? Is there any limit to your pathetic arrogance ?

Video here :

On a side note, the banks who own Getty images debt ( JPMorgan, GE Capital, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs ) have lowered the interest rates due to strong investor demand. ” Getty Images, a provider of photographs and music ( ..and super cool free standing plastic logos..), plans to use the proceeds from the $1.27 billion term loan, along with a $100 million revolver, to refinance debt and fund a dividend payment to its private equity owners, Hellman & Friedman and Farallon Capital Management.”

So, if you work at Getty and do not get a bonus this year, you should rejoice yourself by knowing that the owners of the company will, however, receive dividend on your hard work. Hey, and who knows, they could even let you pose next to their super cool free standing plastic logo  and become a photo motif yourself…..

Posted in commercial stock, Corpocrates, lens, technology, No sense, copyright, getty | Print | 2 Comments »

November 2, 2010 by pmelcher.

“His latest eye-tracking survey found that “big feel-good images that are purely decorative” are mostly ignored online, while stock photos or generic people are also intentionally disregarded. In contrast, when users know that a picture of a person is real they will engage with the image for extended periods of time.” from the New York Times

“Mr. Nielsen concludes with some advice to those using the Web to hawk products or content: “Invest in good photo shoots: a great photographer can add a fortune to your Web site’s business value.” After all, he notes, most sites are full of “fluff — of which there’s too much already on the Web.”

Posted in Good Enough, commercial stock, corbis, getty, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

October 28, 2010 by pmelcher.

Seems like all the news is coming from France these days. You would think they were all out in the streets protesting against having to work two more years, O but no, they are actually busy. Well Getty Images is busy.

Via a grandiloquent press release, they have just announced the distribution of the Gamma - Keystone collection for the whole world, besides France. For those of you who were not paying attention, Gamma Rapho Keystone used to be called Eyedea no longer than a year ago before sinking into bankruptcy. After weeks, months of negotiation, the discovery of a trust fund, alliance and dis-alliances, the liquidators managed to find a buyer in the  person of  Mr Lochon. Ex-photographer from Gamma in the 80’s, Lochon used his personal money to buy the company with the promise he would resuscitate it from the dead.  His plan ? Well, give it to Getty Image. As if Getty needed more content to distribute.

It’s a great deal for Getty. They didn’t have to buy anything thus no risks of being investigated for monopoly . They don’t have to scan, edit, or deal whatsoever with cranky mostly french photographers. Just sell the images and keep a cut . If they don’t sell anything, well, they don’t care, they haven’t spend a dime. For Lochon and Gamma - Keystone ? Well, not so good. Getty already has the Hutlon-Deutch archives ( some 80 million  images) as well as  what is left of Archive Images; Both trump Keystone historical content in size and content. Gamma’s content ? Well, it all depends on what gets scanned and how well.

The reason this deal went through ? Probably because Getty was to only one to ask. It is doubtful that AP or Reuters even approached Gamma Rapho . Corbis, freshly out the of dubious bankruptcy of Sygma, will probably never deal with anything French for centuries to come. What happens next? Little to nothing. Getty is now apparently in an aggressive strategy to represent as much content as possible, if only to take it out of its competition hands.

On a related note, the director of the French office of Getty Images continues in the tradition of making false statements when he proudly announces that Getty was the first agency to license an image online in 1995 . He’s got a good excuse, he wasn’t at Getty at the time so he’s just repeating what his corporate communicator told him to say. Finally, the real amusing part is that his portrait used to illustrate the article is credited “DR“. At least there is one constant : Corpocrates will remain corpocrates.

Posted in transaction, photojournalism, Corpocrates, editorial, france, corbis, law, getty | Print | 2 Comments »

October 24, 2010 by pmelcher.

Is Pixpalace involved in price fixing ? On a recent email send out by the company last week, Pixpalace, an online aggregation of photo agencies content similar to Newscom, asked it’s suppliers to agree on prices so it would be easier for publishers to purchase images. The intent is noble, the result is horrific.

Pixpalace has been trying to breach into the content aggregator market in the USA for a couple years, with little or no success. While they have grown in the amount of suppliers they mash up, 86 photo agencies at the last count, they have yet to demonstrate that they are actually a beneficial service for this industry.

Plagued with numerous glitches ( the system has been hacked recently and thousands of images stolen), they have also found that publishers in the United States are not  attracted to these type of platforms. One possible reason:

Any photo agency can sign up to add their images, including foreign photo agencies ( non US based) . The result ? a huge mish mash of doubtful quality with sub par metadata, often in a foreign language. Like Newscom, it has become a huge photo dumping ground where anything goes. Not really a resource/time saver for anyone.

Now, probably pushed by book publishers always looking for discount volume pricing, they are trying to convince their current 86 suppliers to agree to similar pricing. Armed with an Excel that appears to have been directly edited out of Getty images online price calculator, they strongly suggest for everyone to fall in line.

There is a lot of issues with the pricing and the rights that Pixpalace is suggesting everyone accepts, not the least is that price fixing is illegal in the United States. It also prices, for the exact same usage, commercial stock photography at four times higher than editorial . According to them, a photograph of a couple walking on the beach has four times the value of a picture taken of the war in Afghanistan. Wow.

It also treats, how quaint of them, digital rights  as a side thought of print publishing.

Pixpalace had the same issue in France, it’s country of origin. After being a succesful trading platform, it’s started getting involved in the pricing of the images they hosted, leading to the violent departure of it’s top suppliers and the creation of a competing platform, this time owned by photo agencies themselves.

There is a good chance that all of PixPalace suppliers who are not based in the USA will agree as they do not know the US market, creating a ” price dumping” situation and forcing others to follow in order to survive. There is a good chance that the no one will investigate the process for alleged price fixing. Finally, there is a good chance that  this will damage even more the marketplace thanks to a combination of ignorance, greed, incompetence and blindness, attributes that seem more and more frequent in the photo industry world.

Posted in technology, commercial stock, license, transaction, france, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

September 21, 2010 by pmelcher.

The rule is simple : be where your customers are. Applying it is much harder.

Sure, you can have a twitter account, and Facebook, and Linkedin and all that . But is that where your customers are ? Not really. They don’t really follow you on Twitter because they don’t want to, nor do they wish to exchange personal stories with you on Facebook ( if they even know you), they log into Linkedin once every few months  to find a number and quite frankly would really appreciate if you would stop spamming them with your blast emails.

Sure, you have a website. But so does billions of other people/companies/schools/institutions/churches/ airline companies and so on. A drop in the ocean doesn’t even begin to describe where your website/blog is right now. You can make that two drops in the ocean if you have a really good SEO.

So what to do asks the wise man ? Well, there is a nifty smart why to put your images in the face of image buyers in a very subtle smart way. It’s called Image Exchange and it is brought to you by Israeli company Picscout, previously in the copyright infringement detection industry.

How does it work ? Very simple. You, the image creator, send small version of your images into their central servers where they are fingerprinted for detection. Image Buyers, on their side, download a small plug in for Firefox or Explorer ( Soon Chrome, hopefully). Every time your image is seen on any website at whatever format, a small “i” icon appears on top of it. All they have to to is click on it and they can be redirected to your website .

The huge misconception about Image Exchange is that  it only works with a Google Image search, which would be already not be too bad. But no, it works everywhere. Let’s say your friend post a link to an article that they like on Facebook. Automatically, a thumbnail of the picture on the page is rendered. Well, Image Exchange can recognize that image and tell you who the licensing right owner is.  Your images become viral and your best publicity without you doing a thing: Imagine that ! Wasn’t that one of the promises of the Internet ?

Image Exchange is somewhat free. They get paid for each recommendation that they bring to you after a certain amount of click-trough. You can purchase more, in advance, or stop whenever you want . That simple.

so, if you want your images to finally end up where your potential clients are, head on to Picscout and sign up.  You might actually see some more income without having to dump all your images into Istockphoto

Posted in license, copyright, commercial stock, Tweet, Search, photojournalism, editorial, transaction, finance, getty | Print | 5 Comments »

September 12, 2010 by pmelcher.

Just when you thought it was safe to go outside and shoot again, a new threat has appeared. Under what seems like a very benign press release lies another attempt from Getty to turn the photography world into it’s own private playground.

This is the press release :

“Getty Images, Inc., has signed a multi-year agreement with McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT) to license its award-winning editorial imagery from their network of McClatchy and Tribune papers. From today, the strategic relationship will provide customers around the world with access to imagery captured by one of the most-respected news conglomerates, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, and enables Getty Images to offer the most comprehensive editorial imagery for U.S. and world news, entertainment, sports, business and lifestyle.“

Seems like another one of these distribution agreements that Getty already has with a thousand plus companies and it is. Until you know what was the motivation behind this deal :

McClatchy and Tribune papers own 30 daily newspapers in 29 U.S. markets.. These local newspapers like to cover local news. Among the local news are, of course, local sports teams. At first, Getty images, owner of mutli deals with sport leagues like the NBA ( BasketBall), MLB ( Baseball), USGA ( Golf ), USTA ( Tennis) , NHL (Ice Hockey), and so on, tried to get  “local” photographers out of the games. After all, in Getty’s perspective, they are the official photographers for these sports and thus should be exclusive.

Especially since McClatchy  newspaper then licensed those images via MCT to other newspapers and via agencies to the whole world.

That didn’t work. You cannot prevent local newspapers to cover local sports . Just imagine if the Chicago Tribune would not be allowed to cover a Bulls game ? or a White Sox game ? The whole foundation of US democracy would have been in shamble.

So what did Getty do? They went to McClatchy and said, let us do your distribution of images. Why ? so we can grab your sports images and add them to our own coverage, or sit on them, thus making us practically exclusive on all these sports game. Except for AP and Reuters who have yet to understand against who they are fighting.

Sports photography is big business and shows no sign of slowing down. Getty images is on the path to controlling every image that you will see coming out of a US sports competition, and everything around it. ( remember, Tiger Woods first public appearance ?)

This is not about fair competition anymore, where the best image wins, this is becoming a real monopoly. Heard that, Justice department ?

Posted in newspaper, license, magazine, finance, editorial, news, law, getty | Print | No Comments »

September 7, 2010 by pmelcher.

          Just when you thought is was over, it starts again, like a bloody headache. Getty Images, the agency that suffers and profits the most from micro stock is about to launch a cross brand collection. Called the Agency Collection, at least on Istock,  it will be priced at a premium to Vetta and will be available on iStock, Getty Images, Jupiter and PunchStock.

It will include images from Getty Images, but also from Istock contributors.

Why is this important ? Because this will be the first time that the same image will be available on all brands owned by Getty Images. Will they be priced the same? The post from Istock Kelly Thomspon doesn’t say, although the mention that they will be “priced at a premium to Vetta”seems to indicate that there is a good chance they will be.

A long awaited natural step, this cross brand collection will give Getty a lot of valuable data.

First and foremost, it will show which brand is the most successful at selling these images. If Istockphoto sells more than twenty times what Getty images has sold, you can be sure that will prompt the Seattle giant to revisit the need for sales people, something they are trying hard to prove. If Punchstock doesn’t sell any, they might shut down that brad.. And so on.

It will also show if an image sells better if available on multiple sites at the same time. In theory, it should be.

Istockphoto certainly has an edge in this competition. Not only it is a 100% royalty free platform, unlike the others, but  it has much, much more traffic than the others, which, for RF, is critical.

Kelly Thompson, the current COO, has much more to say in his forum post, mostly regarding another royalty rate adjustment. It is becoming so complicated that these poor microstockers need a high end degree in mathematics to figure it out.You have to wonder if they do it on purpose, a bit like those credit card fine prints.

The launch of this new cross brands collection is due out this month ( September) and it will also be interesting to see how Getty will market it . Will it be one campaign for all brands or all brands independent to each other ? We suspect, the latter.

Because this will be the first time the same images will be available on all brands own by one of the mega giants,it will mark the final breakdown of the walls that use to separate UGC and pro, as well as traditional and Microstock. Now, everything is everywhere at the same time.

Posted in license, Jupiter, alexa, commercial stock, Search, prosumer, Royalty free, getty, transaction, finance, Microstock | Print | No Comments »