August 19, 2008 by pmelcher.

  According to Sellingstock.com, the CFO of A21 just quit. Left his company. Just like that. Not surprising really when you look at A21 recent  numbers. Rising cost of operations, lowering sales, the company is heading straight for a wall, head first. Amusing part is that the only two other public or ex public companies in this business have also posted negative results for the second quarter of 2008.( Jupiter and Getty). None of them have signaled community portals( Alamy or Photoshelter) as the cause of their financial suffering . Some have accused the rising price of oil ( ya, right) and, others more bluntly, the ever shifting move from traditional commercial stock to Microstock.

Even if Getty and Jupiterimages saw Microstock coming, they both underestimated its impact tremendously. It is no longer in the original 8% of existing Getty customers that istock is eating in, but rather 25% and growing. Jupiterimages is struggling to integrate their own microstock offering into photos.com hoping to elevate the price per image. Who will be the first to shut down some of its more traditional divisions in order to save the leaking ship ?

No one knows how Corbis is doing in these hard times. Surely, their Snapvillage is not a player in the microstock field, and if the public  companies revenue are any indication, they must be hurting too. In a Bill Gates kind of way. More layoff before years end ? definitely. But not just at Corbis. expect Jupiter, A21, Getty and others to lay off some weight.

There are no clear solutions for these companies. They were build with very expensive infrastructures that do not work well with lower pricing. Although Getty’s project used to be an Internet company only, they have lost their objective and have fallen  heavy into the overhead trap. When they purchased PhotoDisc, they were going to go all speed ahead in high technology/low headcount. Apparently they got sidetracked, allowing Istock, Dreamstime, Shutterstock to continue and achieve what they only dreamed of achieving. Buying Wireimage was cute but will certainly slow down their growth considerably. They have inherited a mastodon of inefficiency, who was busier to reach high market shares rather than being profitable. Results: lots of personnel, huge operation cost, a big mess and waay too many photographers. Jonathan Klein even said himself at the last Getty shareholders meeting : Mediavast was never profitable.

Everyone knows that Getty purchased Wireimage to get rid of it, not to make it grow.

The next 3 years will see the industry giants engage in any and all enterprise that will help them cut their cost to a minimum while not engaging in significant investments. Not an easy task if they want to also grow at the same time. Certainly less of an easy task when lesser size companies are starting to move on the next step. Mostly European, these companies have grown organically using the more slower pace path of reinvesting their profit. Much more careful on their investments than the big loud 3’s, they have now reach a level of financial strength that they can now start to retaliate.

Some are acquiring, others are merging. While the corporate mend their wounds, alliance are forming  in the back alleys of the industry. Interestingly enough, most have hired ex Getty, Corbis or Jupiter staffers who have learned, from within the beast, what not to do. These agencies are extremely ambitious and battle savvy. They have all they need to succeed : knowledge, relations, expertise, endurance and cash. Most will never publicize their acquisition or mergers because they couldn’t care less about what the rest of industry knows. They have drawn a very precise path and their definition of success is  far from Wall Street . Very far.

The race is far from over : Neither Getty nor Corbis have succeeded  cornering the market. In fact, both have abandon the idea as they realized it is almost impossible. While Corbis is still figuring out how to turn a profit, Getty has spend the last 10 years acquiring companies they felt they could not compete with or create internally. Like pasting dollars bills on their obvious shortcoming.

JupiterImage is surviving only thanks to its internet properties while A21 keeps on borrowing money. Neither have a bright future, not, at least , in the photo licensing world.

A reasonable expectation is that our universe is about to see its giant stars implode. They are about to break apart because, similar to  the laws of the universe, they cannot survive under their own weight. Too much manpower, bureaucracy, equipment, replacement, fiscal obligation are making them crumble.

They ate too much.

Posted in Jupiter, technology, commercial stock, finance, corbis, Royalty free, getty, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

August 4, 2008 by pmelcher.

let them eat cake, she had said. As the eyes of the world are turning toward China and the upcoming Olympics, this is a good time to reflect on how photography is evolving. Not as a medium, but as a media.

Getty images licenses a series of exclusive images to People and Hello! for a reported $14 million. No one questions this. furthermore, no one seems to believe that the number is just plainly insane. On one side of the spectrum, images sell at a buck a piece and on the other, at double digit millions of dollars.  Doesn’t make much sense. And I will tell you why : Image pricing was a combination factor of quality/difficulty/usability. The more an image was going to be used, or seen, the more it would cost. The better, or rather, the more relevant the images were, the more its price would go up. Finally, the more an image was hard to get, the more the price would go up. If you look at the RF microstock model, none of the above is true anymore. Does the Jolie twins bring so much value that they will reep sales above $7 million ( assuming People paid half the bill ?) . lets see : Angelina first baby picture sold for $4million. People sold 2.2 million copies at a cover price of 3.95. That is roughly  $ 8.8 million if you complitely ignore the subscribers. If they raised their advertising space rate, they should have broken even. At $7 million, it becomes more of a problem. After all , it is not because she had twins that there will be double the readership, is it ?

Actually, these images have become a story by themselves. They were priced way before Angelina even had the babies. And by whom ? The media. Rumors, speculation, interviews, opinions were running  like a mountain stream in Spring, finally settling around anywhere from $11 million to $14 million.

Interesting thus, that Getty sold these images for the same price as people assume someone would sell these images. Did the  megastar couple take the hint from the crowdsourcing pricing or is it just hype ? After all, the crowd will be more eager to see images that are worth $14 million dollars than a few bucks. Thus both Getty, People and Hello ! profit from screaming that those images were sold for $14 million. It benefits everyone, even the couple who gets to give even more money to charity.

Furthermore, does anyone who has been in this industry for a while really think that competing magazine USweekly or IN TOUCH  stop bidding at 13,999,999 .00 and said we give up ? Or that if the National enquirer had bid $15 million, it would have been in their latest issue ? Publicists and stars want to be in People magazine, not in tabloids.

Who cares if it is not true, really. What matters here is that these images  got a celebrity status, even before they were even taken.

The second incident is the revelation by Newsweek DP that the Olympics will be mostly a .com event. Ex-photography director, Mary Ann Golon had told me that TIME will be doing the same a few months back . Seems that this Olympic season will be online with additional reporting in print. The slow decay of the paper support is becoming more apparent as it cannot compete with the feeding frenzy. Photography becomes free at last of the written word and regains a position of strength. It can live, breath and exist by itself  on an online slideshow that doesn’t need much explanation. This will only continue to erode the news weeklies here and worldwide. It will also put much more pressure on the photographers to fully report with images and not just be an accompaniment to the text. Its good news.

Posted in license, TIME, celebrity, magazine, Newsweek, photojournalism, slideshow, Royalty free, getty, editorial, transaction, Microstock | Print | 4 Comments »

July 29, 2008 by pmelcher.

This is not the next challenging mountain  path of the Tour de France. It is neither the now too familiar trend of the Getty stock. It is, however, the devastating path of the Jupiter Image stock.  Minus 68% in six months, for a company that is neither linked to the subprime rate or the price of oil, that is pretty bad. It looks to me, and I am not a stock market expert, that this little company is going right down the exit and is just prime for 2 fruity options : being acquired or shut down.

Insider info has also informed us of massive lay offs in New York last week, apparently kept very hush hush. As much as the numbers are unconfirmed, they are talks of maybe 100’s. As we all know, when a public company is failing, the first to be offered at the altar of the Wall Street gods are the employees. The old rituals of human sacrifice revisited for the business world.

There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Alan Meckler and is team are doing the right thing. It is somewhere in its application by the common employee that something went wrong and thus they should be punished.

Without significant numbers, it is hard to figure out why Jupiter is having such a hard time. Guess is that they are suffering from the same effect as Getty Images : a declining rights manage market, a suffering traditional RF demand, and a microstock division not covering for the losses.  The “Call” where Alan Meckler will reveal it all  is scheduled for August 7. He is probably hoping that most people will be on vacation.

“That is obviously a bellwether of what the future brings and the fact of the creative destruction that is going to happen here.” once said Alan Meckler to PDN. I guess that was not the kind of destruction he had in mind.

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

July 19, 2008 by pmelcher.

It is not the usage but the image. A flew of photo agencies, including recently Alamy, have come out with special pricing plans for blogs ( non commercial ones).  It appears to be specially arranged  to compete against  microstock, as the prices are very, very low.

Which begs the question and realization that more and more, these days, images are sold based on usage and never on content.  Since the value of an image can vary immensely from one person to another, corporations, like Corbis or Getty have just decided to ignore it in their budgets. It is a known fact that corporations hate variables. So they take a whole sloosh of images and apply the same pricing. All of these over there are RF, these are Rights Ready, and those are too old. Furthermore, they believe that an image only has a value when it is used and that value is only quantified by the way it used.

As much as simplicity is appealing, as much as it doesn’t reflect the real value of an image. As we all know, some are really easy to get ( the Eiffel tower, for example) and some are really hard ( Angelina Jolie posing with her newborn twins) . One would never apply the same pricing rules to those 2 images, if one was a little versed in photography sales. But it doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. In between these two images, exist a whole range of pictures that are either more or less easy to take and also, have added value created by the photographers themselves ( the Eiffel tower taken by a National geographic photographer).

Example:

let say I take a nice image of the Eiffel Tower.  Nothing special. I license this image to a blog. I get 5 cents. Same image, I license it to Microsoft worlwide 10 years unlimited rights desktop usage. $60,000.  Hmmm… what is the value of my image? 5 cents or $60,000?

But more important, is it really the usage of my image that defines its value ? Shouldn’t be the image itself ? More like a painting ? You will buy a Picasso for millions of dollars regardless you put in a closet or decide to attach it on the walls of the British Museum.

Aaaaah, but photography is not art, you will say. You cannot compare. Well, my friend, why would an Angelina  Jolie and Twins go for a cool $11 million ?

Well, it is not the photographer that matters here, it is the subject, you will argue.

Absolutly !!! my point exactly. Photography is even more wicked that its value is not even obvious by who took the image, but what is on it. Sure you have the Masters who commend a certain price. But the bulk load of images are taken by complete unknowns that will remain so. But some of their image will command huge prices.

Because of how they are used? Or because of their content?

At this point you have to agree with me.

While editorial agencies are very aware of the statue and value of their image, stock couldn’t care less. Here, you can have all these images for a penny an image, because after all, no one comes and visits your site. Well, that is terribly wrong and reinforce the idea to clients that photography is a commodity. If someone doesn’t have the budget to pay for a great image, too bad, blog or no blog.

There is value in some images and client should pay for that value.

On another completely unrelated note:  Rumors are spreading that Getty and other wire service are asking their news  photographers to shoot  events with commercial stock resale in mind. Meaning that those  photojournalists no longer shoot what they see but try to , for example, to purposelessly blur peoples faces in order not to need a model release later. To maximize the lifetime potential for an image. As much as it make sense for the agency, as much as it is digging a little bit more in the wound of photojournalism, making it less and less credible every day.

We will probably see more and more denature photographs of world events as photographers will try to cover them on a more “stocky” way .

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

June 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

What do you do when you have a lot of money to spend on marketing ?

- You can create a false on line museum like Corbis did with the MofAA. A bit confusing and not quite sure how it well help sell more images, it is, however certainly a conversation starter . Anyone noticed how, since the acquisition of Veer, Corbis marketing has suddenly matured into new heights ?

- Create a cool website. Getty has created Moodstream so you can stream your mood. Mixing music, video, stills, one can set up their own customize stream. It does lead to a place where you can learn more about the visuals and maybe a sale.

Both seem to have been put “out there” in the hopes of getting discovered and go “viral”, what the French call Buzz marketing. Corbis has even set up a page for their Museum on Facebook  hoping to generate traction. Both companies are hoping to tap into the high end coolness factor, trying to aggressively difference themselves from the plebeian microstock and its inbred word of mouth.

Hard to say if either initiative will work out, although it is quite obvious that both put a lot of resources into these efforts. Pro creative will certainly be amused and impressed by these internet playgrounds, and some might even be tempted to license some art. The results, with a less culturally savvy crowed, are dubious at best, especially for the Corbis experiment.

Time will tell which is the right path to sustain, or increase, RM or Traditional RF sales, and if any are a customer magnet.

Click on the images below to visit:

Posted in web 2.0, technology, commercial stock, slideshow, corbis, Royalty free, getty, Microstock | Print | 1 Comment »

May 23, 2008 by pmelcher.

Just imagine. Just imagine if a company like Google, or Yahoo, or even Microsoft put their hand on microstock and social photography. Not only Istockphoto projections of $171 million revenue within a few years would be pulverized into unknown heights but it would be the end of both RM and traditional RF forever.

Why ?, you might ask. Simple. Right now, the only reason Istock is not growing faster is its lack of reach compared to better known sites like Google. Given that firepower, there is absolutely no reason why the whole market not tip over into a microstock Tsunami.  Let’s face it, Rights Managed is a badly protected island. And part of its protection came from the purposely shallow amount of choice. A lack of choice is what makes  RM potentially valuable, or what others call “bleeding edge” photography. Thus, out of a pool of 10 images, it is important to secure exclusivity. Out of a pool of millions, who cares?

Furthermore, it would be so simple to “retire” an image automatically for a higher price, thus making that image exclusive by automation.

Why would anyone  consider putting their images anywhere else than on Google Stock ? Already, everyone, from photographers to photoagency are taking night courses in  SEO to pump up their ranking. Most will buy huge amounts of adwords. If Google opens the gates and starts welcoming images in order to license them, there will be no holding back. From no one. It would be an act of suicide not to be part of it.  And since microstock pricing has now set the tone for commercial usage pricing, everyone will seek the low-priced volume sale. And, besides the user generated sites, no one will survive.

RF would quickly become  standard and no one would even bother with any other of those complicated and boring licensing  models. The only way for agencies and photographers to survive will be to jump, or stay, on the assignment peak. Those who have created a market for their photography, their personal work ~ the way professional photography first started~will continue to be untouched by this whole stock mess.

Not sure this will happen ? Well, think about it. Why did Getty go private ? and more important, why do you think someone paid $2.5 billion for it ? So it can watch it grow slowly like a small pet kitten ? Not their style. And what do you think will happen when Newscorp, Google, Yahoo, AOL and others feel they have managed to control most of the channels. What will be their next target to increase their appeal to advertisers ? Content, you said ? Indeed. By having the most compelling content, eyeballs will be attracted. And who has the highest volume of well targeted eyeballs will sell the most ads. Like it used to be with the TV network. But this next battle is happening online and will include stills.

Hopefully, some will stop asking me why I think this industry has not yet seen the worst ( or best) of it. Why there is no more reasons to attend Cepic or PACA congress. The waters are retreating already and I am no fool.

Posted in google, Midstock, technology, commercial stock, web 2.0, CEPIC, Royalty free, getty, transaction, PACA, Microstock | Print | 4 Comments »

May 12, 2008 by pmelcher.

Once again, JupiterMedia has released its quarterly results. Once again they are they loosing money on the photo side ( JupiterImages). Out of the big three , Corbis, Jupiter and Getty, only one has posted profits. Corbis is notoriously a cash hungry beast with a huge appetite for cost while Jupiter seems to be on an ever growing decline. Only Getty Images has been able to pull off the acquisition/consolidation scheme. Not without hurting. No longer the aggressive growth company, it was brutally manhandled by Wall Street and had to retreat into the protective hands of an equity investment company that took it out of the public playground.

There is a lot of resentment inside Guetty these days. Photographers are unhappy : Commercial stock RM revenues are declining while there is too many celebrity photographers rubbing elbows at every event. Something has got to give and it will be a no surprise to see it reduce its snapper staff as soon as the public doors are closed. 2008 will not be a good year for the Getty staff in general.

However, what is causing these monopoly hungry corporation to fail ? A few things:

- No passion : Only Jonathan Klein seems to be passionate about photography. Do you ever see Jupiter’s CEO at any industry event ? or Corbis new CEO ? what about those A21 guys?  NEVER. They sell images like others sell socks: With a passionate disinterest. Like a bunch of accountants recently named CEO.

- A dry corporate culture. It takes dedication to take and license images. It is not a 9 to 5 job. Walk in at the office of any of these companies and you will see rows of cubicles populated by clock-watching workers spending more time surfing job sites then their own. Most of the staff in these photo factories are in a transition job, passionately looking for something else. The only passion you see, or feel, is the passion to get promoted before your colleague. Walk into small or medium agency and everyone is ready to cut their arm to make sure it will work.

- A fundamental misdirection:  Mark Getty has a long term plan that fits in a very long term perception of the world economy. The others just want to make money. Even Bill Gates’ plan was a bit more sophisticated than just making money. Money is what happens when your plan is succesful, not the opposite. I never heard Meckler or Schenk formulate a vision besides “we will be profitable one day”.

- A complete lack of risk taking: Corporation are all about control, prediction and risk management. Everything photography is not.  Spending fortunes on marketing is just not enough. You still need the content. But understanding what is the right content is not something so easily predictable. It is not, for example, because you purchase a successful brand that it will continue to be successful. Without taking risk there cannot be a succesful photo agency. Its all about being one step ahead of picture buyers who themselves are not sure where they are going before they get there.

One could continue on and on why these business structure are inadequate for the photography world. Everyone knows that Jupiter Images is for sale for lack of being successful. No one is foolish enough to believe that Corbis will ever be succesful with its current structure. They will only obtain profitability by downsizing and reducing themselves.  A21, we will not comment as its days are numbered. There is no surprises in these quarterly reports anymore and I doubt there will ever be anymore. The non performers are going to not performed as Getty Images will position itself to be acquired by one of the media giants such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft when these will realize that after owning the distribution channels they will need to control content. As Mark Getty very rightly said ” IP ( intellectual property)  is the oil of the 21th century”.

Posted in Search, Jupiter, celebrity, commercial stock, yahoo, google, getty, corbis, finance, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »

May 4, 2008 by pmelcher.

“The big winner in these data are Internet design and development firms, whose purchases dominate the industry. But while these firms consistently hold the highest market share, both in terms of dollars spent and units purchased, their average spending per image was often lower than that for other segments, particularly creatives. These dynamics can have strong implications for producers and marketers of stock imagery.”

TrendWatch Graphic Arts_2005_

That was 3 years ago. The $71.9 million revenue of Istockphoto in 2007 is a clear proof that this study was correct. It actually did not reveal any secret but confirmed what everyone already knew. So, how as the industry reacted in the last 3 years ?

- The conservatives: Most have continued in their all too familiar ways, producing the same images for the same pricing, even when 90% are now being sold at microstock prices. Voluntary ignoring the microstock noise, that has now grown from a chatter to a scream, they believe that it is just a passing fluke that will die down when the party is over. Some even take a stand against this market by claiming loud and clear that they will NEVER surrender to such pricing model. As if high-priced images had any appeal to any image buyers.  They have the same images available on mid and micro sites, yet priced according to antiquated models. They have capture the attention of the medium mediocre pro photographers whose very livelihood is threatened by this sudden price drop. As the protectors of the pricing “status quo” they stand up desperately like little toy store owners in front of K Mart refusing to sell cheap chinese toys while charging 6 times more for the same products.

- The cold feeters : They understand what the market is up too but have a hard time accepting it. They have been in this industry for a long time with reasonable success and hate seeing prices go down. So they adapt. They either create new collections for these markets or “retire” images and price them lower. One foot in the water, one on land, they think they can continue doing what they know best without loosing on new pricing trends. They enter with little careful steps as walking in the waters of a cold lake, trying to organically figure out its temperature and if they will be able to swim. These agencies confuse their photographers tremendously as revenues become unpredictable.

- The passionate: They can’t get enough. They were early-adopters and cannot wait to do more. Some have caught the wave at the right time and are seeing good results, while others waited and jumped both feet at the same time. They are leaving familiar pricing territories and well know clients for hit and run sales. Less tear sheets but more volume. Less marketing intelligence but more sales data. Some have created their own micro/mid platforms and are hoping to catch up on the Istock wave ( Tsunami ?).

What is fascinating is when you see a traditional RM/RF platform asking their contributors for more “regular business images: people at their desk, answering phones..” . It is also laughable when others stand up on their soap box and say: “The answer is easy, my friends, create more high end RM images”.

Huh ?

When I was at Corbis, the term was “cutting edge” and even back then I was hitting my head against the walls trying to figure out what it meant. And more important, how it is made.

A stock image is by nature an image that is made to please a wide variety of clients. Furthermore, it has to be unfinished so that text and logos can be added. Even other images copied and past into it. Even with our world turning into a global village, local sensitivities are at skin edge. It makes it very hard to create images that will please everyone in the world.

So what is high end RM images ? I would like to see. Because, like the Eldorado or Atlantis before, there is a lot of talk about it but not much to see : Behold the savior of photography, the almighty cutting edge, high end photograph. The secret knowledge that will lead to the golden caves of fortune: How to create a high end image. If you possess that wisdom, that elusive stone, the magic wang that transforms a low end / medium end image into that legendary 6 figure image, then why in the hell would you stick it in a photo agency that will take 50% or more of your sales ?

Most commercial stock photo agencies, right now, should give their salespeople a substantial raise. Because the major reason their sales are still stable, if not rising, is because their client stick with them. Mostly because they enjoy the help and friendship with their contacts there . Its not the pricing, nor the images, those can quite frankly be found elsewhere, its that person on the other side of the phone. Yet, most go on a search for the elusive “sharp, cutting edge, high end” imagery soon to be copied by extremely web savvy microstock shooter.

A good salesperson will tell you exactly what images you need because they sell them everyday. Its not going to be a creative research ( shoot RV people !!, especially the ones being pushed because people can’t afford the gas price, says Corbis ) or keyword search analysis. Not even past sales data. It is going to be these guys behind their screens and desks, day in and day out that can tell you what you need. And they also, have no idea what a cutting edge image is, but they sure do know what an image that sell can be.

Posted in Search, Midstock, license, commercial stock, keyword, finance, Royalty free, corbis, transaction, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

March 26, 2008 by pmelcher.

One reason Getty claimed revenues were not so strong was because according to them, a lot of the advertising dollars are going to purchase adwords at Google. Some companies pay upwards to $100,000 a month, if not more, to purchase the best location, based on your search terms.( I shouldn’t have to explain this).

Well, the future, at least for the photo stills department, is not looking brighter. For Getty or others. Google is already secretly beta testing Video-text ads. It will look like this:

Unobtrusive,  you will actually need to click to make the ad viewable. You can actually see a live demonstration if you do a search for “laptop” in google.com and look at the Intel entry on the right.( it doesn’t always appear. You might to do it a few times)

What does this mean for the photo industry ? Well for starters, commercial stock photographers not doing RF should really rethink their future, as well as RM only photo agencies, because between Video and RF, there will not be a lot of dollars left.

Commercial stock Photo agencies not doing video should also rethink their future.

Stock, in general, will begin to become obsolete in general, as the cost of producing a 30 second mini video will allow more and more companies to have customized work done in house .

Editorial photographers  should sit back and enjoy, because it will not affect them at all. Same for their photo agencies, if they are also only in their editorial field. However, they might want to look where the newspaper/magazine market is going if they want to survive. Hint: you need a computer to see it.

Finally, we will see ( although many exist already), a flurry of small video producing companies grow like mushrooms all over the world to respond to this new market. Some owned and operated by smart, flexible ex photographers, others by new players.

And then someday, someone will have the idea to consolidate them into one big company.

Posted in license, focus, technology, lens, multimedia, Search, web 2.0, google, newspaper, Royalty free | Print | 2 Comments »

March 23, 2008 by pmelcher.

Here are a few of the most recent press release spins that I appreciated the most:

Picapp: Seems every time Picapp sends a press release, everyone picks it up. Hard to avoid anything photo and non photo related without a mention of Picapp this week. The news ? not much, if only to mention that news images have been added. Not sure if it is really news. The web 2.0 community seems lukewarm about this ad supported service while the photo community has no opinion, most still trying to figure out the difference between a Jpg and Tiff.

Seems to be a few issues: Why put in just pro content like Getty ? At a time when even Getty suffers from crowdsourcing, does it make any sense ? Why can’t I put up my images and make money on it on my blog or any other blog ? Do I really need to go through an agency and give up 60% of my earnings ? And why keep on claiming to have Corbis content when the only pictures from Corbis are a few old images of Bill Gates or one of Gary Shenk at a Hollywood podium ? And finally, why no mention of Jupiterimages, Imagesource, Thinkstock and all the others that apparently Getty has dragged into this experiment?

And what’s with the funny, cutesy cartoonish interface ? Sure, one can use a recent image of the Iraqi war, along with a insightful commentary, only to have some little guy’s face playing hide and seek with the image. I do not think serious blogs will appreciate that.

Finally, still wondering why a company that has been in the image tracking and infringement business for many years has now turned around into a licensing platform ? Is this the long arm of their Picscout business ? Look, we caught you in a copyright infringement. Next time use Picapp !! A bit as if a cop would stop you for speeding and try to sell you a speed radar detector.

Photoshelter : A bit less effective with their press releases than Picapp but still able to travel way beyond the photosphere. Changed their interface. Made it all green, not sure why. No pricing for blog usage but the closest I got “web. newspaper” told me $135. But what is with this 1/4 screen, 1/2 screen , full screen question when trying to figure out the pricing for a blog or any web usage . And this 1 week, 2 weeks , 1 month ? One would have thought that for such an internet savvy company, they would not have applied print usage standard for the web. This is not 1994 anymore…

Anyway, under cover of a redesign, another blog launch ( they have 2 now) and added features to the Personnal Archive, Photoshelter changed they contributors agreement to give themselves the right to grant discounts to image buyers . Recently launched, the Photoshelter Collection is already offering discounted prices…It is going to be hard to keep high rates. Using Fotoquote as a billing tool might not have been the best choice. They now have to face the reality of the market and the wake up call is harsh.

Remenber, Getty and others, sell images for web usage for either $49 or free ( if you use Picapp). At $135 a pop, they are not really competing hard. So let the discounting start !!!!

Jupiterimage: Great spin !! “a transition year” says their press release. You have to love that !!. Isn’t a growing company always in a “transition year”, every year? Transition from what to what exactly ? and that “write-down of goodwill and intangible assets” of $82 million. Much much better then the Corbis legendary ” If you do not include our one time expenses, we are profitable”.

and what happened to the celebrity offering promised in September 2007 ?

Posted in No sense, Search, license, technology, web 2.0, finance, getty, corbis, transaction, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »