Organizing content is a continual problem. Since it can be difficult for new readers to dig into content past the last five or ten posts, I regularly update this post to provide links to notable posts I’ve written about the photography business from 2007 to the present.

Opportunities in Shifting Business Models
Five Lessons on how photographers can take advantage of the opportunities in the changing photography industry:

• Introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models

  Technology has democratized access to the tools of production and distribution, leading to a surge of creators, squeezing the middle class of the industry; the long tail of photographers are getting squeezed.

  We are seeing a massive mismatch of supply and demand; photographers have flooded the market with an oversupply of images created and distributed using mediums and based on economic models no longer in demand.

• Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition.
  

  The way to make money in photography is to sell stuff to photographers.

• Lesson 2: Take advantage of the atomization of demand and expand the scope of consumption.
  

  People spend their money, time and passion to better their lives, not to better yours. Accept it. Remind yourself of this mantra every time you create, market and deliver a product or service, and it will make you focus on exactly why someone should spend their money, time and passion on you.

  By and large, most new amateur photographers don’t want to buy your images, they want to do things with their own.

• Lesson 3: Take advantage of the oversupply and target your brand, your niche, your fans, your customers.
  

  Forget about fighting the market. Stand above the market and create your own.

• Lesson 4: Connect with context and content.
  

  It’s always been about creating great content, but there’s now a larger opportunity than ever to deliver great context.

• Lesson 5: Make great work.
  

  People still love photography. People still love seeing stories communicated through images. We’re living in a world with a far wider range of mediums in our daily lives that can create, manipulate and display images. We’re not limited by options, we’re limited by our desire and vision.

• Remixed: How Photographers can Create New Business Models.
  

  Shawn Bueche (@bentvisual) remixed a post of mine about the photography business, using a video to present the same essential content in a different format, medium and communication style.

The Changing Photography Business

• “Creating Context for your Content” at Photoshelter’s Austin Photo Seminar.

  The slides for a talk I gave at @Photoshelter‘s Austin Photo Seminar “Thriving in Uncertain Photographic Times” in Austin on March 13th, 2010.

• Instead of focusing on the image, focus on everything around the image.
  

  The biggest creative and business opportunities for photographers is not the image, but everything around the image. In other words, the opportunity is in context, not content.

  … Instead of just being an artist, be an “experience artist”.

• Everyone can be a Professional Photographer (SXSW 2010).
  

  The slides for the SXSW Core Conversation I’ll be co-lead with @Photoshelter CEO Allen Murabayashi entitled “Everyone can be a Professional Photographer” on Sunday March 14th at 5 PM, Austin Convention Center room 8A.

• SXSW 2010 Panel: Everyone can be a *professional* photographer.
  

  Everyone is a photographer: a camera in every cellphone, a point-and-shoot in every pocket, a digital SLR camera in every bag or home. New platforms to create, distribute and sell to a wider range of clientele give everyone the opportunity to be a *professional* photographer and sell their photography.

• The View from the Front (from two talks in Austin during SXSW)
  

  A short recap from two talks I gave this month in Austin during SXSW 2010.

• Will the iPad *save* photography? No.
  

  A short video about photography, the iPad and the value of content and context for Ellen Boughn’s talk at Blend Images’ annual meeting prior to the Palm Springs Photo Festival 2010.

• Do people value great photography?
  

  But these aren’t the fundamental problems; instead, it’s a question over the supply and demand for photography. Does great photography draw readers and dollars to media? Or is “good-enough” truly “good-enough”? Where is the equilibrium of marginal cost and marginal benefit across different types of print and online media?

• Free isn’t a problem, it’s an opportunity.
  

  “Free” has always been in the art world. It’s just a more applicable and useful pricing strategy for a wider set of products than ever before. That’s why we pay more attention to it now. But free, and the economic trends that have pushed it into our contemporary consciousness, has also given us more opportunities to differentiate content while still using free as part of our overall business strategy.

• “Be a hub”, an interview with Ellen Boughn about photography and creative content business models.
  

  “I have a strong belief that successful businesses need to be more like people. Individuals want to connect to the people behind a business.” He suggests that a photographer that only shows photos on his/her website is missing opportunities to connect with their audience. “People want to see more than a series of images. Photographers should use all the tools available to them to tell a story. Be a hub of information about not just yourself and your work but about a story that you have created.”

• “Be a Story”, Part 2 of an interview with Ellen Boughn about photography and creative content business models.
  

  How can photographers move their story-telling skills into a broader context? And why is this important? Taylor responds, “Telling good stories is a necessity for photographers. But creating a story creates much richer interactions. It’s these broader interactions that are the biggest artistic and business opportunities today because the economics of creating context have changed (i.e. cheaper to connect, create communities, empower niches), making rich experiences and interactions more available, possible, and powerful than ever before.”

• Why should photographers use Twitter?
  

  At the end of the day, the key is that you have to first identify your goals, figure out the tools, learn about the community and then create a plan for your actions and behavior to accomplish your goals.

  The REAL opportunity is in finding ways to use online and offline together; to integrate twitter, blogs, comments, communities, mailers, exhibits, books, etc. That’s where the real fun lies, and what few people do very well. Yet.

• Photography needs a new business model
  

  The fundamental shift has been the democratization of the tools to create share, promote and distribute content. The tools are no longer available only to the rich, the connected, the judges or connoisseurs of taste: available and open to all, we now have the opportunity to create ourselves, distribute ourselves, and rate and rank by ourselves. Eliminating the opaqueness of the process has spread the opportunity to the masses and increased participation and interest.

• Can the photography business create a new DNA?
  

  The basic economics of the photography industry have been absolutely, fundamentally, permanently upended, flattened by the democratization of the tools of the production and distribution and a shift in the technologies, mediums and methods of communication.

• Everyone is a photographer
  

  Communication has never been about pure quality, but rather about exchanging information efficiently, and once you accept photography as a form of communication then you completely change your expectations and use of the medium.

• The deluge of the amateur photographer, redux. (March 2010)
  

  The abundant supply of images is obvious: the shift in demand is less obvious but just as important. If people don’t value great photography then they won’t pay for it. Go ahead and mock, but anybody can be a professional photographer: not for all buyers, and surely not for big-budget commercial shoots, but for most buyers, great photographers and classic, outstanding images simply aren’t needed.

• Photographers are like Musicians, only in a different way than you think
  

  Amateur photographers are the long-tail sharecroppers of the photography business… Lots of people creating quality products with little or no revenue created by any individual product.

• How can photojournalism adapt to the low attention economy?
  

  In essence, traditional photojournalism is a form of communication that is ill-suited to short-attention media, short-attention forms of communication and a short-attention audience.

• Are we losing our focus? (on the Canon 5D II)
  

  “The medium is the message”; multimedia and video communicate differently than static images simply because of the medium used. Not all stories can be told the same way.

• How many photographers are “professionals”?
  

  Getty and Flickr took the easy operational route; selecting images instead of photographers would have broadened the base of photographers and forced Getty and Flickr to educate many photographers about stock pricing, royalty-free and rights-managed licensing schemes, model and property releases and many other nuances involved in stock imagery.

  But that was the opportunity. Everyone is a photographer. Why not create the platform to allow everyone to be a “professional”?

• Can using Twitter help commercial artists with their bottom line?
  

  People should also remember that there is no overnight success in social media. It takes a long time for your investments in social media to pay off. We all understand it takes time and experience to be a great photographer: The same goes for social media.

Stock Photography Business

• The stock photography industry needs to be unbundled

  We need to unbundle the functions of the traditional stock photography agency. There is no fundamental need for the image delivery and management platform to be delivered by the same company that makes the market and connects buyers and sellers.

• Is Flickr’s new “Request to License” feature a big deal?
  

  Is Flickr’s new “Request to License” feature via Getty Images a big deal? For Flickr, it’s a feature that aids their competitive positioning. For Getty, it just adds to their efforts to bring more images to the market. For a photographer, it’s just the chance to make money where there was really no chance before, without any extra effort. And that’s fine. It is what it is.

• Recapping @CEPICDublin
  

  During my part on “The Future of Stock Photography” panel, I brought up five main points for conversation that I truly believe stock agencies need to consider when planning for the future, namely: 1) How can agencies aggregate and curate the crowd? 2) How can niche agencies thrive? 3) Can agencies use social media to attract contributors and sell images? 4) Can agencies reach and make money from non-traditional stock buyers? and 5) What core value does an agency create and deliver?

• *The Future of Stock Photography* at the CEPIC New Media Conference
  

  Ellen Boughn asked me to contribute to a panel at the CEPIC New Media Conference where I’ll be joining Shannon Fagan, Kelly Thompson and Cathy Yeulet to discuss “The Future of Stock Photography”. Ellen has brought together an interesting mix of professionals from the photography industry to hash out some big issues faced by professionals in the stock photography industry (and by parallel, the larger stock media business).

• Flickr: A Wasted Opportunity for Innovation in Stock Photography
  

  Getty and Flickr decided to find the top PHOTOGRAPHERS rather than the top PHOTOS. Huge difference: vastly different business models, incentive structures and community involvement principles, and honestly it seems to fly in the face of the vaunted Flickr ethos.

  Failing to involve the “non-professional” community … is a huge strategic mistake.

• Expanding on the role of middlemen in stock photography:
  

  The issue in stock photography is how to connect buyers and sellers in a world where demand has shifted and the market is saturated with images (granted, quantity, not necessarily quality); the traditional middlemen have struggled to create an efficient market to match up demand and supply in this new environment.

• What will the stock photography business look like in 10 years?
  

  What will the stock business be like in ten years? Will the traditional functions of the stock agencies be unbundled?

  … What are the pain points in the stock photography industry?

  … The existing industry structure is simply not sustainable.

• Unbundling the Photography Industry, Redux:
  

  Break down the stack of services in the photography industry and imagine a photography sales platform that operates as a search engine through the internet’s warehouse of images; the current issues in the photography industry are signs of long-term pressures and hints of the industry’s future.

• Microstock isn’t perfect, but economic progress rarely is.
  

  Microstock photography isn’t a perfect solution, but then again, when is economic progress ever perfect?

  Remember, “traditional” stock photography is a fairly new innovation in itself, and it’s continued to change and evolve considerably over the years. Media publishers no longer employ photographers to create new images for each story; photography agencies no longer store photographs in physical forms and send out printed catalogs to photography buyers to showcase available images; rights-managed is no longer the only licensing system; and at some point in the future, agencies depending solely on existing microstock image pricing, sourcing and delivery methods will no longer be competitive in the marketplace.

• Photoshelter closing their Collection stock agency to focus on Personal Archive
  

  Fact is Photoshelter was just unable to create the business to pay for the Collection, which offered a 70% payout to photographers and was free for photographers to use. The Personal Archive offers a similar platform to photographers with a wider range of opportunities to explore other products and sales opportunities, but costs photographers a range from free (limited basic account) to $50 per month.

• Digital Railroad continues the “rebalancing” of the photography industry
  

  Digital Railroad’s problems have nothing to do with the current macroeconomic credit deleveraging and rebalancing; it’s about a dead business model, a reliance on old DNA, a failure to adapt to the industry’s fundamentally different balance of supply and demand of images, photographers and publishers.

  What will the industry do? Instead of trying to sell images, we’ll probably see a continued focus on selling stuff to photographers.

• Creating efficient markets for images is more valuable than managing libraries of great images.
  

  Seriously, stop worrying about the quality of the images in the library; when the pool of creators increases the average quality comes down. But the real value created by a stock photography distributor is the markets they create and manage. Efficiently matching buyers and sellers is a more valuable core competence than managing a “great” library. Create a great market and the library will come; efficient, effective search could give everyone the opportunity to be a “professional” photographer.

• Getty closes down Scoopt: Surprised?
  

  The most important part: Getty failed to understand the basic nature of how and why people share information.

• Photrade: A photography sharing, licensing and syndication service without a compelling value proposition
  

  “Advertising-supported” is not the cure-all business model: Depending on advertising to pay for a value exchange is a terribly lazy business model. I’ll leave it at that, but for more of my thoughts on advertising-supported business models click here.

Assorted: Critiquing, Defining, Learning

• “Ripping off artists” is a poor argument against crowdsourcing.

  They aren’t “ripping off artists”, they’re paying attention to new economic realities and making a good business and marketing decision.

  Incumbents, clinging to the past and fighting the losing battle to keep the crowd out of the game, rather than building business models that fit new economic realities. Good luck.

• Messages and Messengers
  

  Instead of critiquing his eye, it seemed far more meaningful to help him develop his voice.

• How can people define their brands in physical spaces using digital content?
  

  How else do people display objects to create their image or “brand”, and how can the content you create help them build their image?

• You can steal content, but you can’t steal me
  

  You can steal my content, you can steal my thoughts, you can steal my photography, but you can’t steal me.

• Will photojournalists adapt to a changing audience?
  

  The industry is full of challenges these days, but it’s not just about the declining stock business and the oversupply of photographers and images: our demand has shifted, our values have changed, we’ve splintered into smaller and smaller niches of interest and we have a different range of goals for our images. Our tastes have changed, for better or worse. As photographers, can we adapt? Will we? Should we?

• What happens when everybody is a videographer?
• The importance of looking around
  

  Looking around, exploring viewpoints, is how a photographer explores their eye, surveys a scene, and “sees” the world in a way to extract meaning.

  The same applies in business.