Organizing content is a continual problem. It can be difficult for new readers to dig into content past the last five or ten posts, so I’ve picked out the main articles I’ve written on the photography business over the past year or so:

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.

The Changing Photography Business

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

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.

• 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.

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

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

Assorted: Critiquing, defining, learning

• 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.