Filters, Atami, Japan, July 2009

Efficiently matching buyers and sellers is a more valuable core competence for a stock photography distributor than managing a “great” stock photography library.

• Mark Edward Harris, in an interview with Nick Evans-Lombe, COO of Getty and Renee Martin, Vice President, Sales & Service North America of Corbis, The New Face Of Stock Photography:

  While stock photography has gone through incredible changes since entering the digital world, at its heart, it’s still a library of images. But how photographers create those images, then which of the stock agencies choose to market them and finally how potential clients locate those images in a massive sea of images are in a constant state of evolution. To better understand this process and the current state of stock, we tap into two of the industry’s powerhouses: Getty Images and Corbis.

  … For many working pros, the notion of crowd sourcing—soliciting material from almost anyone with a camera—has been seen as a threat. At Corbis and Getty, though, crowd sourcing also is seen as creating ever-increasing opportunities for working pros by attracting more customers to stock photography as a whole.

  Corbis: The idea of working with the broader audience of photographers when it comes to harvesting content—in the micro world, nonprofessional photographers are submitting photography in the industry. It has raised the bar for professional photographers. It diversifies our sourcing model. Buyers go to these microstock sites because they want affordable images. So we have more image users and more image producers.

  In order to address a larger audience, there has been the need to create volume at low cost. But also there’s a content interest there in “the crowd.” You end up seeing a different style of imagery—more authentic, nonposed, DIY imagery. These are huge trends that affect our pricing, our sourcing model and our content. At Corbis, we entered into this market with SnapVillage.

  Getty Images: The number of people coming into the industry on a micro level is a good thing. It not only raises the number of great images in the marketplace, but also increases availability of imagery, and that’s good for the industry as a whole. What it does mean, though, is that the industry will be compelled to continue to evolve the ways in which we help our clients to be successful. That means a continuing need on the part of all of us to improve the quality of our search and to increase the service that we provide to our clients. There’s nothing more useless than a great image that can’t be found. The downside of all these people coming into the industry is that a lot of not-so-good imagery is also being created.

  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.

  Continuing,

  In terms of pricing, this has come down. Microstock has introduced a price point that, I think, 10, 15 years ago would have made all of our hair turn white. But a lot of those price points are going for online usage where huge volumes of images are being consumed. The number of images used is growing exponentially. Now, more people than ever before are licensing imagery to publish it online or in print.

  Getty and Corbis have launched efforts to attempt to deal with the changes in the supply of images, but what have they done to deal with demand?

  Interestingly, I think few people really understand licensing models and basic copyright law. But educating people about copyright isn’t the answer: instead, it should be so easy to license photography and use images that users shouldn’t have to worry as much about fair use and copyright restrictions.

• From an interview by John Lund with Dan Heller:
  

  Dan: I blogged long ago that Getty still doesn’t get the big picture: that the future of stock licensing is not about having good editors finding good pictures worth selling, but about aggregating as much content as possible (even bad content) and just letting the marketplace decide what they want.

  Let the “editing” be done by the natural process of search rankings and user behaviors, just as my own site has demonstrated. Getty’s relationship with Flickr is just perpetuating their old business model, the success of which has been self-evident over the past 5 years.

  Agreed; the Getty-Flickr deal was a wasted opportunity to introduce real innovation into stock photography.

  Back to the interview,

  John: How do you view Microstock?

  Dan: Many people feel that microstock hurt photo prices, but it didn’t. Supply-and-demand did it: the internet provided a distribution model for consumer-generated imagery to get online, and that’s what lowered the perception of value by buyers.

  Microstock was just one way to “sell” that content, but microstock didn’t cause it to happen. In fact, microstock itself evolved from the vacuum left by Getty and other agencies’ failure to properly address the expanding low-end photo licensing market.

  Sadly, too few photographers understand supply and demand.

  Continuing,

  John: None of us really knows what new technology or business model might pop up at any second and change everything. How would you suggest that photographers help prepare themselves for whatever might come along?

  Dan: Unfortunately, most photographers see themselves as victims of the system—their enemies are those who infringe, those who undercut the pros, those who “discount” prices, and so on. Their responses to this has lead to a cultural disposition of “all for one” – that we all have to stick together in order to fight back.

  Photographers are going to have to get behind initiatives that encourage openness, distribution, and wider-scale adoption of intellectual property. This is the one and only path that will help bring order to the chaos of images on the internet. And with that comes ranking and prioritization, much like how Google ranks websites.

  And when that happens, “quality” images will percolate to the top, and reward those photographers who truly are better than others. If one assumes that most “pros” are better photographers than consumers, the only way pros’ images will be found and licensed by buyers of any sort, will be when there are business incentives for companies to build those technology solutions.

  Photographers tend to focus on the increased supply of images and how it increases competition between photographers, but the larger issue is how demand has changed: an increasing variance of acceptable quality, an influx of new licensees, and an accompanying wider range of uses.

  Nothing new, but nothing’s really changed… yet.

  Stop fighting economic and cultural trends bigger than yourself; instead, play with new (and old) tools, test new tactics, and create new business models. If it was obvious then it wouldn’t be terribly innovative…