StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

Getty Images: Results for Q4 2004 and Full Year 2004

Those are the key numbers:

Company announced 4Q 2004 revenues of $162.1m
Full year 2004 revenues of $622.4m

Quarterly Highlights
Revenue grew 21 percent over the fourth quarter of 2003
Operating margin improved to 27 percent
Net cash provided by operating activities was $63.8 million

Full Year Highlights
Revenue grew 19 percent over 2003
Operating margin reached 27 percent
Net cash provided by operating activities was $202.6 million

"A strong December capped another record-setting year for Getty Images -- we achieved the highest level of revenue, operating margin and net income in our ten-year history, for both the fourth quarter and full year," said Jonathan Klein. "We met or exceeded every 2004 target we set for the company, including achieving significant growth in our editorial business, launching the first fully localized e-commerce site in Japan and achieving a 27 percent operating margin, two full percentage points ahead of our target."
All details here and here.

StockArtistsAlliance (SAA) : Maybe Tens of Millions of Dollars in Lost Revenues Because of Image Misuse

Nothing to add:

The StockArtistsAlliance (SAA) and PicScout today announced the initial results of their much-anticipated study about misuse of SAA members' images. [...]
"We were astonished to find out these images were found 11 times the rate of the average that PicScout finds," said PicScout. [...]
Applying the same rate of misuse of images to the full Getty Images collection could mean tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues to both photographers and Getty Images.
"The average rate of infringements on the web is 90%. This means that for each image that is properly licensed, there are nine images that are being used on commercial websites without being licensed," added PicScout.

Full text here.

Posted by Andy

Selling Prints: A Dead Issue? The Biggest Success Ever?

Lots of photo agencies are looking to expand their business and to enter new vertical markets by selling prints to consumers and corporate customers. The history of those tries however is somehow short and has not always been a financially successful endeavor.
Now PictureArts has started to sell fine art prints to corporate clients after an agreement with Art4Love giving access to over 80,000 high quality, digitized images.
Quoting another source, Art4Love believes that the corporate art market "currently allocates $10 billion annually in support of the arts".

Posted by Andy

Corbis' 2004 Revenue Up 22 Percent/Possible Flotation?

"Corbis, the image library owned by Bill Gates, said yesterday that revenues last year reached $170m (£91m) as the founder of Microsoft readies it for a possible flotation.
The company said it would be cash flow positive this year for the first time since Mr Gates founded the business in the late 1980s. Revenues in 2004 grew by 22% organically. Adding in the company's recent acquisition of the German image bank Zefa would have increased revenues to $211m. [..]
Corbis claims to have about 12% of the global market, behind Getty Images, which has 30%. Zefa, which was acquired by Corbis for €56m (£39m) earlier this month, was the number three in the image library market." (Guardian.co.uk) (Similar: seattle.bizjournals.com)

See also: "Corbis and Marvel Announce Content and Rights Representation Deal", Link)

Sheldon Marshall Enters Content Mine International

There had been rumors about a change in the company structure of contentmine (kpa photo archive and  central order motion) since a couple of weeks. Now Sheldon Marshall, Executive Chairman of Heritage Partners, has acquired a stake of contentmine.

Previous Sheldon Marshall had been the CEO of the Visual Communications Group (a holding of numerous photo agencies which was sold to Getty Images for a non disclosed price - rumors expect the deal to be in the area of $200 - $250 million - in late 2000). He has worked as Vice Chairman and Deputy Chairman for ImageState in 2002 and entered the stock photo agency Nonstock (which was recently sold to PictureArts) in 2003. UK-based Heritage Images named Sheldon Marshall as Executive Chairman in May 2004.

Posted by Andy

Corbis/Zefa Deal: Erwin Fey Gets € 28 Million

The Times/Dan Sabbagh delivers the background numbers of the recent Corbis/Zefa deal ("Corbis snaps up third-largest image catalogue"):

The deal, estimated at €56 million (£39 million), shores up Corbis’s status as the secondbiggest photograph owner, amid speculation that Mr Gates, the founder of Microsoft, is poised to announce a flotation of the company with a valuation that could exceed $1 billion (£530.7 million).
Annual sales at Corbis, which owns more than 70 million images, will rise above $200 million following the acquisition of Zefa. The German catalogue, which is the last major independent image library in the world, has sales of about €32.5 million.
Getty Images ... The company, which is about 20 per cent owned by the Getty Trust, is worth $4 billion — implying a valuation for Corbis of between a third and a half of Getty Images.
Zefa was jointly owned by Erwin Fey, 3i, the UK venture capital group, and its management. Herr Fey will take about €28 million for his 51 per cent stake, while 3i has more than trebled its initial investment of about €8 million, which it made in 1998.

IT Conversations

The first time I found out about IT Conversations  and listened to Tim O'Reilly in The Software Paradigm Shift in 2003, I thought: how brilliant, mp3s for my ipod, great listening material for plane trips and excellent learning materials but then IT Conversations just continued to get better.
From IT's website: "IT Conversations is a network of high-end tech talk-radio interviews, discussions and presentations from major conferences delivered live and on-demand via the Internet. It's a one-person labor of love. Doug Kaye is ITC's host, producer, developer, writer, interviewer and engineer. He launched IT Conversations in June 2003 and produces three to five programs each week." Some of the great interviews include:
- The Software Paradigm Shift  by Tim O'Reilly, old but still relevant
- Open Source Code: Managing the Opportunity Is open source ready for prime time? Can you bet your business on it? Would you invest in a business that has done so? In this panel discussion, an investment banker, a Red Hat executive, two lawyers, and a software developer address the issues.
- Perspective with  Doc Searls, senior editor, Linux Journal. Doc Searls presents a number of case studies in open source. Great stories about what customers can do for themselves. Includes his slides.
- Open Source: Capturing the Upside While Avoiding the Downside by Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School. This keynote presentation was recorded at the Open Source Business Conference 2004 held in San Francisco.

The interviews are organized by topics. The Software Development  and Open Source sections include some great nuggets. One last great thing: most of the interviews include supporting materials such as slides and references.

Posted by Leila

Stock Footage: Need a Disaster? An Assasination?

"...in the 2003 film "Matrix Reloaded", a wall of monitors displays several horrific historical footage, from the WTC towers burning, to dead bodies at Auschwitz, to Ku Klux Klan members marching. All that footage, all 59 clips according to the report, were licensed by Gates' Corbis Motion."

"If you thought that Bill Gates' Corbis and Mark Getty's Getty Images were peacefully co-existing, think again."

Two real naughty articles: "Laughing Kids from Hell called Getty and Corbis?" (The Inquirer) and "Stock footage: Look no further than the newly organized, digitized and revitalized stock footage industry" (Hollywood Reporter).

Posted by Andy

Visual Exploration

Ten by Ten - A Visual Exploration

A wonderful example of nice flash programming and xml. Ten by Ten uses images to give us the big picture. An interesting visual exercise. Ten by Ten currently gathers news from media outlets such as Reuters World News, BBC World Edition and the New York Times International News. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image.

10x10 was designed and developed by Jonathan Harris of Number27 , currently on a one-year fellowship at Fabrica, Benetton’s Communication Research Center in Treviso, Italy.
10x10 runs with no human intervention; images and words are gathered automatically from news sites. What's also fascinating is the open-source nature of this project: the data produced by the project is available to developers with attribution.
Could make for some wonderful applications in the stock photography industry.

Posted by Leila.

Five Imagery Trends for the Future

Five trends for 2005 Jonathan Klein is predicting:
(1) the Image-Rich Web
(2) More Imagery Delivered on More Plattforms
(3) Photojournalism Enters a New Era
(4) Marketing Gets Personal
(5) Smart Digital Asset Management

The first three points are worth to read: film footage, mobile phones, hand-held technology, re-invention of outdoor advertising; more here.

[© Illustration "The Future" by Brian Miller, U of Alaska]

Posted by Andy

The Shopping Tour Continues: Corbis Buys Zefa

After long and intense rumors "Corbis Corp. yesterday announced the purchase of Zefa Visual Media Group" (John Cook, Seattle's Corbis buys German photo firm, SEATTLE POST):

The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, will give Corbis a collection of more than 450,000 digital images, 140 new employees and eight branch offices in cities such as Amsterdam, Netherlands; Milan, Italy; and Warsaw, Poland. Together, the distributors of digital images to advertising agencies and publishers will have more than $200 million in sales, Corbis spokesman Dov Schiff said. [...]
"They [Zefa] are really known for cutting-edge, fresh, hip commercial photography." [...] Corbis' commercial photography business grew at 35 percent for the first six months of last year, he said.
Europe represents one of the fastest-growing markets for Corbis, with the company reporting sales growth of 39 percent for the first half of last year. That compares with 19.3 percent in the United States. About 40 percent of the company's sales occur overseas, Schiff said. [...]
In the past seven months, Getty Images has acquired three German companies that specialize in sports, entertainment and news photography. [...]
As a result of the acquisition, some layoffs could occur, Schiff said. [...] Erwin Fey, president of Zefa, will become a consultant for Corbis.

Brain twister for the readers: Getty bought Bongarts, Elance-Media - and? :-)

Will photographers working for ZEFA be delighted? Will their contracts change? As always in this industry no words about the "producers" of the goods- the photographers.

Official press release here.

Posted by Andy

Corbis going public?

John Cook of the SEATTLE POST:

Seattle-based Corbis, a digital image company founded by Bill Gates 16 years ago, has acted like a publicly traded company for the past two years, holding an annual meeting in New York City and reporting financial results. That has sparked rumors that Corbis, whose principal rival is Seattle-based Getty Images, may be getting ready for an IPO. Company spokesman Dov Schiff said there are no plans to go public.

"Ten years from the now the structure of the company will probably be a lot different than today," he said. "But in the immediate future an IPO is not in the cards."

"The best strengthening of a rumour is always to deny it totally". Churchill? Plutarch? I don´t remember.

[Source: "Area companies may be ready to go public in coming year"]

Posted by Andy