StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

Using Google Base For Selling Stock Photography

In early summer 1999 Miroslaw Malek told me that a new start up named Google, founded in September 1998, was starting to develope a new and completely different internet search engine. I thought "Heck, who cares?", because the internet search engine market seemed to be overcrowed at that time with successful companies like Yahoo, Altavista, etc. Back at my desk in the evening, I checked out Google (and Teoma), some of the underlying principles and have been using it ever since. Altavista, who?

When Google introduced Gmail on April 1, 2004, although furnished with tons of new and different features, I still thought "Heck, who cares? Email is simply email, you can´t reinvent the wheel even if you´re Larry Page or Sergey Brin, how can they think they could be more innovative than Yahoo mail and all the other webmail services?" Weeks later I received an invitation to Gmail and have been using it ever since (and remember, it´s still beta).

When Google introduced Google Base on November 15, 2005, I didn´t pay much attention and had no time to dig deeper into this topic.

But David Sanger, the new president of the Stock Artists Alliance, started immediately one day later to work with Google Base and loaded up 200 fine art prints and afterwards "all 6000 images". And it´s obviously working. Generating new revenues. Without paying a middleman.

VISUELL Bashes CEPIC and PACA

The new issue of VISUELL, the "leading mag for the picture business" (national print run decline from 12.000 in 2003 to 9.500 in 2006), introduces a new column named StockPhotoTalk smallTALK.

To my surprise I noticed that this new column is written by an author who wants to stay anonymous and uses this freedom of speech to bash publicly PACA and CEPIC. Topics covered:

Why in the hell has the next CEPIC Congress to take place in Biarritz? Why not in Paris or another french town? But Biarritz, a small town with few hotels, and very difficult to travel to by plan? With dump flight connections and not one single international direct flight for non-french people? It takes me more time to fly to Biarritz than to drive to Paris by car.

QuickLinks For 2006-01-27

• "Shares of Getty Images were among the NYSE's losers Friday, falling 8% after the supplier of stock photographs and images posted mixed fourth-quarter results and issued a softer-than-expected first-quarter guidance." (TheStreet.com, "Today's Winners and Losers: Getty Images")
  • Related:
    
    • "In midday trading, Getty shares were down $7.85, or 8.7 percent, to $82 on the New York Stock Exchange on nearly six times average daily volume... In light of the lower-than-expected sales and first-quarter guidance, Jeetil Patel of Deutsche Bank cut his rating on the company to "Hold" from "Buy"". (Bizweek)
    • [Update] "By Far The Best Year In Our History": Getty Images Announces Quarter IV 2005 and Year 2005 Results

• With immediate effect, Mauritius Images is distributing the entire collection of UpperCut Images; Jonas Fredriksson, Mauritius Images.

[Update] "By Far The Best Year In Our History": Getty Images Announces Quarter IV 2005 and Year 2005 Results

Getty Images (Quote, Profile, Research, Upgrades/Downgrades History) has announced today the results for the Q IV/2005 and the full year 2005.

When Getty Images announced the Q III/2005 Results (October 20, 2005), the company predicted that "for 2005, we expect to report revenue in the range of $735 million to $739 million."

When Getty Images announced the financial guidance for 2006 as part of its 2005 Analyst Day (December 08, 2005), the company cautioned that its fiscal 2005 results would probably fall at the low end "of both the revenue guidance of $735 million to $739 million." (Getty Images: Probably Lower 2005 Results)

QuickLinks For 2006-01-25

• Chicago-based photo agency LuckyPix introduces the new magazine Fresh Look, published quarterly in PDF format (download link), "a quarterly showcase of our newest imagery".
  LuckyPix distributes RF and RP/RM images and selected images from Thinkstock's Royalty-Free image collection. Director of Photography is Michael Rastall, a former photo editor of Photonica.
  The company has a pretty nice blog: LuckPix.Blog, online since September 2005.

• StockPhotoTalk expands to China: photojournalist Alexander F. Yuan, full-time staff photographer working with the The Beijing News, will start to translate some of my blog articles into Chinese and put them on his blog page.
  Here´s one of his latest cover photos.

But what about the current working conditions for photojournalists in China? Alexander writes:

"I was beaten by four court policemen when photographing by the opposite streetside towards gate on Haidian District Court in Beijing around 2:10 pm Beijing Time on Jan. 20 afternoon.  My assignment was to cover migrant workers who said they will commit suicide in front of the gate of court, because of unfair case judges."
And I am now writing memos on my blog page ... photos and audio clips that show the truth will be on my blog page."

Definitely A Turning Point In The Stock Photo Industry: JupiterImages Invests In Stock.xchng And Stockxpert.com

This is the first time that one of the top three companies in the stock photo industry makes an investment in a micropayment stock photo community site and I think it´s an important turning point. Casually I had been the first one to report about StockXpert (Stockxpert: Run, Forrest, run!, September 26, 2005). StockXpert was launched on Sept. 11, 2005 (that´s just 4 months ago).

I always had a strong sympathy for the sister site stock.xchng, mainly because the company was growing in Eastern Europe without firing the big marketing guns:

One of the earliest (and also a "major") player had been stock.xchng. The creators of this site are also the people behind Stockxpert. The blog stainedscreen offers a nice comparison chart (iStockPhoto, stock.xchng and Stockxpert) and looks at some details.
(Stockxpert: Run, Forrest, run!, September 26, 2005) 

Today Stock.xchng has over 25 million page views monthly and over 500,000 registered users (details). Compare these numbers to the numbers listed here at stainedscreen in September 2005.

The Major Battle Arrives: Famous Celebrity Photographer Michael Grecco Sues Gawker Media

This had to happen somehow sooner or later... .

Back in summer 2004, after Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc. wrote about "Fair Use for photos on the web and in blogs: a modest proposal to avoid a major battle", I had a general discussion with Jason on this topic, together with Bahar Gidwani of Index Stock ("Blogs, Photo and Copyright: "Hey, I drove that Porsche Boxster for two days, but frankly, I didn´t want to use it, I just wanted to make advertisement for Porsche!"").

Jason noted at that time here in this blog:

I think we are one of the responsible parties out there because we are researching the issue, talking to the people involved and making sure they are comfortable and even reaching out to people discussing the issue like you!

Nick Denton (founder and proprietor of Gawker Media, the company behind gawker.com and wonkette.com) is not Jason Calacanis/Weblogs, Inc. The famous celebrity photographer Michael Grecco today filed suit against Gawker Media alleging the company that one of its blogs, defamer.com, had been violating the copyright of a photo of Michael Grecco, originally published in Time Magazine (details here).

QuickLinks For 2006-01-20

• Betsy Reid of The Stock Artists Alliance is hijacking London, announcing the "Stock Artists Alliance London Event" on February 14, 2006: "Expect a candid appraisal of the realities of the stock industry with regard to licensing and distribution models."

• Swiss photo (Comstock, Liquid Library, AbleStock, Photos.com and PhotoObjects.net) and footage (DigitalVision, Filmdisc, PhotoDisc, Rubberball) distribution company and photo agency Kursiv starts blogging: Kursiv Blog.
  The first european photo agency using a blog for corporate communications had been Medicalpicture in 2003 here.

• Fotolia introduces PixMotor, the search engine for 250,000 RF stock photos.
  • Related: "Interview With Fotolia´s CEO Thibaud Elziere: "Microstock Sites Can Capture Up To 30% Of The Existing Market"

QuickLinks For 2006-01-18

• Thomas Robinson/Historic Photo Archive: "I can attest that many professional photo researchers are using Google first. I just sold a book cover to McGraw-Hill, they found my photo with a google search. I built my whole site as static html pages to be spider friendly and now I´m top rated on the engines. Probably sell a couple of single photos a day to the googlers, and a big order every week or so." (Google Stock Photo Store discussion/Stockphoto.net)
  • Related: Google Image Search And Professional Photo Researchers

• "PDN Parent is Takeover Target": If VNU, the parent company of PDN, IPNStock, IPNRelay and PhotoExpoPlus is sold, what will happen to IPNStock/IPNRelay?

(The StockAsylum; also here,  here and in "VNU Receives Takeover Approaches, Cuts Sales Forecast")

• "The key to effective crisis communication is to be prepared before a crisis occurs": while photographers are waiting for their money and their past christmas presents, Bahar Gidwani of Index Stock Imagery takes a nap in China, dreaming of a white "Christmas and New Year party situations".

SYS-CON Interview With Alan Meckler: "I could not believe the profit margins"

SYS-CON (Australia's i-Technology News and Information Source) Media group publisher and editorial director Jeremy Geelan today features an interview with Alan Meckler:

Question: Does your own experience with corporate blogging--in which you were one of the pioneers, having started your "Internet Media Commentary" blog in February 2003, lead you to believe that in the future there will be more CEO blogs being launched...or fewer? Why?

Meckler: I doubt you will see CEOs blog the way I do. Being the largest stockholder as well as Chairman gives me some leeway that the average CEO would never have. No hired gun is going to take the chance of being frank—particularly if he has to report to a Board of Directors.
Writing a blog has its burdens—one, I have to worry about public information—that cramps my style. Also it is a lot f pressure to write three or more times a week. But now I have a following so I feel I need to keep it going. [...]

Question: ... When did you first realize that images represented such a huge market opportunity for you?

Quaero "really going to spread panic in Silicon Valley"?

Recently I mentioned in the QuickLinks section Quaero, "a combined sound, image and video search engine for the general public, professional search applications and audio-visual 'heritage' such as historical footage", as the Financial Times/Tom Braithwaite writes today in "Seek and you may not find":

“There is already a good French search engine – it’s called Google.fr,” jokes one blogger. [..]
If successful, Quaero would indeed be the first “truly multimedia” search engine. Google may have created a powerful business around a good search engine but for indexing and searching for audio, photos and video nobody has yet won the battle, the researchers argue. [..]

QuickLinks For 2006-01-13

• "The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art will announce today that it has acquired the entire Hallmark Photographic Collection ... The works ... have an estimated value of $65 million"; Kansas City Star, via APAD.

• Art4Love Inc. creates Art4Love Images Inc., its digital rights licensing subsidiary. More details here.

• Veer becomes the exclusive distributor of ès right-managed (RM) photography in North America, created and produced by the PhotoAlto photo agency. More details here.

• Scott Mc Kiernan, founder of ZUMA Press, will give insight on trends in media usage of pictures in his lecture titled "Trends in media use of pictures" at the symposium "The Role Of Pictures In Society: New Ways of Using Images". He'll touch on "new ways media source and run pictures, from citizen journalists to podcasting to metro papers and mobile streamed content."
  Other speakers include 2005 Newspaper Photographer of the Year Jim Gehrz, photographer Oliviero Toscani, etc. More details here.

• Recently Jeff Greenberg asked me my after my previous entry about Google Video "Is Google Stock Photos Store on the way?". I responded that Google is too late because the Google of Stock Photography had already been invented, namely by Randy Taylor of Stockphotofinder: "After Inventing The Google Of Stock Photography, StockPipeline Is Randy Taylor´s Next New Venture".
  Dissatisfied with my answer, Jeff started a topic at Stockphoto.net about the "Google Stock Photo Store?", an ongoing and interesting discussion.

Google Video Offering Footage From Getty Images

Google recently announced on January 6th during the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the planned opening of the Google Video Store, an open video marketplace enabling consumers "to buy and rent a wide range of video content from a major television network, a professional sports league, cable programmers, independent producers and film makers" (Link). Video producers can upload content and distribute it for free or at a fixed price and owners also have the choice to offer their content with or without copy protection.

Recent Changes At Micropayment Sites In A Nutshell

Only five days are gone and a lot of developments at some of the major micropayment sites did happen. The following is a short overview, taken from the press releases (I have deleted the marketing crap phrases) and other sources:

• Fotolia introduces the Extended Royalty Free License option:
  • If photographers choose this option, images can be downloaded, redistributed and resold on merchandise at the buyers' discretion. Photographers benefit by still maintaining their copyright and can set the price for this new license of images within their rank, which is based on the amount of images that a photographer has sold.
  • The design community benefits by purchasing images for redistribution without worrying about the traditional extreme costs of classic agencies and complications imposed by Rights Managed licenses.
  • The Extended Royalty Free License includes all the rights that are traditionally covered by the Rights Managed license but in a simple, unique extended feature becoming the fourth option of licenses for photographers and designers on Fotolia (others include the Standard Royalty Free Web Use license, Standard Royalty Free Web & Print license and the Exclusive Buyout).

QuickLinks For 2006-01-09

• Apple introduced Aperture a while ago, now Adobe introduces Lightroom for Digital Photography Workflows: "Well, you guys are just releasing this beta now because Aperture is in the market". Details here and here, where John Nack of Adobe has written a FAQ on Adobe´s new product Lightroom.

• One2One Introduction to the new Corbis book; William Hannigan/The Digital Journalist. Link to the OnetoOne Gallery.

• "There was some discussion here about the pros and cons of Photographers Direct. One of the negatives was that unlike Digital Railroad and Photoshelter it did not facilitate high res uploads and buyer downloads direct from the site. That is changing." If you´re in the mood for long discussions, start here at "Photographers Direct update" or here at "PhotographersDirect  (PD) Criticism" at the StockPhoto.net discussion group.

• Related:
  • Interview With Allen Murabayashi, CEO Of Photoshelter (July 25, 2005)
  • "Photoshelter: Another ASP Service for Photographers" (July 19, 2005)
  • How To Showcase Yourself Today As A Professional Photographer (December 15, 2005)
  • Digital Railroad: A New Hub For The Professional Photographer To Organize And Sell His Work (August 14, 2004)
  • Digital Railroad: "It's My Alternative To The Big Boys" (August 02, 2005)
  • Online Photo Storage And Marketing Systems For Professional Photographers (October 18, 2005)
  • Paradigm Shifts In Stock Photography (July 12, 2005)

The Acquisiton Game Continues: ShutterStock Buys PhotoSights

Another year, another acquisition, and this time it´s not JupiterImages buying the next company. Instead the micropayment sites are entering the acquisition game. Or, as Thibaud Elziere of Fotolia has put it so eloquently here ("Interview With Fotolia´s CEO Thibaud Elziere: "Microstock Sites Can Capture Up To 30% Of The Existing Market") a few weeks ago: "Only one or two big micro stock sites will survive, I hope we will be one of them."

So ShutterStock, offering the meanwhile well-known "highly successful subscription model" with its 508,633 royalty-free stock photos and 19,637 photographers (and 7,650 new stock photos added this week) has acquired PhotoSights.

New York Times Starting To Explore The Stock Photo Industry, Looking For Volunteers To Contribute

Recently I received a message from the office of a famous person and I was immediately moved to tears. This person is the co-founder of an even more famous company. The message stated that this person is writing on a story for the New York Times and needed badly details and statistics of the stock photo industry and especially detailed figures and numbers of the micropayment sites I had been writing about a lot in the past:

I'm interested in what you term micropayment stock photo sites and the number of images they have amassed as well as stats for the stock photography industry... Ultimately, we'd like to determine how many stock photos are commercially available and what percentage of these are online.

At first sight, it looked like pure fun to contribute. However, for delivering answers with this special required kind of a 101% accuracy of estimate, even for a Jim Pickerell or a Brent Phelps it would have taken some time of investigation to figure out the hidden details and numbers. And, for delivering informations with the latest up-to-date news that otherwise might go overlooked, you need to pepper insiders and specialists with questions and calls. Except for Jonathan Klein and some other execs, nobody has all this information always en detail and always up-to-date in his drawer, ready to be pulled out immediately. - Shortly, you have to invest a lot of time and money.

As an appetizer, the message stated that my small blog had been “super helpful” to explore "the image portion of the story I am researching."