Three weeks earlier, on January 20, 2006, I wrote that
Rumours have it that a company based in Seattle, WA, is talking to a company based in Calgary, Alberta, about acquiring all of the assets of that company.
I received a lot of heat for these lines. People thought I must be mad. The CEO of a well-known company in the stock photo industry wrote that "it’s going to take me the remainder of 2006 to recover from the shock!", if this would be true. Even analysts told me, "Are you out of your mind?"
But it was not too difficult to imagine that I´m talking about Getty Images and iStockphoto, regardless if the headquarters of iStockphoto are in Calgary or anywhere else... .
This issue was discussed in the forums of iStockphoto as well, with the underlying tenor: "No, no, no, Getty will never buy iStockPhoto".
Jonathan Klein didn´t even mention the possibility of acquiring a micropayment site during the Q4/2005 and Full Year 2005 Conference Call on January 26, 2006.
But none of these "Wall Street Analysts" did take the chance to ask Liz and Jonathan about the possibility of an investment in a micropayment site. I think these analysts have no clue what is going on in the so called picture business. Although they are responsible for other people´s money. And now they will start to announce, just like other websites reporting about the stock photo industry, "I saw this all was coming, of course" and other stuff.
$50 million for a micropayment site, compare this to all of the other acquisitions of classical stock photo agencies in the stock photo industry in the last two years. Zefa, the third largest photo agency in the world at that time, was sold to Corbis for around €56 million 14 months ago.
And thus, Alan Meckler was wrong ("Jupiterimages And The Stock Photo Micropayment Business", January 24, 2006), as he wrotes "many just do not get it": they (Getty) just do get it.
And to no surprise the next targets for a take-over might be Shutterstock and Fotolia, both excellent companies.
By the way, where is Corbis?
And afterwards Yahoo might consider how to filter out all the professional images at Flickr and how to market and sell them. And then, one day, they´ll notice: they should have hired Thomas Hawk earlier.
More details of the deal here at The Stock Photo Industry Press Release Cemetery.
Related:
- istockphoto.com: "Bringing the price down to a level where everybody can afford to buy a stock photo" (April 28, 2004)
- All entries regarding iStockPhoto
- “If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”; official iStockphoto declaration
- Getty Images Buys iStockPhoto.com For $50 Million; Daryl Lang/PDN
- Getty Images buys iStockphoto for $50M; Seattle Post
- Interview With Fotolia´s CEO Thibaud Elziere: "Microstock Sites Can Capture Up To 30% Of The Existing Market"
Technorati Tags: Getty Images; iStockphoto
[Update Feb. 11, 2006]
Alan Meckler responded yesterday to this blog post in "Who Gets What?".
Well, in the context of the other sentences in your earlier post "Jupiterimages And The Stock Photo Micropayment Business", to my understanding and interpretation the phrase many "just do not get it" in the paragraph
Community has always been part of the Jupiterimages growth strategy. There is no ecommerce business in the world that would not gain sales by having a significant community position -- many "just do not get it."
referred also to the fact that the other two big players Getty Images and Corbis
so far had not been able to build a comparable kind of community like
JupiterImages did in the past with some of its special services. Not
only to my understanding this was a very obvious interpretation, a lot
of other people I talked to shared this interpretation at that time. It
might have been an overinterpretation. On the other hand, time will
tell if and how Getty Images and iStockphoto might work together more closely. I think this is only the beginning.
I used the same interpretation of these words in "Definitely A Turning Point In The Stock Photo Industry: JupiterImages Invests In Stock.xchng And Stockxpert.com" (Jan. 24, 2006) in a more positive meaning for JupiterImages, and there had been no complaints that I possibly might misinterpret or overinterpret the words.
But for sure the art of interpretation is sometimes a difficult and tricky one and leaves often clearly room for additional overintepretation that might conflict with the originally intended sense of the words.
