StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

QuickLinks For 2006-06-30

• Is YouTube a flash in the pan?
  As video-sharing site YouTube rides an enormous wave of popularity, a research firm has expressed doubts about the company's business prospects.
  Josh Martin, an IDC research analyst, issued a report Thursday asserting that YouTube will struggle to squeeze profits from its video-sharing business, primarily because its audience has grown accustomed to paying nothing for the service. [...]
  YouTube owns more than 40 percent of the burgeoning video-sharing market, and more than 13 million people log on ... every month. But even while the company's profile mushrooms, and more than a year since YouTube was founded, executives have yet to roll out a business model.
  C|Net.
  Tags: YouTube video sharing

QuickLinks For 2006-06-29

• Microsoft Creates Icons of Imaging Program:
  Microsoft today unveiled its Icons of Imaging program, a new initiative designed to recognize world-renowned photographers who use the Windows operating system in their digital workflow. [...]
  The announcement was made at Microsoft's first ever Pro Photographer Summit, held on the company's sprawling campus outside Seattle. [...]
  The Icons program is Microsoft's first and biggest attempt at building long-term relations with the professional photography community.
  Jay DeFoore/AmericanPhoto.
  Related:
  •Microsoft Launches Icons of Imaging Program at First Microsoft Pro Photo Summit
  •Microsoft acquires iView Multimedia (Peter Krogh)
  Tags: Microsoft professional photographers

QuickLinks For 2006-06-28

• Jean-François Leroy´s Editorial on the 2006 Visa pour l'image festival:
  The news in 2005/2006 has brought its grim harvest of bad news, wars, disasters, threats and bombings. [...]
  One more comment. We can no longer refer to it as a fashion or trend; there were so many reports sent in this year which were nothing more than a series of posed shots showing people clutching the portrait of a loved one now dead – victims of the tsunami, of Chernobyl, famine or war – we could have done an entire festival with the same type of report. How boring! Do we really need to point out that the sum total of individual stories can never – or so rar rarely – tell a full story. And when a trend becomes a system, then we really have the ultimate form of boredom!
  The complete festival program here (pdf-download).
  Tags: Visa pour l'image festival

Digital Railroad Partners With APA, Launches New Corporate Site

Digital Railroad announced today a partnership with the Advertising Photographers of America (APA), following an earlier cooperation with the local NYC chapter of APA. The company noted in a statement that its services will enable APA members to better manage their workflow, increase their image sales worldwide and that new programs as well as new services will increase market opportunities for APA membership.

QuickLinks For 2006-06-27

• Warner Bros. strikes deal with video-sharing site:
  Warner Bros. Entertainment on Monday began selling full-length feature films and TV shows over the Internet via Guba, one of a legion of companies presenting amateur-videos on the Web. The agreement is the latest sign that at least some in Hollywood may be ready to deal with Internet sites that some in the movie business consider a threat. Guba plans to stand out by being one of the few video-sharing sites that is profitable. CEO McInerney said his company, which began as a subscription service and now also generates revenue through ad sales, never had enough money to operate on a deficit.
  CNET.
  Related:
  • Warner Bros. to Offer Content Online (WSJ, June 27)
  • Warner Bros. offers video on demand through Guba (TC, June 26)
  • NBC to run TV promos on YouTube (HWR, June 27)
  • Video is Converging on Us (APAD, June 26)
  Tags: online video sharing

QuickLinks For 2006-06-26

• Today the Rocky Mountains News runs a long article on Thought Equity and the $300 million stock video footage market:
  Denver-based Thought Equity is the world's largest stock video footage licensing and management company, with more than 165,000 clips on its Web site. The four- year-old company essentially serves as a middleman between ad agencies and media companies that want to incorporate stock footage into their own productions and the vast film libraries that own those rights. [...]
  Stock footage is estimated to be a $300 million market, according to BBC Worldwide, and is poised to grow to $1 billion by 2010 as more clips make their way into Internet ads, cell-phone snippets and digital billboards.

QuickLinks For 2006-06-24

• MySQL addresses istockphoto's enterprise needs:
  In 2002, the company moved to a fee structure and wanted to increase traffic. "We came across this amazing thing that looked like enterprise-grade software, called MySQL", said EVP Patrick Lor. With that and PHP, they re-coded the entire site, and in 2002 sold 154,000 images at 25 cents each. [...]
  Today, istockphoto.com runs 12 clusters of eight CPUs each on name brand hardware with "five-nines kind of quality." Each day, istockphoto.com sells about 45 gigabytes, or $20K, worth of images, grossing more than $7 million a year.
  NewsForge.
  Tags: iStockphoto MySQL

QuickLinks For 2006-06-23

• The Face of India, What it's like to find yourself a TIME cover model:
  But what happens when someone who isn't famous, or even a model, actually wakes up one day to find themselves the face of America's most popular newsmagazine?
  That's what happened to Gunjan Thiagarajah, 29, a sales and marketing employee at a biotech firm in Los Angeles [...] a friend invited her to a photo shoot with a stock photographer. She thought it would be a fun experience and a quick way to make $100. She had no idea that, through the process of stock photography, her face would become an international symbol for the future of India.
  Time.com (thx for the hint, DR).
  Related: $150 for a photo on a 39-cent-stamp (Orlando Sentinel, June 18, 2006)
  Tags: For 100 bucks, we can be Heroes just for one day (Link)

QuickLinks For 2006-06-22

• ITN revamp ‘not just a coat of paint’:
  ITN formed a landmark partnership with Google in January which already enables us to sell video clips straight to US consumers. In this imagery market it is no longer the BBC and Sky News which we see as the big players around us, but Getty, Corbis and other aggregators of still imagery who, like ITN, see the use of stills and video merging — above all in corporate, advertising and consumer markets. If your children use photos from the web to enliven their school homework, it is a fair bet that in two to three years they may be downloading ITN video clips.
  Press Gazette UK.
  Related: ITN Archive becomes ITN Source (June 19, 2006)
  Tags: ITN Archive ITN Source

Analysts Recommend: "Getty Images needs to consider the acquisition of Jupitermedia"

On Monday this week, the "Financial Performance Scorecard, Full Year 2005" report from Outsell, Inc., a research and advisory firm providing market analytics for the $308 billion information industry, announced that in the new Outsell 100 Top 10 company ranking the companies Google, Autonomy, Adobe Systems and Jupitermedia Corporation are listed, among others.