This year at the CEPIC congress some got the impression that the event had been partly a meeting of dinosaurs discussing the same old topics they are discussing since years, with the same results, but nothing changes.
At the recently held PACA conference someone said during the first day that most of the exhibiting photo agencies will not survive the next ten years. On day three of the meeting, another person emended the number of years down to five.
PDN recently published the article "The Five Biggest Threats To Stock Photography", which has sparked off a vivid discussion ("Five contributions to decline of stock") on the Stockphoto.net group with lots of answers regarding the core messages of PDN´s feature:
- The decline of print media.
- An oversupply of stock photography.
- Super-cheap images.
- [By the way, the best two articles how micropayment works out practically for some contributors are still:
- How "ordinary" photographers are making Big Money shooting for small stock agencies (PopPhoto, 3 pages)
- Microstock: How Much Money Can Photographers Make? (again PDN)]
- Google Images, Flickr, and user-generated content.
- Customer and contributor confusion.
Here are two provocative responses found on Stockphoto.net which have value beyond the day-to-day business issues. The conclusions quoted above were aimed at small and mid-sized agencies, Boston-based photographer Stanley Rowin takes another perspective:
A couple of months ago I gave a talk to the ASMP DC Chapter on the state of the industry. Most of the points in this article I touched on, but the people who asked me to speak gave me the task of not having it just be a "downer." They asked me to come up with solutions. I tried to. I used positive examples from the current economic theories detailed in books like "The World is Flat" and "The Long Tail" and by expanding on terms like "crowd- sourcing."
One of the positive (and simultaneously negative) aspects of the new technological and market driven changes is the great leveler known as Google. Give them a few years and Google can make the 20th Century stock portals like Getty and Corbis irrelevant, while allowing smart entrepreneurial stock shooters to license their images directly, with no commission, through Google.
"The truth is, what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google," Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft said recently.
When even Microsoft is scared, it's time for all of us to take a step back to determine if we can exploit the new tools of the 21st Century, or if they will be the final nail in the photo stock industry coffin.
It's time to start thinking out of the box. [...]
The key is for smart photographers to optimize for more photo buyers using Google to look for images than Getty. Unfortunately the fees will probably never return to where they were.
John Heymann responds:
The mentioned PDN article gives a good framework for thinking about the future. Still the current discussion among photographers seems to be on a surprisingly low level.
Photographers talk a lot about today but no one seems to be willing to discuss how the world might look in some years. Everyone loves to fight about the differences between RM, RF and Microstock but very few people seem to accept that the fundamental changes will be very similar whatever business model you have choosen personally.
For agencies it seems to be pretty obvious how to adapt to the changing landscape: Attract as much talented contributors as possible and build distribution networks that are profitable independently from how much you charge your customers or how much your contributors earn. Look at istockphoto.com or at alamy.com for seeing what I mean.
But what is about us, the photographers? Is it really enough to accept that the market is in a changing process, make some smart business adjustments and after that we are fine? I'm afraid this will not be enough for most of us to survive. My personal guesstimate is that 60 percent of todays photographers will not be in business in 2010.
Related:
- Where Is Getty Headed in 2007? (Jim Pickerell, Nov. 14, 2006)
- Using Google Base For Selling Stock Photography (Jan. 30, 2006)
