"Upload, vote, share, blog about images": Jonathan Klein on ViewImages and Getty Images´s new Consumer site

Around mid-May Jonathan Klein told Seattle Times technology reporter Kim Peterson that "he has big plans for Livingstone to drive Getty´s growth in other areas of the company", but Klein "won´t say what".

Attendees of the CEPIC session on User Generated Content/Microstock in Florence in mid-June may remember that I asked in a slide if "Getty goes again for User Generated Visual Content after iStock and Scoopt?". I assumed also a new photosharing site with the ability to license images with all needed releases and to self-tag the price of the image.

Jonathan Klein presented more general features about Getty Images´soon to be launched new Consumer site in the following sentences for a Getty Images broadcast, which was partly recently recorded in July after the earlier acquisition of Pump Audio:

 

"There are bigger and more important things happening now than in any stage of our history. [...]

What I like to talk about is what I´m calling Getty Images 3.0. [...]

You know for some time we have been tempted by others as well as by ourselves to dip our toe into the Consumer market. It has been a scary word, and our core skills and strenghts have been in B2B. We are now extremely confident that there is an opportunity to have a significant impact on the Consumer experience.

I will outline today some of our thoughts around Consumer. [...]

We started fooling around last year. [...]

We were fooling around with an idea we had called ViewImages.com. We never communicated it, we did a trial with Yahoo and today we are already seeing significant traffic on that site.

 

 

What we are doing is we´re taking what we have learned there as well as a number of other ideas to bring together a Consumer site.

On this site, we will offer a wide variety of content to consumers. There´ll be images, the images will be professional images, as well as user-generated imagery. People will be able to upload images, vote on images, share images, pass them around, blog about images, have a conversation with the community around imagery.

The site will have some of the best imagery in the world, of a professional nature, as well as as I said stuff which people just want to share.

It goes without saying that the site will have footage, some people call it video or film, and again the same attribute will apply to the film or video part of the site. And as you heard a moment ago, what would life be without music? There will be music of all types on the site.

Furthermore, the site won´t just be a whole blob or collection of content. We will target specific interests, specific subjects and specific demographics.

There will clearly be an important part of the site for Celebrity or Entertainment. Sport seems to be of interest to many people. There are News junkies. Everybody is into Travel and Nature. The environment is important. The Fashion industry and people´s obsess of interest in Fashion will be covered. And of course we do have a few historical images, so we cover History and biography.

Now of course, we are not doing this just for fun. We´re doing this in order to drive additional revenue. Firstly from our existing assets: images, footage and over time music. We also want to leverage our expertise which we have into this new market, and we want to put that together in a way which is community-based.

The experience and the site, because I have already seen it, is extremely cutting-edge, and it shouldn´t surprise you that this is being led and driven by our resident social media and community expert Bruce Livingston, out of Calgary. As you know Bruce is a Senior Vice President of Consumer and is the CEO of iStockphoto which incidentally is the biggest, the most successful and the most profitable imagery community in the world. [...]

We have significant traffic already and let me just pause for a moment. When you add the Getty Images sites together we already have today, before the Consumer site is up and running, 10 million unique visitors a month. Not bad for a selection of B2B sites. That´s not enough. We also are adding deals with other sites in order to drive traffic.

Revenues will come from many sources. We do not believe that it´s all about advertising. Advertising will be a component of the revenue, but there will also be e-commerce."

Remarks:

• Four images derive from a video edited by Getty Images.
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Related:

• "In October last year, I mentioned -- and I mentioned it very much in passing, I don’t think anybody noticed -- that we intend to monetize our assets beyond our traditional customer base and a consumer offering is in the works to do just this".
  (Jonathan Klein during the last Conference Call on August 01, 2007)

• "I’ve also made it clear that our consumer offering would have not just our content but also other major players who have still and moving imagery".
  (Jonathan Klein during the last Conference Call on August 01, 2007)

• "What we feel is that we have now the opportunity to create a broader based digital media company. What do I mean by saying a broad based digital media company? We need to go beyond just pictures to our customer base".
  (Jonathan Klein during the William Blair Growth Stock Conference on June 20, 2007)

• WSJ: Getty Images to acquire Pump Audio for $42 million (June 20, 2007)

• Microstock photography represents a new business model
  (Seattle Times, May 28, 2007)
  • Picture this: Affordable stock photos via the Web
    (Chicago Tribune, June 11, 2007)
    (Smaller Reprint of the Seattle Times article)

• "We plan to launch a consumer business in the next 90 to 120 days".
  (Jonathan Klein during the Goldman Sachs Internet Conference on May 23, 2007)

• The CEPIC has made available the Powerpoint presentations of the panelists of the Microstock session on its website. They can be downloaded here.
  A transcript of the entire session will follow later.