StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

A Few Words With Professional Image Buyer Alexander Karst on Microstock in The German Speaking Countries

Alexander Karst is an old stager in the picture business.

He started his career in 1998 as Web & PR Manager at PhotoDisc where he first met his now partner at Die Bildbeschaffer, Michaela Koch, worked later for Getty Images and Digital Vision, and co-founded Strandperle in 2002.

In 2008 Alexander founded "Die Bildbeschaffer" in Hamburg, again together with Michaela Koch: a new venture which offers the outsourcing of the complete process of buying RM/RF/MS/CC images, rights clearance and pricing as a service to ad agencies and corporates. Now, "Die Bildbeschaffer" not only do the fulfilment – but also do pre- & after-sales jobs: image databases, filling images into the databases, trainings and seminars for all purposes.

As an image buyer, Alexander has been involved from Day One in buying and using microstock. I wanted to know more about Alexander’s buying experience with microstock since the beginning and how it and also his perception about microstock have changed over the years.

 

iStockphoto: COO Kelly Thompson Projects $200 million in Revenues, Microstock Agency launches Vetta Collection

Kelly Thompson became COO of iStockphoto in September 2008, a few months before Founder & CEO Bruce Livingstone left the company.

In his new position Kelly is responsible for the future of the world´s - in absolute numbers - economically most successful microstock agency, which employs a staff of 115 in Calgary (including contractors and the Berlin office) and additionally 110 image inspectors around the globe, in total about 225 people.

Recently I spoke to Kelly and asked him: what is the future focus of iStockphoto under the COO Kelly Thompson?

"I´m a pretty technical guy: I have a computer science degree with a specialty in UI design and worked at a major enterprise search company for a long time, so you´ll see a focus on that for me.

Bruce left the company in brilliant shape with the content we have: I might be biased, but I think we have some of the best content on the planet, micro or not - as Vetta attests to.

A Short Conversation with Christina Vaughan, the New CEPIC President

Christina Vaughan, Founder and CEO of Image Source, was so kind to respond to some questions during the CEPIC congress.

Andy:

Under your guidance as the new CEPIC president, what will change and how fast? What are the next real steps in daily life to make CEPIC as a association and as a congress event a better experience?

Christina:

In Dresden, the National Associations gave a unanimous vote for the position of new President, and an almost entirely new Committee was voted in. Afterwards it is safe to say that the Members and Stakeholders of CEPIC are looking for change. There is a huge appetite for Positive Enhancing Change, to see that CEPIC is not only relevant to their business, but it is critical to help shape the business culture of the image industry.

The three new Officers, Klaus Plaumann, Dominique DeLouis and I were elected on a Manifesto of Transparency, Membership Enlargement and Inclusion, Lobbying and Networking. We believe that Europe requires a powerful voice, a voice that will harness all creators, suppliers and distributors of visual communication media. That voice needs to be forward thinking, inclusive, confident and bold.

A Short Fall Conversation With AudioMicro´s Ryan Born on Microstock Audio

Andy:

Ryan, first off, congratulations to the good news for AudioMicro. Before founding AudioMicro, which started officially in May 2008, you were formerly the VP of Finance for WireImage. How did you get into the music and especially the microstock audio business?

Ryan:

As a finance professional at WireImage, I analyzed the photography marketplace (crunching numbers, reviewing financial statements of the public photography companies, and reading outlets like StockPhotoTalk) and in late 2004/early 2005 it became clear to me that the micro stock model was the future of photography licensing.

When Getty announced that they were acquiring WireImage, I needed to make a career decision. I had always wanted to try and build a micro stock photography site, but it seemed like a very saturated market. I wondered what outlets, other than photography, the micro stock model could be applied to - video, flash animations, fonts, vectors, and music all came to mind. I chose to move into the music market because it was the largest market that had yet to be swept up by the micro stock licensing phenomenon.

A Short Midsummer Conversation With Shutterstock´s Jon Oringer on Microstock Footage

Andy:

Jon, compared to the microstock photography market size, how big do you estimate is the microstock footage market size in general?

Jon:

Comparatively speaking, the microstock footage market is much smaller.  However, like the microstock image market in its early days (just a few years ago), it is quickly growing and has great potential.

Andy:

Compared to the traditional footage market size, is microstock footage opening a new market that didn´t formerly exist (like microstock photography)?

A Short Conversation With Shutterstock´s Jon Oringer

Question:

First off, Fotolia launched The Infinite Collection a few days ago with the words that it´s "the first traditional stock library to be created by a microstock agency". Does The Infinite Collection pose in any way a threat to Shutterstock in particular and to the microstock photo industry in general? Do you think Fotolia will permanently lose contributors to other microstock agencies like Shutterstock because Fotolia´s contributors will see The Infinite Collection as a competition?

Jon Oringer:

The quality of the images in Fotolia´s new collection is inferior to those that are being submitted to Shutterstock at the moment. In fact, we would have rejected many of the images they have chosen. I´m not sure what the advantage to the buyer is?

No matter what people pay, they want value for their money. I´ve been following the threads in the microstock forums (as I always do) and contributors aren´t happy that inferior images are selling for $20 - $80 each. Here is one example, one of many, that contributors are pointing to: http://www.fotolia.com/id/5352668.
[an image from Image Source]

We do not see this new offering as a threat to Shutterstock.

ImageTrail.net: The first microstock only photo portal, Q&A with Founder & CEO Peter Galbraith

Towards the end of the microstock session during the CEPIC conference in Florence I wanted also to present and to discuss with the panelists the specific impact of a dedicated micropayment stock photo portal, showing microstock photography only, but after 2 1/2 hours we finally ran out of time.

Some readers know that I had been working on a micropayment stock photo portal myself, but could not procede with full power due to other events.

Peter Galbraith, 27 years young, Founder & President of ImageTrail.net and based in Corrales, New Mexico, started instead about one month earlier in summer 2006 to work on his vision of a microstock only photo portal, and recently I threw some questions at him.

Interview With Digital Railroad´s CEO Evan Nisselson

I discovered Digital Railroad back in early summer 2004 und was impressed by the concept and the philosophy behind the company, the product and the services offered, as described here from my point of view in my blog post of August 2004.

Now it´s 2006 and definitely time for an update.

(Photos: Ron Haviv/VII Photo; click on photos to enlarge)

Andy: Evan, shortly before we met last time, I wrote about the snowball effect of the Digital Railroad philosophy. At that time, Digital Railroad showcased about 160 photographers and 8 photo agencies in the archive directory. Currently, Digital Railroad has about 300 photographers and 16 photo agencies.
Did the snowball effect really take off? How many photographers and photo agencies are signing up for your services at an average per month? How many photographers and photo agencies do you expect to have by the end of 2006?

Evan: The snowball effect that you so accurately wrote about is definitely progressing in terms of our number of subscribers; however, another key metric that is actually more important, in my mind, is our number of High-Quality photographers and agencies.

BusinessWeek: Interview With Bill Gates And Steve Davis Of Corbis; Analyst Expects $2 Billion Market To Grow In The Mid-Teens Percent In 2006

The BusinessWeek runs a long article today about Corbis (Content is King at Corbis) and an interview with Bill Gates and Steve Davis in this matter (Bill Gates Pictures Corbis' Future):

Gates noted in the interview:

Question: The explosion of digital photography, combined with the Internet, makes it possible for millions of people to share photos and videos via Web sites like Flickr and BitTorrent. Is there a role for Corbis in this citizen-creator phenomenon?

Gates: Most of what we get is done by professional photographers. We do have partners who are in the spot-news business, who create the stuff people need right away. We're good at archiving and organizing it, so we take that material and make it available. You could have some amateur work come in through the spot-news channel. It will be like it is with e-zines and bloggers. In photography, you'll have the whole array of stuff that's just up there free, and then increasing levels of quality. The whole spectrum is being figured out.

Listen! Black Star Starts Weekly Podcasts

Except for the webcasts of Getty Images, podcasts still haven´t entered the stock photo industry.

Legendary NYC-based photo/publishing agency Black Star was founded in 1935 by the germans Kurt Safranski, Kurt Kornfeld and Ernest Mayer. Today the company operates divisions like Assignment Photo (also here), Stock Photo (also here) and the Editorial PhotoJournalism service.

According to John P. Chapnick, Black Star is soon starting a weekly podcast. The podcast series will "cover trends in the photographic industry, for photographers, agencies, and clients" and is going start in late March 2006. Generally, estimates are that podcasting is a 1,2 - 2,3 billion dollar industry currently.

Tags: Black Star; Podcasts in the Stock Photography Industry

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?

Middleware Technologies For The Picture Business: Who Cares?

After the printed issue of VISUELL "The News Magazine For the Picture Business" shipped last week with my five-page story about "Middleware Technologies", the story is now also available online (Link).

After a small introduction I´ve done some interviews with VPs and Execs of Getty Images, Mauritius Images, Laif, photo portal Fotofinder, etc. and the picture editing department of german magazines Stern and Spiegel.

The story focuses less on the technology itself, but more on the benefits (virtual photoportals for photo sellers and photo buyers) for the user regarding products like -- alphabetically -- the Communication Server (Confessmedia), opengate (picturemaxx) and The Missing Link (DiASystems).

The story will be also appear translated in the international issue of Visuell next month in December, but without the additional and marvellous comment (Link) of editor-in-chief Stefan Hartmann. As the Krauts are apparently sometimes strange people, no one outside Germany would probably understand the comment without heavy, heavy background information.

However, the story is online only availabe to regular subscribers of VISUELL.

Technorati Tags: middleware technologies; software; Confessmedia; Communication Server; DiASystems; The Missing Link; picturemaxx; opengate; Krauts

[Image via object plus; this company is not involved and has got nothing to do with this kind of middleware technologies]

Interview With Fotolia´s CEO Thibaud Elziere: "Microstock Sites Can Capture Up To 30% Of The Existing Market"

I discovered the new start-up Fotolia via a TrackBack of their blog back in April 2005 and, after their six month beta period, was impressed by their concept and thus the difference to other micropayment sites. It´s about time that new and young people are entering the stock photo industry game of "I´ll buy you before you acquire my competitor", together with new ideas and fresh blood.

A game, that is still dominated by 40+ years old grandpas with starting gray hairs. Some of these grandpas were about 26 years old when they started their own businesses. Regarding the traditional media, also still ruled by 40+ years old grandpas, it´s sometimes difficult for these young companies to find the attention they deserve. So I peppered Thibaud with some questions and here are his reponses.

Andy: Thibaud, could you describe your professional background and your experience in the stock photo industry, as well as the experience of your two co-founders, Oleg Tscheltzoff and Patrick Chassany?

Thibaud: I am still young, 26 years and I did an engineering school in France and a management school in Germany. My experience in the stock image industry is more as a buyer than as a photographer. I was in charge of marketing/communication in some start-up web agencies and had to deal with images quite a lot. Oleg is an very advanced amateur photographer, who shots with a Canon Mark II. Moreover our team is composed of two professional photographers (Chad and David) and one famous model (Aiste). Last but not least, we have Patrick who is an online service specialist with demonstrable successes of creating and selling web services.

Interview With Allen Murabayashi, CEO Of Photoshelter

In the following interview Allen Murabayashi, CEO of Photoshelter, answers to some of the questions about his company, the basic ideas and reasons behind Photoshelter.

Andy: Allen, what was the basic idea to found Photoshelter?

Allen: We live in an increasingly digital world. The proliferation of devices like digital cameras, iPods, and computers in the past few years means that as a society we are accumulating more digital assets. Camera resolutions are going up, and professional photographers are concerned because they realize they can't indefinitely chain hard drives to their computers. At the same time, broadband has become commonplace. So having an online archive is achievable.

Photographers don't have time to learn how to administer their own RAID. They don't have time to swap out drives, or deal with network security. So Photoshelter provides a managed archiving solution that is hassle free, and provides a level of redundancy that no single photographer could match in his/her home.

Secondly, the consolidation of the industry has made it difficult for the individual photographer to compete. I think the famous statistic is that Getty and Corbis do 40% of the stock business with 1% of the photographers. That means there is an enormous amount of talent that is not being represented through picture sales. Providing a marketplace for that to happen is a goal of Photoshelter.

Andy: How do you think PhotoShelter can compete against Digital Railroad and IPNStock?

Allen: First, neither is an archiving solution. Regardless of claims, both systems are designed and priced to sell a limited set of images. And while DRR doesn't currently have an e-commerce solution, we assume that they will develop a commission-based system like everything else out there.

Photoshelter's vision starts a step earlier at the point of the archive. After the images are safe, we're agnostic on how you market/sell your images. We provide an e-commerce solution so that a photographer can manage direct sales to compliment their agency relationship. Or we'll happily feed images into any system, if you choose to sell images elsewhere.

So, in our opinion, we're not competing at the same level. IPNStock appears to be an alternative brand to Getty. DRR appears to offer agency capability to photojournalists. We do not see ourselves as a competitor to agencies. People will use Photoshelter as a springboard for their sales and marketing. In fact, we're talking to a number of agencies about using Photoshelter as their commerce engine.

Also, this "industry" (i.e. the little guy creating their own "agency") is very nascent. DRR, for example, is often quoted as being an industry-changing force, but they only have a couple hundred clients. Printroom, by contrast has over 5,000 clients. So IPN and DRR might end up being major factors in the years to come, but it's impossible to tell at this point. We think it's a very exciting time for photographers and photo buyers. [Click continue to read the rest of the interview]

Interview With Mark Thomson/Yotophoto

In the following small interview Mark Thomson, CEO of Yotophoto, answers to some questions about his company, the basic ideas and reasons behind Yotophoto:

"Yotophoto is a small operation and is privately funded. The original idea was to create a way to easily search Wikipedia's images as their servers are -- or at least they were -- notoriously slow at this. The site then grew to incorporate other free image sites.

We don't come from the stock photo industry but have a background in web development and web publishing.

I understand that the emergence of cheap or free stock is a problem for photographers and I understand why. On the other hand I think change is inevitable because the technology for taking pictures and the methods of distribution are evolving so rapidly. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I should point out that our primary target market is not traditional print or online publishers but rather individual bloggers and webmasters. Blogging is exploding but most blogs are still purely text based. We'd like to help enable these 'citizen-publishers' to incorporate relevant visual media in their articles."

Background: "Yotophoto: The Long, Soft And Inevitable Revolution?" and a recent post in the Stock Photo Discussion Group "High-quality stock photography now available for free" by Jim Hunter.