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Getting Images
This morning I was treated to an excellent presentation by Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images, the leader (dare I say dominant company) in the stock photo and video business.
Jonathan is everything you want in a founder/leader. He is a company builder, a solid manager, a thinker, a doer, and more than anything else a passionate believer in the power of images to move people. And the Company he leads, Getty Images, is a testament to his force of character.
The presentation included a photo montage put together for Live Aid with images of the poverty and famine in Africa that was moving to say the least. I like that - selling more than your stock.
But the entire time I sat in the audience listening intently to his presentation I was thinking that I wasn't going to use one of his images to decorate my post.
I am using a photo from Flickr, in this instance, a photo I shot today on my afternoon bike ride around the desert surrounding the Boulders resort.
And I couldn't help but wonder how user generated content that is free and doesn't require a license, will change the images business.
The Business 2.0 blog is not decorated with stock photos, its decorated by the Flickr photo of the day. And they are amazing images, every single one of them. Produced by the people, for the people, of the people.
When everyone has a camera in their pocket (or a videocamera) the best of the amateurs is often as good as much of the pros.
Something to muddle on some more.
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Posted March 6, 2006 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
Its going to get a lot cooler than you think. Just wait, yahoo is on the verge of pulling off some really incredible stuff in the near future in both video and images. Just think about their announcement of focusing on user generated content.
Posted by: Bradley Twohig | Mar 6, 2006 7:50:56 PM
Nice call, we are only at the tip of the iceberg on this one, in two years Getty will either be struggling or leading the way. I am curious to see what happens.
Posted by: Bradley Twohig | Mar 6, 2006 8:10:07 PM
answer: you get the "microstock" industry - the leader of which is istockphoto - which was just bought by getty ($50M) - I'm surprised that Jonathon never spoke about this.
istockphoto is by far my favorite case-study in peer production yet.
what istockphoto has shown is that;
a) there is $ demand for quality photo's taken by you and me
b) flickr != quality, interesting yes, quality no
c) licenses have to be managed no matter how small the margin - both in the acquisition & distribution of images - "free" images can only ever serve "free" products
d) anyone who will buy images haven't the time to sort the long tail - and will pay for the convenience of not having to
the microstock model perfectly fills the gap between traditional stock image databases and mostly-unusable-commons-based-images (flickr etc.) - when done right, with strong community, companies like istockphoto could take the all demand in the stock image industry
also --> joining istockphoto's a GREAT way to mprove your photography
Posted by: David G | Mar 6, 2006 10:22:15 PM
I emailed Alan Meckler once and asked about what would happen if Flickr added the ability for users to sell their photos.
My main point was that a quick search for "delaware" in Getty revealed a couple photos of Philadelphia while the same search in Flickr revealed hundreds of photos of Delaware.
Meckler's respsonse to me: "there is no commercial value in Flickr."
I'm a web designer. I'd love to pay for photos on Flickr. It'll happen.
Posted by: Rick | Mar 6, 2006 11:58:51 PM
I agree w/ you 1000 percent that user generated content is going to be big in this and other areas.
In very short order, we'll have a video service that uses user-generated content, a huge index, and P2P for distribution and we'll call it our TV. At least I will.
And re: photography in particular. I've always thought this was the art with the most charlatans. It's pretty easy as an art form and a science. The point being that it would take the average person a lifetime to come up with a great painting, but anybody with a digital camera and time on their hands will end up taking some great photos.
Posted by: scott partee | Mar 7, 2006 1:45:07 AM
This is interesting, because Fred said that he was wondering how user generated content that's free and doesn't require a license will change the business... and several of these responses were about how the business will shift so the formerly free content is sold.
I've done some shopping for stock images, mostly to use on websites, and I'll happily pay for a good image, just as I'll pay for good stock footage.
Unfortunately, as 20 some odd years of people owning video cameras has shown, the amateur is usually not even cloe to the pro. But the amateurs who ARE as good can now quickly become pros as this kind of online distribution increases. I like this. It'll let the cream rise more quickly.
Honestly, though, I highly doubt that user generated video is ever going to be as popular as shows or films made by pros. There's a reason these things are done by pros - because most people don't know how to do it. It's a LOT more than turning on a camera and pressing record - there has to be something to shoot.
Posted by: Chrispy | Mar 7, 2006 10:06:54 AM
To further David G's point, Spymedia (www.spymedia.com) purports to be another istockphoto. On the mobile front, check out www.scoopt.com, the first agency for amateur cameraphone photogs.
As far as user-generated video content, for all its imperfections, Current.tv is pushing in that direction.
Posted by: Frederic Guarino | Mar 7, 2006 12:25:12 PM
Another issue with sotck photos is model releases. Most producers or providers of stock photography (at least as used in business and advertising) have already handled getting model releases for those images. The person whose picture is being taken has certain rights over the use of that image.
I headed over to Flickr (I'm actually in the market for some good stock images right now) and browsed around their "interesting" images in the category I'm looking in, and true - there are some great pics. But I doubt seriously that any of those images could be used commerically (even if they were freely licensed) because the subjects are not going to allow their pictures to be used to help other folks make $$$.
Posted by: Steve Ivy | Mar 9, 2006 12:59:04 PM
Yotophoto.com is a search engine for Creative Commons and other 'copyleft' images. The images range from very high quality professional looking photos to lower quality ones that proably aren't suitable for design. But, many of these images may be of use for historical, geographical or academic interest (mostly from Wikipedia et al.)
More developments soon, we're still in early beta.
/shameless plug
Posted by: Mark Thomson | Mar 10, 2006 4:49:31 AM
Steve, you make a good point about images with identifiable people in them, but there are also many, many, great images on Flickr that marketers would want that have no people in them or unidentifiable people in them.
Also many of the people in images are known to the photographer (family, kids, friends, etc.) and if needed the photographer could probably in many of those cases get a model release signed.
I've sold three photos now online (one through Google Images and two through Flickr).
Posted by: Thomas Hawk | Mar 10, 2006 11:59:57 AM
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