Sorry to have been remiss in my blogging. I've been traveling most of the past two weeks. One of my stops was in Seattle, where PACA, the main industry organization for stock photography agents, held its annual meeting this year.
The meeting was well attended, and quite stimulating. Our industry continues to change rapidly. I believe there are at least six trends underway, that will change our industry. Here they are, in order from most important (as I perceive it) to least important:
Adobe Stock Photo Service. If you have not heard about this new product from Adobe, you had better catch up. (This is a link to Adobe's FAQ on the product. Here is also a link to an interview with the manager of the product, done by a very nice site called "The Stock Asylum.") ASPS is going to completely change the stock photo industry. Any registered user of Creative Suite Version 2 can now get access to 230,000 royalty free images, from within his or her PhotoShop program. The images can be searched for and licensed with an incredibly simple interface that also helps track each image as it is manipulated in PhotoShop and later used in Adobe's InDesign program. This product makes it natural for PhotoShop users to do their shopping for images via PhotoShop--and threatens to supercede all other methods of obtaining images.
iStockPhoto. I've written about them before, but I have to mention them, again. This is a Calgary-based company that allows photographers to list and license images for $1 per download. It sounds crazy. What artist would give a royalty-free license to his or her images, for $1? You can say it is crazy, but it is working--and working big time. iStockPhoto site traffic has grown to huge numbers (their Alexa rank of 978 is above Corbis' ranking of 2,288 and not that much under Getty's 586), and it has now set up an iStockPro site where the best of the iStockPro material can be licensed for bigger dollars. These guys already have a great library of images--it is only going to get bigger and better, over time.
PLUS. Thanks to the Plus Coalition (PLUS = Photo Licensing Universal System), we are finally making progress on standardizing rights-managed licensing. Some of the forums I track have been filled recently with agonized threads about how rights managed (RM) image providers are hamstringing themselves, by making RM images harder to use than royalty free (RM) images. A big part of this difference in ease of use has been the complex pricing grids that the various RM suppliers offer. Each grid has different terminology and a slightly different structure. A client who tries to buy from three sources is likely to get three different interpretations of the use and three different pricing philosophies. The folks who run PLUS have pulled together a star-studded cast of industry players (including Adobe) and convinced them to simplify and coordinate their pricing grids. This effort looks likely to pay off later this year, with a system that everyone in the RM world can get behind and support.
Subscription. Our customers love our high end photo subscription product, Index Open. We recently added a low end subscription product for small businesses and Web designers called Photos To Go Unlimited. Our customers love it, too. There are only a few players right now in subscriptions (we think we are now number two, behind Jupiter Media). But I'll bet that several new folks try to jump in, over the next few months. Some of these products may be pretty lame (only a few images, only a few sources of images, lots of limits and restrictions, etc.). That may confuse the market for a while, but nothing is going to stop the long-term momentum of this type of product. It is just so darn convenient and easy to understand, that everyone who learns about it, wants it.
Custom Stock. I have written before about our partnership with the leader in this area, OnRequest Images. I've been amazed that no other major players have pushed into their territory. I've heard nothing but good things about the opportunities OnRequest is creating for artists and the images they are making for their customers. We've certainly seen good results on the images of theirs that we now represent.
Infringement tracking. Two firms have announced that they will carry infringement tracking beyond the Web and into the world of print media. Each will be scanning major publications and reporting image uses to their subscribers. Both have already demostrated enough success in the world of Web usage, to convince most licensors of stock images to try or consider trying their service. There soon may be no place left, for an infringer to hide!
Overall, these trends are likely to continue pushing smaller agencies into the ground. Many agencies may argue that 1) their interface is better than ASPS, 2) that the stuff on iStockPhoto is poor quality, 3) that their price grid is better than PLUS, 4) that Subscriptions are only for low end users, 5) that customers don't need custom images, and 6) that their own systems catch most infringements. You can be sure that we at Index Stock take these trends seriously. We may not be able to benefit from all of them, but we are trying to at least find ways to avoid being buried by them! We may have adjust our business models, but we should be able to turn most of them into profitable opportunities for our artists.
I'll take bets that at least three of these trends will take hold in the next year and that at least five make a difference to how things look, over the next three years. (No bets above a dollar please--we want to stay friendly on this, but feel free to state the proposition and send in your offers!)
Thanks for the comments! By the way, iStockphoto just surpassed Getty Images on the Alexa rankings front.
Posted by: Patrick Lor | July 18, 2005 at 04:39 AM