The 800 pound gorilla finally decided to put on clothes, and join the party! Getty Images seems to have finally launched a subscription product. (As far as I can tell, the smart folks at phototalk broke this one, last Friday. This is the link to their original article.)
The launch is a strange one. Getty doesn't seem to have put the info out front on its site. Instead, the details of the product are hidden down a layer, with bits and pieces sticking out here and there. I guess they plan to try things out quietly for a few weeks, and then make a big noise about it.
Of course, folks like us at Index Stock, who have been in the subscription area since 2000 (with our WebSpice product) and who have two pretty successful royalty free subscription products (Index Open for high end users and Photos To Go Unlimited for small businesses, Web designers, and road warriors), have been anxious to learn what Getty was up to. We worried that their new product would undercut the market we are part of, or would be overwhelmingly wonderful in some new and exciting way. (The product manager for our subscription products, Brent Phelps, is now writing his own blog on our industry. He has been especially diligent about looking for info on this product, and broke part of the story too, in his About the Image blog.)
We were pleased to see that the new Getty subscription product is weak. The table below summarizes what we could find out about it, from looking at the Getty site. As you can see, on almost every point, both our high end and lower end products are superior in value, image breadth, and (in my humble opinion) image quality.
The only place that we see the Getty subscription having an advantage is in the number of images that can be downloaded per day. I recently shared my analysis of this issue, and we will soon take steps to address it. Our product has 50% more images at between half and one tenth the price. Our images come from more than 80 independent artists and image providers, and most of them are new images. The Getty images seem to have been selected from the older ranks of the Digital Vision and PhotoDisc files. Our terms and conditions are more customer-friendly (like us!). Our subscription remains the only true high-resolution subscription, in the market. (There is no need to upgrade to a higher resolution with our Index Open product--you get the full resolution file, right away!) We are also still the only subscription provider who links their subscriptions to their main library. Our subscribers get instand access on each search, to an additional 900,000 images. That makes our product an ideal one-stop creative tool, for most image professionals.
The folks at Getty are smart, flush with cash, rich in images and talented artists, and incredibly aggressive. I am sure their customers will tell Getty that their subscription product is not what their customers had hoped for. I expect Getty to listen carefully to this feedback, and respond to it. For the moment, the big monkey has his pants on backwards. However, we expect him to eventually figure out how to turn his pants around, and start making trouble again in this new part of the zoo.
Comments