Diluted, Uncharted Waters
Stock photography; rights managed picture libraries, royalty free and micro stock agencies.
by
Jonathan Eastland
Stock photographers are creative people. Those who survive do so on a mixture of imaginative visual interpretation and business acumen accrued over time. The longer they can stay in the game, the more creative (and or obsessed) they become and the more acumen (business experience) they acquire. Some get rich on it; most toddle along and are intermittently in and out of the game.
It isn't an easy game to stay in and prosper from. The individual hoping to do so will need gallons of stamina, dreams and aspirations beyond normal sensibility, a colossal network of contacts, and the visual and mental ability to be able to turn the ordinary into something special, and, be able to continue to do all of this on a regular basis for decades. It's hard but wonderful work; a privileged position if one can pull it off.
One of the major problems for would-be stock photographers however, is that they often lack the business acumen and or contacts needed to sell their work and today, they lack the knowledge required to build and script internet web sites which would enable them to do so. Hence, the plethora of service sites (e.g. Clickpic, AmazingInternet.) with ready made template driven web pages aligned to e-commerce picture sales and back office admin tools. For a monthly subscription fee, individuals can enter the game, uploading a few images to basic sites. From there, it's dream on. Photographers don't make real money from these portals but it does give those without the aforementioned web building skills a simple route to the world wide window display. All the individual has to do now, is wait for a punter to spot the picture he/she just cannot live without.
So let me tell you a true story before we go further into this minefield.
More than forty years ago, a very young would-be photographer began to carve out the beginnings of a new career in the visual world. The Writers & Artists Year Book, Willings Press Guide, a monthly private subscription journal, the Photojournalist, membership of the fledgling Bureau of Freelance Photographers and a book entitled How to Freelance in Photography provided the much needed inside information on how photographs were sold to the press and publishing world. Very early on, the young would-be photographer began submitting b+w prints to Barnaby's Picture Library and from them, received many enthusiastic notes of encouragement for the high standard of interesting submissions the agency was sure would sell soon.
A few short years down the line, the now independent, barely established would-be and mostly impecunious photographer with a very young family knocked on the door of an international press agency with a demand that it hire the young visitor and send same off to war torn foreign parts. The request was turned down flat and countered with an alternative offer which at first seemed desperately unattractive to the photographer. It was that, specialists in a particular field would always be needed and the applicant in question had some skills which others lacked.
The applicant was me. The skills learned from an earlier, and what had seemed, promising career, had been picked up from childhood while messing about in boats and later, in the Merchant Navy. For reasons I will not go into now, the sea did not figure in any of my plans to be a photographer. The whole idea of it was anathema to my dreams and aspirations of becoming a top news, fashion, sports, war or whatever photo-journalist.
But when times are hard and you have run out of childhood train sets to sell to pay the rent and you desperately want to keep on doing what you know and love most, you have to think again. Thus was dug the foundation of a long and lasting relationship with that news agency, the establishment of my own news and feature service and the setting in place of bricks that would ultimately lead to the building of a specialist picture library.
In the years which followed, I was able to do the thing I most enjoyed far beyond any horizon I had dreamed of when the decision to do it was first made on the sandy shore of Lake Maracaibo. These were wonderful years filled with travel and the excitement of meeting new people in new places, of covering events and producing results my knowledge of the sea had enabled. My own agency did well. Publishers from all over the world came or called to request pictures and stories. The bank manager who had once suggested I give it all up was more than happy to advance capital whenever I needed it, no questions asked. Sub-prime? It's as old as the hills.
But then, things changed. I also changed. And these two moments more or less collided.
First, along came cheap magazine colour reproduction. The b+w images which were the mainstay of agency and library work at the time and which could be easily and cheaply replicated for distribution, were suddenly no longer in demand. Clients wanted colour and they wanted originals and they mostly wanted them exclusively. I kept up the coverage of events and mimicked what was happening with the technology in the international news agencies; Shoot on colour neg and service the clients with colour prints or film positives. My clients didn't like the change. They did not have the technology or the know-how to obtain good quality repro from this material. In house pre-press operators got better results, they said, from reversal materials on new laser drum scanners their bosses had invested hundreds of thousands of pounds into, so the call for trannies came thick and fast. If I could avoid it, I refused to hand over originals. A costly duplication system was set up but more or less at the same time, many magazine clients had reduced the number of news pages so they could fill them with more feature material and allocate more advertising pages. It eat into revenue returns which in turn meant one had to take a longer and harder look at the calendar of events to be covered which would turn a decent profit.
A lot of other incidental changes also took place throughout the late 1980s and early 90s and not least of these was that I no longer had the desire to go chasing around the world to cover the sort of events I had been attending for the best part of 25 years. There were many other things I now wanted to do photographically but it wasn't easy to fit these into a slimmer operating budget. And then there was that other thing.
Digital.
In 1975, I had been shown the skeletal outline of the technology which would revolutionise the way things were done and which now rules the roost. Closely watching the electronic changes taking place through the years at the Associated Press had, in a small way, enabled me to maintain some enthusiasm for the future, as well as, to keep going when things looked really bad for the rest of the world. My picture library had grown and the only way to administer it efficiently was to appoint a manager. Now we had computers they could be used to create a database. Filing was more efficient and requests more reliably serviced. This was crucial as I had learned years before that when a picture researcher made an enquiry for images, there was usually, no deadline. They wanted the images then and there. Same or next day delivery was a given. And people would not come back for another bite if, the first time around, you made them wait a week.
And suddenly it seemed, the phone went dead. The enquiries dried up. Analogue images lay dormant in metal filing cabinets. I survived on day to day events coverage and producing features for a handful of clients still willing to pay good money for my expertise. I started a small book publishing division with dreams and aspirations really beyond my financial capability, but which nonetheless and to this day, keeps a fire in the grate. Like many others, I had underestimated the power of the fledgling world wide web to march rough shod over personal client relations as well as its potential as a tool for efficient distribution.
New experts and service businesses offering opportunites to get on board www sprang up. For the lone entrepreneur, the cost was high. Digitalising thousands of film images and buying into a full blown e-commerce database driven system with all the associated security necessary to protect intellectual property rights required a down payment of several hundred thousand dollars. Today, it's a fifth of that figure, but still eighty grand on the table. Only big players with deep pockets, such as Mark Getty, who reportedly once made the analogy that images would be the oil of the 21st century, would make the technology work. For the rest, how long they might survive in an increasingly competitive world without substantial electronic infrastructure to deliver the goods, was anyone's guess.
Medium and small generalist picture libraries without proper e-commerce web systems would find the going tough in the short term. The lucky ones got bought by Getty, Corbis or Jupiter and their collections amalgamated into the larger stock holdings. Growing content was the thing. The unlucky or obstinate libraries struggled on and if you follow industry performance month by month as I do, you will know that some of the better known names in this small arena continue to go pear shaped. Bankrupted by the times we live in.
And for the independent lone wolf stock photographer, it is the times we live in which should ring alarm bells on the awareness agenda.
There are more printed journals and magazines out there than ever before: More specialist low circulation journals and more up-market glossies than one can keep track of. They all want and demand images to fill their pages. From where I stand however, it seems to me more and more of these, whatever they are, want more and more images at lower and lower cost; or better still, for northing. In the newsprint sector, diminishing advertising revenues force down picture fees and there is now clear evidence of papers regularly using royalty free micro-stock.
Ah! Micro-stock. Stock imagery that is sold for peanuts in a variety of sizes by the likes of iStockphoto.com, a division of Getty Images and which now has a stock content of 5.9m pictures. It's a mere splash in the ocean compared with Getty's colossal 75million plus archive. But there are many others in the micro-stock business with large collections which are added to daily ranging in size from, 10,000 to 1m. I have trouble keeping tabs on the few thousand digital images already uploaded to our own site, never mind the 70 odd year workload worth of analogue images in the library still awaiting digitalisation.
Add to these figures the trillions of free images which now circulate on the internet and one can easily begin to see the real problems facing the many photographers who want to earn a living from what they do best. And it is no longer a question of who can produce the best picture of a dandelion; it seems to me from looking at a lot of stuff that gets into print, any old picture of a dandelion will do. An appreciative culture for great images is as old fashioned as a bakelite telephone handset or a valve radio. We are back to the smudge on the page. If it's colourful and the right shape to fit the slot, it will do. Thus, accountants and business managers dictate to picture researchers the places they must go to find stock.
The largest, cheapest suppliers will do. In the trade, such suppliers are called a 'preferred vendor'. Get a good subscription deal from Getty, Corbis or iStockphoto and clients can pretty much download anything needed from the most obscure to the most popular types of image for a few dollars or less. The magazine or newspaper reader doesn't seem to care one iota about aesthetic image quality content so long as the pages are filled with stuff. The hands of picture buyers are tied to management directives. Result? A world of print in which a plethora of mostly cheap, junk images dominate.
It comes as no surprise then, to learn that PhotoShelter's year long battle to make inroads into the stock photography business failed and they are pulling out. I see their plight in the same light as any other picture agency which has recently gone down the pan. And there are more than enough of those biting the dust almost daily. PhotoShelter couldn't make enough sales to maintain forward momentum and as their CEO Allen Murabayashi said in his blog on the subject, "Licensing a photo is not a simple proposition. It is not like selling a widget." He says he remains defiantly stubborn on the micro-stock front in spite of PhotoShelter's recent experiences, but as Alamy has shown, micro-stock and royalty free is a burgeoning commercial force to be reckoned with whether you like it or not. Even big players have had to find smart ways to deal with that advancing threat and they are no where over the hill with it yet. Save for a handful of enterprises with unique image collections, micro-stock will ultimately win through. Why?
It's a simple business case primary school pupils could easily work out. For too long, photographers and picture agencies, have relied upon a notion of their market place being a closed shop. Closed that is, to a relatively small group of relatively high paying customers. The facts today are very different and blatantly shouting in the face of non believers.
For every modest to high paying print client, there are at least 10,000 individual customers looking for images to use on blogs, newsletters, small town adverts, booklets, cards to send to Grandma and what have you. Those customers never could afford the kind of reproduction fees working stock photographers or their agents might have asked of them in the past, nor did they want to pay those fees, especially when, as many often did and some still believe, they could take a picture 'just as good'. But this market is not afraid to stuff pride in its pocket. Royalty free micro-stock availability saves time and trouble; customers recognise the difference between a picture they could take which might do the job and was adequate, is now complimented by a vast raft of material that is so much better. A couple of dollars spent on one image for Grandma's homemade card saves the time, hassle and costs of doing it yourself. There is therefore, as businesses like iStockphoto have successfully shown, the potential to make millions of dollars from millions of customers rather than a handful of high payers. As Google gears up with a plan to bring the underdeveloped world into this scenario, customer volumes will grow, far outstripping the traditional market place for picture sales. And it will happen soon.
For the enthusiastic stock photographer, or for that matter, any photographer hoping to maintain some sort of a lifestyle based on the ability to press a button, the foregoing may paint a dismally depressing picture ..no pun intended. But the fact is nothing much has changed since I submitted my first images to Barnaby's all those years ago. In ten years, that picture library never sold a single picture of mine that I know of and in the end, I asked for them all back. Within a few weeks I had begun to sell them myself. It taught me a lesson early on. Dross can sell when you find a market for it. Note, I said when, not 'if'.
So what are the real differences between then and now? Today's library content volumes are far higher than 40 years back and the market place is colossal in comparison to its size in those times. The market continues to grow while smaller generalist libraries stand still or fall by the wayside. Then, you knew mostly, who comprised the market. Now, you cannot be sure who is looking or, at what they are looking; and the control of who the stuff is sold to is out of the hands of the photographer.
The demand for all kinds of images continues to grow; stock I would have binned a few years back ticks over earning pennies here and there; others (not mine!) are rocket powered and click with the public imagination, being downloaded thousands of times and earning for their authors, large sums; probably far higher than the same image would have done placed exclusively with a rights managed agency. The best thing about this however is the fact that one no longer needs to spend time and money marketing these images. All energy can be focused on producing the goods; finding new ways to photograph the dandelion. As manufacturers sell more computers and more owners sign up to an ISP, so the chances of another download increase.
What is the next phase?
There is no room for more business models like PhotoShelter hoping to build a different aesthetic genre of stock content. Some photographers will argue that what they do is so different it deserves special attention and higher remuneration. So be it. I think that argument is crap even if a handful of photographers do very nicely thank you for the moment. There isn't anything out there or coming down the tube which has not already been done and in a way, I am on the side of the guy who wins a contract to photograph an event but has to give away the copyright in the images to the client. There is an analogy there between shooting stuff you make available for stock and realising its worth is how many times it can be downloaded. The more the better, but if you place a rights managed restriction on it because you think it is worth more than the next guy's picture, the chances are it will not sell in today's climate.
To understand this clearly, you need to think more about what you are shooting, why and how. A body of work about something of enduring interest to a lot of people and which remains exclusive because of your exclusive access to it, retains some value a long time into the future. A body of work which is essentially a collection of images the subject of which anyone could access to shoot at any time and is of little or no interest to a broad audience, is potentially worthless. But of course, this idea may be endlessly dissected and apportioned its degree of worth relative to opportunity and circumstance; right time, right place, etc., Out of the thousands of pictures in my own library, I probably have no more than a handful I could honestly say are unrepeatable. For the rest, someone else was there, the idea has been copied, it's a very similar subject/interpretation and so on. Most are not unique in that context.
So we are back to numbers. Volume versus worth; quantity versus quality. And I am not talking here about technical quality, even if that is a high priority on an agency list of submission terms and conditions. I'm talking about the kind of aesthetic content quality which differentiates the wood from the trees; the kind of bell ringing stuff that stops people dead in their tracks and makes them look twice. It's a tough nut to crack on a regular basis but it should nonetheless be the aim of photographers who must then go out and explain and demonstrate the same lore to professional picture buyers.
Achieving this aim will not increase the number of big agencies through which images can be sold for high fees; the ones which are already established will remain and none of them are being complacent about their positions; they are constantly looking for new ways to move more stuff more quickly than they already do - one image on average, downloaded from iStockphoto every three seconds...!
I do believe however, in spite of this dire scenario and perhaps because I am an optimist by nature, there is enough apple pie out there for everyone who wants a slice. It may be tough to get, but the fact is that the pie is now very, very large.
These days, I find myself constantly thinking about how to develop the thread of an idea into something of substance capable of earning a penny or two. Such are the tiny returns of micro, I can only think about capturing those ideas on digital, and the closer to home that can happen, the better. Less expense, more profit. But making use of the thousands of dormant analogue images in the library is also a work in progress.
To this end, I long ago dismissed so called expert advice that advocated negatives and trannies needed special high quality scanning to make them usable in print or on screen. Proof is in the print pudding where the micro differences between a negative scanned on a supermarket mini-lab for fractions of a penny and the same image scanned on a drum by a specialist lab for several pounds, is neither here nor there. Yes, there is a difference. The higher cost scan reproduces marginally better in everyday repro, yet for most uses, that margin makes no significant difference to the end result. Customers still buy or subscribe to the magazines and they rarely if ever complain about today's high standards of image reproduction.
Nowadays, I scan the trannies myself, but if supermarkets had the software to do this, I would hand the job over to them just as I do now for colour negatives. Frame for frame, it is the most cost effective and quickest way to get the job done for thousands of frames. A rights managed only agency partner in Europe does well with them, bringing in a reasonable revenue contribution from specialist selections. Frames of general subjects are also distributed through a variety of micro agencies, which, as I have mentioned, are downloaded periodically. But there's no real rhyme or reason why some of those agencies take grainy film images in preference to perfectly clean, and newer digital ones. I'm not wasting time on trying to figure it out either, any more than I am wondering why one image was taken and another six rejected. One day selection seems arbitrary, the next vaguely rational and the next, well, you just wonder which side of the bed the monitor fell out of.
Apart from news and sport coverage which appears in some quarters to be threatened by citizen journalism and the advance of video technology, the current demand for quality still pictures from advertising and editorial sectors remains high. Second guessing the futures market is another matter, but I think on the back of what is known, continuing internet expansion will increase server and delivery capacity exponentially; this is bound to create a further dilution for more expensive rights managed content; for micro agencies it's a different scenario. They rely on a continuous contribution stream from individuals so content here will grow massively too. Some big players currently dominate in this field but the software technology to power similar businesses is out there and available to anyone with money to invest. The waters to the east of Suez remain uncharted, but there are already signs of other players sitting eagerly on the sidelines.
ends.
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