If you’re an astute bettor, you already knew this was coming and had money down but, Photoshelter announced today that they were giving up on the whole stock photo sales thing. At the same time, Corbis announced they were laying off 15% of their staff.

What’s this mean? Well, everything if you’re a photographer who doesn’t know the difference between a balance sheet and their elbow and nothing if you even have a rudimentary knowledge of business and have followed the stock industry for more than 37 seconds.

Waddaya mean Dan? How could anyone have predicted this and isn’t it Getty’s fault? Easy and no, not really.

First off, let me say that my observations of all these stock sites is based on nothing more than my good sense and experience, I can’t be bothered to pull the SEC filings and annual reports of any of the publicly traded stock agencies and certainly have no time to surf forums dedicated to the private stock sites or micros. Having said that, here’s my take.  First off,  Photoshelter. It was a widely held belief throughout the industry that PS was “pro photographer” and that the high commission rate, combined with their stance on royalty free, rights etc greatly favored photographers. I agree and, as a small contributor, thought it was such a great idea that I spent a few minutes before bed each night praying it would work in spite of my predictions to the contrary. That said, capitalism is a cruel mistress and what I knew deep down came to pass. Customers could care less where you fall on the political spectrum when it comes to photography, publishing is a cutthroat, razor thin margin business and getting the best pictures for the least amount of money is part of the game. Think about it, do you really care if General Motors is on the brink of bankruptcy? Maybe you’ve driven GM vehicles all your life and are deeply attached to the brand. Even still, you probably don’t care that much if they go under because, you can probably buy a nicer car, for less money, from another car manufacturer. And if you think about it, GM probably deserves to go under for just this reason.

From a practical standpoint, Photoshelter was extremely cumbersome to upload to. It required a lot of keywording and technical manipulation to get images on line and they then had to be vetted by an editor. Getting accepted and then uploading to a stock agency is exciting for about 9 seconds, then, you realize it’s a ton of work and that getting a cheque is actually way down the line. For many photographers, this becomes a “bridge too far” and the uploading of fresh, creative imagery starts to slow down. Once this happens, customers start to pay more attention to other portals. For example, look at Alamy. They have more than 13 million images online, are fairly easy to work with because they have no editing and when they tried to tighten controls on quality recently, had a virtual cross burning on their lawn and gave up. You could argue that 13 million images is absurd and I’d agree but, overall, it’s a pretty good business model and from the amount of Alamy photo credits I see, I have to agree. From a customer’s perspective, they’re Wal Mart and, we all know where they are.

As for Corbis, well, they are a private company so, information is a little slim but, I’d be careful about reading too much into a 15% staff reduction. First off, as far as I know, private companies don’t have to make any announcements like this so, I’m immediately suspicious as to why they would announce this. Second, 15% of their workforce could simply represent a bunch of interns who should have left on September 1st to go back to school anyway. It’s my understanding that they have let go a total of about 50 people which could also be redundant positions from their acquisition of Veer last year. Outside guess, I’d say they are making announcements like this because Bill Gates is planning to get out of the stock photo business and is shining her up and plans to put her on the front lawn with a “for sale” sign on ‘er or, they’re planning to go public.

Either way, these continue to be interesting times for stock photographers and, I think this all confirms my master theory that the industry will continue to consolidate into one or two micros, one or two big “macro/assignment/archival/historical” agencies and a whole bunch of individual or small collective photographers who focus on specialty niches such as travel, news, science, environment, animals, industrial, oil and gas etc. If you’re building a website or newsletter, you go to the micros for their generic, boring, predictable pap, you go to the biggies for archival stuff, historical stuff or top quality generic images and you go to individual shooters for their focus on specialty stock.

If you think I’m nuts, let me offer just one small example; I like to fly fish, and so does a guy who works at my local camera store. We go out fishing once in a while. Recently, I had an outdoors magazine call me and ask me what I had for fly fishing stock. “None” I said. “Too bad” said they, “we’re in desperate need of fly fishing stock and none of the big agencies have anything decent.” So this lead to a conversation with my camera store guy and he agreed to model for me while I spent the day shooting some fishing stock. So this lead to my doing some late night research recently and if you check the major stock portals for fly fishing stock, you’ll see that what’s on offer is fairly uninspiring. But, if you Google this same subject. you’ll find some phenomenal shooters who specialize in this subject and are cranking out this kind of imagery in high enough quality to make me want to sell everything I own and become a bone fishing guide in Belize. I don’t know where these guys sell but, it’s not through the agencies.

The moral of the story is this, if those high quality niche shooters were talking regularly to the buyers of this kind of stock (not just magazines but tour operators, resorts and the ton of fly fishing gadget manufacturers), they’d likely have a ready market for custom stock, putting up galleries and sending links to their fly fishing contacts, giving first rights to the highest bidder and getting some decent sales at full margin in the process. So, if you wanna sell stock, depending on what you like to shoot, forget about the majors, pass on the micros and find a niche, shoot the shit out of it and get it front of all the big buyers of this subject. You might be pleasantly surprised to find out what a stock image is really worth.

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