Yes, Digital Railroad is gone.
And they won’t be the last to fail.
What do stock agencies need to do?
Cutting royalty rates is not the answer.
The future is not just about microstock and cheaper images.
It will not be a monopoly: there will be multiple players pursuing different segments of supply and demand.
My comment on A Photo Editor: ImageSpan may change stock photography forever:
Spot on: reducing transaction costs (time, price comparison, effort) is the biggest opportunity in stock photography to allow stock photos to reach that long-tail market.
TinEye has had the ability to track unlicensed uses, but it’s kind of a one-off: combining the tracking of unlicensed with a licensing platform is much more powerful.
What happens when there’s an even larger flood of images? How will we sort through everything? Who will be our our filters?
What we’re learning from the “long tail” model of economic organization is that everybody except the truly great get flattened, and that profits in the tail spread out to a larger and larger number of people, making it harder for anyone to earn significant money.
Will it get so cheap to license and distribute photos that we’ll license photos for free? What we’ll pay for LicenseStream as a “marketing expense” instead of an investment to earn licensing income?
Fun times…
What will the stock business be like in ten years? Will the traditional functions of the stock agencies be unbundled?
- Where will photo buyers buy photos? (Probably not from any of the stock agencies around right now)
- How will they find photos? (A powerful aggregation, filtering and search-driven platform)
- How will they buy photos? (Standardized, transparent pricing schemes powered by image tracking and verification systems)
- Who will be selling them? (Everybody)
- Who will earn a living from stock? (Very, very few people)
What are the pain points in the stock photography industry?
- Why is image pricing so inefficient and opaque?
- Is this the best way to price photographs?
- Why are we still tied to the archaic model of categories, channels, distribution and image size to set prices?
- Who is the authority on pricing assignments?
- Who is creating a transparent way for buyers and sellers to compare prices, to compare images, to find the best pictures for their use?
- Who is building systems to decrease the time spent finding the best image, the best photographer, the best outlet for their photos?
The existing industry structure is simply not sustainable.
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I’ve gotten lots of questions from friends about why I’ve been writing so much lately about business models in the photography industry. I don’t know. Got any ideas for a new passion?
