There is an interesting article on the stock photography business and how it has come to its current state at http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/opinion/2072022/stockpiling-trouble-stock-industry-ate
or
http://tinyurl.com/3uo2la7
Excerpts:
Market failure
By the early 2000s, collections had moved online and, while revenues remained robust, growth slowed as the industry matured and competition increased. Stock distributors launched a host of reactionary tactics in response, including reducing royalty rates, expanding sub-distribution agreements, offering micro-level pricing to top customers and producing wholly owned collections. The net effect was the redistribution of industry revenues, with less going to the photographers and more to a widening web of distributors and aggregators.
The Stock Artists Alliance's ongoing Investigative Shopping Project revealed these hidden, often layered, sub-distribution arrangements. Photographers who had been puzzled by surprisingly low licence fees now had an explanation; many had been unaware that the revenues they received were often a meagre single-digit share of the licence fee, rather than their contracted royalty rate. When asked directly about these practices and the lack of transparency, the company line was always the same: these deals are essentially none of your business.
...
Amateurs
In early 2006, contributing editor at Wired, Jeff Howe, interviewed me for an article on a rising phenomenon about "how the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the responsibility of a specialised few." He coined the phrase "crowdsourcing" and cited microstock photography as a prime example.
The concept of a file-sharing service with micro-pricing was developed by an entrepreneur who recognised that digital photography and online file-sharing and selling platforms had broken down the walls between users and creators. With it came the harsh recognition for picture libraries and professional photographers that they were no longer indispensable for creating and licensing images. As Howe foretold, "pain and disruption are inevitable" and it was perhaps most painful of all in the professional photography market.
...
Read the rest of the article at http://tinyurl.com/3uo2la7
Fred Voetsch
Group Moderator - Selling Stock Photography
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/selling_stock_photography/
Owner - Acclaim Images, LLC
http://www.acclaimimages.com/
0 comments:
Post a Comment