MicrostockGroup

Hi PixelBytes,
Thanks for your comments, when I wrote about the traditional artists sitting on the fence, I was thinking about artists not shooting classic micro, not the 'established traditional' artists like Jonathan who's assets are already established with macrosites, but the 'new traditional' artists that do not have a home for their mid range assets, these artists assets are not ready for Getty or Corbis, and they do not support the microstock model in it's current form.

There are not many options between the microstock sites like Istock, and high end like the Getty and Corbis collections, there are many specialist boutique collections with small contributor and customer bases in this market, but currently no real big players, some services like PhotoShelter have tried to fill this gap and failed, artists aiming at this market have very few options to place their assets at the moment, Alamy being 78% editorial over commercial with no markets to grow into are also trying to move into this market with their own commercial collection which includes RF images.

The big two are Getty and Corbis, if we look at Getty they own Istock and have Microstock and traditional Macrostock well covered with little room for new growth, other possible buy-outs would have to small a customer base and many of the same assets and customers, the area they do not have covered is the mid range market, they cannot grow in the mid range market like they did with microstock by acquisition, there are no real big players to purchase, creating a new mid range agency would take to much time and resource.

They already have a vast contributor base with some assets that will fit the mid range market, and they are also aware of the number of artists out there with no markets for their new mid range assets, so the way they have dealt with this is to create collections within their existing microstock models, this will bring some of the mid range assets from existing artists back in house, but also make the model attractive to the new traditional artists.

As much as these microsites are courting existing artists for content, they are running a business so it does not mean that this will remain the case in 18 months time, the artist exclusive model works well for Istock and where they lead other will follow, so there may be many of these mid range collections, some will be by image exclusive invitation not artist exclusive, it will be interesting to see how these collections grow.         

It would be nice to think that this is about offering the artists more options, but it is only about business growth, there is no more scope in the market to grow by acquisition, but there is a smaller mid range market to look at, they already have the staff, infrustructure, model, customers and vendors to make a move into this market.   

David (I do not have a crystal ball these comments are just my thoughts)

Yes, everything changes and free things on the internet are slowly disappearing.

Whatever major newspapers are left will go online and will become subscription only. The ones that don't charge will go away.

So while this generation expects everything for free they'd better start getting used to paying for anything that has any value. The leftover stuff that isn't worth paying for will be free. Same thing will photography. The tiered system that's emerging now I believe will be the future.

Well, whatever you are looking through, your ideas are plausible and make for a good read

Thanks for clarifying about the big two - Getty & Corbis.  Sort of the Godzilla vs. Megallon of the stock world, LOL. 

I certainly hope that you are right that the "growth by acquisition" phase is petering out.  Monopoly isn't good for any industry and I doubt "duopoly" would be much better.

I question whether that will happen.   It may be too late for the big print media to start successfully charging for an online version - the content has been free for too long.   NYT tried paid subscriptions for a while, and gave up.  It's true that free music came under heavy assault and eventually many people got used to paying something for downloads.  However, I think the price of music downloads will only continue to decline.

Print newspapers aren't making money and are going out of business. Their online divisions that rely on online advertising aren't charging money and aren't profitable. Readers are quickly headed toward online content. So what options are left? Go under or charge.

At some point the only news companies left will be the ones who have enough capital to last long enough to survive the transition from unprofitable print and unprofitable online advertising to profitable subscriptions. Slowly the free sites will go away until readers have no option but to pick one or a handful of pay sites.

And it may takes years but I also believe stock photo values will correct themselves. Low value images will stay in micro and higher value images will move upward in price. Bigger sites like Getty will drive prices up by luring higher value images away from free/micro (Flickr? Istock/Getty?).

Online advertising as a whole doesn't work. Targeted advertising does a bit better. When is the last time here anyone clicked on a banner ad? You buy anything?

What happened to all of the free Internet access like Netzero? New free offerings will always come up and after a few years with none of those companies making any profit they will start dying off and the ones that are left will start charging.

This is how Amazon.com is still around. Their plan was to survive dotcom circus until all of the unprofitable business models were gone. It worked.