MicrostockGroup

Very interesting.  There seems a lot of nervous laughter at the end as he's talking about H&F.  His body language really changed at that point.  He was very confident throughout the interview until then.   

He talks about the fact that their one shareholder "care very much" about how Getty is run, but that "we paid them a very large dividend last year" so they are happy for the time being. 

Of course we all know on whose backs that dividend was produced.

Thank you for sharing, that was interesting.

So - obviously, "we" are for still sale...

The part I really don´t understand - he says himself the market for images has grown immensly, billions of images are needed. And yet - both getty and istock are very restrictive. getty dislikes similars, istock has severe upload restrictions for non exclusive content. And all the emphasis on V/A makes it look like they want to become even more specialized.Plus all the discouragement of artists, especially mixed media artists.

If the image market and needs have grown so much (and I fully agree) - where is the growth??

And why not encourage the artists to work together to produce more content? Why not encourage the photographers to do video with every shoot they plan and encourage the videographers to take pictures with every set??

Strange.

Klein is summarising in 'big picture' terms the history of Getty ... since 1995 ... in fewer than 6 minutes. Not surprising he doesn't go into much detail about the last 12 months at Istock specifically. Like any CEO he's not in the business of saying what a lousy job he's done recently either. I thought the bit about 'their one shareholder' was quite telling though.

Thanks for the heads-up on this.

I like his quip when asked if H&F are looking for an exit any time soon: "Well they're private equity, which means that they were looking for an exit before they made their entrance, 'cos that's how their model works"

Contributor commissions - Unsustainable

Very large dividends for shareholders - Sustainable