Why may the big 6 go under and be replaced by a newcomer in less than one year

After putting my flack vest and helmet on here is why I think this may actually happen.

- Economic pressures are always working. At the moment it is the authors that bear the biggest weight. However the efficiency need will hit the agencies too sooner or later.

- Right now authors are held by the balls by the agencies whose only goal is the make money for themselves.

- In almost every other field an 30% cut will trigger an immediate revolt let alone an 80%.

- What buyers and sellers need is an efficient market. Something like the stock exchange.
They do not need an agency they need a marketplace.
The exchange  makes money by taking a small cut and operating in a very efficient and neutral way.
The exchange could operate at no cost if operated " a la google".
The exchange do not care who or what sells. His only business is to carry the transaction in  the cheapest way.
They have no business in pushing exclusivity, rewarding golds, starts or whatever. They are blind. What sells, sells.

- The reviews are dead.
We have already seen why. Yahoo pretended to control the market with human reviewers.
It was a failure. They were screwed by Google who understood that reviewing was a losing proposition
An algorithm will be devised that will make happy both submitters (with unlimited and immediate acceptance) and buyers (with meaningful searches). Chaff will be automatically pruned by sales and other criteria

- If a credible exchange appears, all authors will flock immediately to it (think about unlimited uploads and 0 commissions) starving the rest. Buyers will pay less and sellers will get more. A win-win

A final note: why this may not happen.
After all the whole market is not so big and may not attract the right  player
In this case the authors will remain in the hands of the few actual medieval barons.
It looks like authors prefer to hang separately than hang together.

The trouble with this idea is the server structure and search engine facilities required to facilitate an exchange are not cheap to run - and require specialised knowledge to set up in a way that is scaleable as the exchange grows. The scalability of the whole deal is one of the big problems that nearly all the sites seem to have had. Google certainly isn't run at no cost - searchers might feel that way. But the advertisers on it don't!


In the end an exchange would, I expect, end up looking like any other of the micro sites, except owned by contributors rather than a company - and that's a hard corporate structure to maintain as an enterprise grow in size. It's not a coincidence that istock which started out owned and run by photographers (or to be more accurate owned by one photographer) ended up selling to a corporate giant who could finance the expansion that was inevitable. You can't just have a free for all as buyers need to have legal certainty of he rights they get over the images that they buy - and inspection at least for copyright and image ownership issues would stilll be necessary (the number of individuals caught uploading other people's images as their own indicates that not every one is as honest as you are!)