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The availability of professional level equipment and editing software makes it much easier for an amateur filmmaker to produce professional grade digital footage.
Combine that with the advances in video distribution / streaming / playback and you'll soon see some low cost stock video become more accessable to businesses that could not afford a huge production.
We put together a quick video for our site this past weekend using a panasonic DVC30, handheld steadicam, and Final Cut:
http://www.convos.com/home/video-our-first-vide...
I'll say this: iStockPhoto isn't bad, but it's still not a patch on Getty's better collections, where you might buy sole worldwide use of an image. And don't forget that where Flickr might give them trouble is the outright theft of material from Flickr; we always thought the better of stealing from Getty, because you know they'll come and get you sooner or later.
I'd be pretty careful before I point to Web 2.0 as a Getty slayer, but I'm curious about your thoughts on the theft possibility.
But Thomas is already getting quite a few commercial jobs, but for less than a typical Getty photographer will get.
Getty has to still play to their traditional media customers but with time, I suspect you'll see the bulk of their business organically move to the iStockPhoto brand.
Last point on this is that photographers typically specialize. Those that specialize in Stock should probably stick with Getty, but those that specialize in events / sports etc. should absolutely use tools and networks like Flickr to promote their work.
And I'm hoping professional stock photography is going to start looking a little more like amateur, "user generated" photography. Maybe that makes no sense; maybe pro photographers will hold on to what differentiates their work. But I think taste is changing, people are more accepting of uncorrected color, bad focus, etc. I'd like to see that cause an overall shift in taste, along with a move away from professional cultural production.
A site that has done something different is istockphoto.com, which is very stringent on what they let onto the site. It all has to be stock photography with model releases from all participants, etc. Still, you can buy the photos for $1.00 and up. That approach can really kill off the old expensive stock photo agencies.
For the record, I have no affiliation with istockphoto, other than as a buying customer (I have spent $10) and as an aspiring photographer.
And if Thomas has sold photos, he's not an amateur. That's the difference between professional and amateur--whether you sell your work or not.
And I also imagine that the work Thomas is getting is specific to his position as a relatively well known weblogger as much as it is to his photographic skills.
I don't understand this desperate desire to prove that amateurs are going to kick professionals out and take over the world. Can't we respect the time and dedication a professional puts into their career. Just because Nikon and Canon have made it easier to be hack photographers, doesn't mean we're all going to end up the next Walker Evans.
That reminds me --> the primary reason I recommend iStockPhoto to photographers is that it's the site that is most likely to help improve your talent. On iStockPhoto, every single picture I upload gets critiqued by professionals - their feedback is sometimes brutal but my accepted rate has improved dramatically since I started listening to them.
Free photo communities will never compete for the same consumer as microstock websites --> buyers of stock images need garuanteed unambiguous commercial licenses and they need very targeted search capabilitiies where free sites don't actively enforce copyright and benefit more from browse than search.
So, iStockPhoto doesn't need to worry about ZOOMR but likewise, I don't think Getty's going to get into photo hosting and "interestingness".
THAT is why things are changing. Back then the only way to get good images for publication was to go to things like Getty. Today I can find hundreds of thousands, even millions, of good, publication-quality, images on Flickr and other photo sharing sites for far less than I'd pay Getty.
But, I'm totally into professionals making money doing this stuff. My Photowalking show will talk about this more in the future.
Digital, at least, enables the prosumer crowd, to produce professional results. But it's not a revolution, there will always be a Getty and Hollywood, just you can skip film school now, and raw practice, not needing to goto school to get access to the "tools".
But really, differing markets altogether...
Yes, there are a lot of talented photographers out there who haven't ever gotten paid for their work, just as there are a lot of talented musicians who have to do it all for fun. But all of that is changing even if those who are entrenched have to be pulled from their ivory towers kicking and screaming.
Welcome to the 21st century.
You said "But I think taste is changing, people are more accepting of uncorrected color, bad focus, etc. I’d like to see that cause an overall shift in taste, along with a move away from professional cultural production."
If that's the case then why are you shooting HD video for your work? There's a difference between looking amateurish, which is deliberate, and poor quality, which is neither deliberate nor excusable for a professional. I don't believe we're more tolerant of poor quality, in fact I think the bar for professionals is going up because of the fact that so many prosumers own 5Ds with $1,500 lenses.
It's still damn hard to take a professional grade image and do it daily, and what makes it hard has little to do with equipment.
I disagree with that sentiment. Which is why I shot HD.
Wait a minute. If Getty is the most profitable photo site, what should they be learning from Zooomr and Flickr? How to make less money?
So, any big company exec and employee better be looking for ways to grow audience, grow customer base, grow transactions, grow engagement, grow brand love, etc.
Getty can learn a LOT from Flickr and Zooomr in those areas. Even their CEO admitted that.
Actually, shareholders demand growth that represents ROI, not just growth for the sake of it. Grow into an area that's going to lose you money, and your shareholders will have your heads unless there's a long term plan.
By the way, the home page you point to doesn't have a search box because it lets you go to two very different sites, GettyCreative and GettyEditorial (plus the film stuff, of course). Go to the GettyCreative home page (http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/home/hom...) and you can search much more comprehensively.
And this actually gets to the nub of why I always go to Getty and its ilk first. Getty's advanced search lets me narrow down an image by collection (which are themed), keyword (much more comprehensive and professionally done that Flickr tags), and crucially orientation (if want an image to fill a space in a layout, I NEED to get the right orientation).
If I go to Getty, I can pretty much gaurentee that I'll find a usable image. If I go to Flickr, I might - or might not - find the image I want, depending on whether it's been tagged well or not. Time spent searching through amatuer images is time wasted for me, and my time is very expensive.
Oh, and of course, there's another thing - Flickr doesn't actually have very many images that are freely available for commercial use. There are far more than release under creative commons non-commercial licenses, which are useless for me.
Go to Flickr or Zooomr and show me the commercial licenses and the 'buy now' button. Or the image search with the well-edited and cross-referenced taxonomy.
I agree that you can find some very good professional quality photos on these services, but tell me what company would be willing to use these for a major advertising campaign on the back of a creative commons license? Equally, do you want your kids popping up as the next Gerber baby because you forgot to change your default CC license for that shot?
It wouldn't be hard to do, but Flickr and Zooomr will clearly have to create a well-defined business-to-business section if they truly want to compete with Getty.
"They don’t care about making the site entertaining, they want to make it easy for a magazine editor to find a photo and buy it"
Like it's a bad thing. And actually, that is their purpose and they live up to it admirably. Being all Web2.0 and flashy just for the sake of it is lame. This is not a site for a casual user, it is a site that makes one's job more convenient, they dont care about entertaining the average tom/dick/harriet b/c its not in their interest.
it's kind of like ubuntu - nice flashy wm's and stuff because it's supposed to be for home use/entertainment whereas at work, i use a commandline and stippped down BSD or unix variant b/c i need to do work and it's more convenient than a gui....
I think you are right to observe Getty Images and how it looks compared to new disruptive market entrants like Zooomr, Flickr etc.
But we can take this a lot further. The reason Flickr and Zooomr are getting traction (and maybe why Getty is sagging) is not just about how they look (clinical vs community), its about how they are solving the problems for customers and who are the customers.
Getty cleary serves a very important, demanding client base who struggle with problems like this: "How do I quickly get a great, pro-quality, striking image for my magazine/brochure/ad campaign etc."
This is a great business and Getty dominates it.
But Flickr and Zooomr are disrupting the market by giving access to a far wider audience. Web designers, small businesses and others are struggling with a slightly different problem which these sites solve: "How do I quickly get an ok-to-good, cheap picture for my web site, blog (or other app.)?
It is not a surprise to see Flickr and Zooomr gain ground in the low-end marginal customers, with increasing traction for serious professional applications. Also it is not surprise that Getty is trrying to enter into the disruptive business model by buying iStockphoto.
The trend of disruption tends to follow a similar pattern across many industries, whether it is PCs vs large computer systems, iTunes vs CD sales or a free commuter newspapers vs established newspaper giants. Cramming some aspect of the new disruptive thing into the current business model is a common response. (Newspapers did this with their online strategy for most of the past five years. Doesn’t work.)
The very difficult challenge for Getty Images, or any other company in this position, is to balance these two conflicting corporate goals:
* Support the current business and its customers;
* Grow new business opportunities which potentially cannibalize the current business;
There is a method to do this, but it is certainly not easy.
Separate strategic business questions into three files
1)Revitalizing the current business;
2)Abandoning processes, products and services that customers no longer value or can’t earn their keep;
3)Creating new opportunities for the future.
Details on how this technique would apply in the newspaper industry are discussed in the link below. It would seem to apply to Getty’s business as well:
www.ondisruption.com/my_weblog/2006/10/fivews_f...
Bingo. What was your point again, Robert?
In that sense, all that cheap digital photography has done is turn people who used to be skilled professionals into digital sweatshop pieceworkers.
The sheer ubiquity of pretty poor digital images, has subsumed decent work under a tsunami of shoddy images and has removed any economic incentive to excel as a photographer.
If in a market where you have to work like a hamster on a wheel to keep cranking out $1.00 images for an RF stock house, wheres the incentive to produce good work (apart from lowest common denominator saleable widget-images)? Any creative impulse will have to be shelved in favour of struggling to make a living - a full time living I might add...not a part time monetized hobby which undercuts full-timers. So much for the rewards of risk taking.
And thats assuming of course, that you can earn enough to buy the gear to do the job in the first place, because part timers giving their work away does nothing for the photography business as a whole except accelerate the bottoming out of full-time photographers incomes.