Stock Moose wrote:
> This analysis seems to me incomplete, at best. It seems to me that that age
> old duo, supply and demand, are the primary causes.
Absolutely. And your reasons are sound. When I jumped into the game
back in 1989 or so, I was exactly the type of person the establishment
was complaining about. Little did we know that in the late '90s, this
little thing called "The Internet" would change the world forever.
Instead of expensive brochures and multimedia presentations, the
customers shifted the bulk of their marketing over to web development.
Unfortunately, this shift also brought in a mindshift that the images
were worth much less because companies like Coral would give you the
images or line-art for $1. Instead of expensive images to fill the
website, the developers could do line art (which made the websites
MUCH faster than images), and save thousands of dollars on image
licensing costs.
People like Tina had established themselves in the publications world
very well, but us upstarts, without journalism degrees, focused more
on specific industries (bicycling and radio broadcast were mine) and
established ourselves with those related markets and provided a lot of
images for marketing materials. The near instant shift that happened
between multimedia presentations and web-development and the mindset
change that came with it created a huge amount of damage to stock
photographers not well-anchored in publications.
> Mix those two factors, and you have a market flooded with images available
> cheap to buyers who don't want to pay much. That's the old free market at
> work. I'm sorry you, Tina and others have lost out in this change, but
> Nathan is correct. Ask the buggy whip makers, ask the Stanley Brothers, ask
> Kodak, and so on, and on, and on ...
We certainly brought it upon ourselves. When microstock started making
inroads, we screamed as loud as we could to everybody jumping in to
not do it because we were creating an unsustainable business model
where it is impossible to make any money with fifty cents of royalty
per image with no usage restrictions. Oh, but we'd make it up in
volume. Sure. There have only been about a dozen photographers in the
world who have made any form of income with this and it's only because
they flood the market with literally 100,000 images a year.
> As to the factor you blame, I think it's a small part of the change. Can you
> imagine any business intentionally and unilaterally lowering prices just
> because their costs go down? The only way it happens is if competition sees
> an opportunity to increase their share. Inevitably, that happens eventually,
> but not, I think to the extent that it has happened to this market. Prices
> go down, but not to the point of disappearing.
It did happen and my own primary agency (Alamy) directly contributed
to it. There have been enough memos from management to us to know what
happened.
> As Nathan has pointed out, the music business has also changed dramatically.
> In fact, if you go back a few more decades, you'll see what a roller coaster
> it has been. An old friend and musician has said all along that the
> recording and star business has ruined music, that's it's only real live.
> Maybe he's to blame. :-)
The music industry has its own set of problems, but it can be said
that it was always broken.
AG Schnozz
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