Web 2.0 threatens the business of the largest photobanks

For many Russian amateur and novice professionals, it has become commonplace to sell their work to small Western photobanks like Fotolia, DreamsTime and Shutterstock. Thanks to the creativity of amateurs, such startups quickly replenished their collections and are now beginning to compete with the leaders of Getty Images and Corbis. They sell for a dollar or two photos, which in quality are almost as good as the pictures of the best professionals in the world at a price of $ 10,000. Not surprisingly, Getty shares almost halved over the year.



A fascinating business of trading photos through the Internet market with an annual turnover of $ 2 billion - analyzes magazine Business 2.0.

Corbis and Getty Images are real photography giants. They own the rights to sell from 90 to 100 million photos, and the annual turnover is hundreds of millions of dollars. To be precise, Corbis has $ 251 million, and Getty Images has $ 807 million. In any magazine tray in Russia you will definitely see a cover with a photo from the Corbis archive or Getty Images. In American magazines, this is every second cover.
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On the other hand the barricades are a number of relatively small photobanks. Oleg Cheltsov with his website Fotolia is one of the most ambitious competitors. His photo archives have already grown to 2.2 million photos from 25,000 authors, and the annual turnover is approaching $ 10 million. Last year they sold 4 million photos, taking at least 50% commission from each transaction. These are amazing turnovers for a company with just 18 employees, of which 15 work remotely. The founder of the company, a French entrepreneur and the son of Russian émigrés, Oleg Cheltsov, communicates with his subordinates mainly via Skype and IM, saving on office rent.

Anyone can create their own photo agency on the Internet. To do this, you do not need a special mind or large initial costs. The main thing is to organize a large community of professional photographers who will replenish the photo bank with high-quality content - so you entered the world market with an annual turnover of $ 2 billion.

The secret to the success of “microstock” is very simple. They buy cheap photos from thousands of amateur photographers via the Internet, and then dump the prices on their goods. In fact, this is the same Web 2.0 model — using custom content. By analogy with outsourcing, such a business model can be called “crowdsourcing”.

It is interesting to observe how the army of small online photo agencies displaces Corbis and Getty from the market with a more technological and modern business model. After all, 10–15 years ago, Corbis and Getty also ousted competitors from the market due to digital archives and the transition to the Internet. The technological revolution, which raised them up, is now lowering them down because they could not rebuild the business (and hardly anyone in their place could).

via Business 2.0