PHOTOS FOR SALE

The Image Bank, located in Dallas, TX, has acquired Artville, a royalty-free company in Madison WI. The "Big Three"-- Corbis, in Bellevue WA; Getty Images, in London; and TIB, in Dallas, have now all acquired sidekick royalty-free companies. In case you’re confused and wonder who is wedded to whom, here’s a run-down: Getty acquired PhotoDisc (See PSN Feb. ’98); Corbis acquired Digital Stock (See PSN March ’98); and TIB has acquired Artville.

When I visited The Image Bank in October, Don Barlow, their director of strategic planning , said that TIB sees a great future in royalty-free and on-line transactions, and used the "M" word, (micro transactions) to describe the process ("millions of micro transactions"). Translated: the fees may be small but the volume is high. The Image Bank doesn’t want to miss out on this market. In talking about their acquisition of Artville, TIB president Rex Jobe, said, "Royalty-free images are going to provide our customers with a cost-effective option when they don’t require exclusive use photography. Royalty-free will also provide our photographers another potential source of revenue."

Whether it’s a lemonade stand or a digital stock agency, market share is the bottom line. Corbis has taken innovative steps to bring its royalty free collection to the attention of prospective buyers. The Corbis "Create A Card" and the "AV Photo Finder" features on the AltaVista search engine are good examples. The Corbis name is attached to both free services.

Corbis is also exerting image muscle power on its competitors by lowering prices in some cases up to thirty percent.

I talked with Corbis Digital Stock’s Rick Becker-Lakrone in Encinitas, CA, earlier this year. "Many of our photographers are making big checks," he said. "Volumne sales and automation is the answer. Everyone benefits, - the customer, the photographer, and us."

In another part of the country, Bahar Gidwani, president of Index Stock Imagery in New York, takes a different stance. Although his company is producing a 50-disc royalty-free project, he puts low-priced "managed rights" photos ahead of royalty-free, as producers of additional revenues for photographers. I talked with him this summer on my annual New York visit. He has written a white paper outlining his company’s views on low-price fees. With charts and graphs he shows a sample of 15 photographers who are enjoying royalty checks from low-priced managed-rights photos. The fees are under $100 per photo, and the photos are licensed to small businesses and home offices. "Over the past year, 93% of our photographers received revenue from these small low-priced fees. While the average amount of these fees was only $178, none of the photographers sent back the checks!" says Gidwani.

The same photographers are selling the same pictures for high-end fees also. One photographer, who had 6,010 images on-line with Index Stock, earned $47,275 in the past twelve months.

Marketing photos in both the RF market and the managed - rights market at the same time seems to be the trend in the commercial stock photo industry. This marketing technique reminds me of my friend, Roger Brault, who was a Texaco representative in Niamey, French Niger, Africa, many years ago. On one side of his massive holding tank for gasoline, the sign read "Texaco." The other side of the tank was emblazoned, "BP" (British Petroleum).

"You mean there’s one tank filled with gasoline, and it belongs to both companies?"

He nodded, "Yes."