Reinventing Photography
By: Tom Zimberoff
Tags: Machine Learning, Marketplaces, Startup, Photography, Data

In Conclusion

There is greater demand today to publish photographs than in the heyday of film. The number of print publication venues has declined but that is offset by an exponential increase in online publication opportunities. Demand continues to grow. However, the vexing business problem to solve is how increasingly difficult it is for name brands and media buyers to find commercially useful pictures. That’s what led to underpriced photography. And the consequences of underpricing are customer alienation and stagnant revenue.

The incumbent vendors didn’t so much disrupt the photo marketplace as buy it outright. Then they broke it. They deliberately chose to turn photography into a commodity, a consumer-facing marketplace that eschews intellectual property because it doesn’t suit their purposes as middlemen. That was an arbitrary decision to make, based on ignorance of the photo industry’s practice of licensing intellectual property — not to ordinary consumers but to commercial publishers.

The incumbents could have chosen to serve Enterprise photography buyers as well as the consumer class of buyers. But they did not. Instead, they made adversaries out of the very content suppliers (the photographers and videographers) that Enterprise buyers expect to work with because they did not how to do otherwise. They also failed to innovate technologically, having developed no means to gather and use market intelligence.

Actionable market intelligence relies on having both the will and the ability to connect sellers online directly with commercial (not consumer) buyers. But the way the incumbents see it, connecting them, letting them work directly with each other, would jeopardize their coveted position — in the middle — between hundreds of millions of photos and hundreds of millions of photo buyers; an effective place to be in a consumer-facing marketplace but completely ineffective in a business-to-business (B2B) marketplace.

Commercial Photo is the only multi-billion-dollar marketplace in the world where administrative and economic transactions are conducted largely offline and on paper in the twenty-first century. The incumbents’ inability to capture data prevents them from becoming arbiters of pricing, to consolidate better, more useful content (plus the creators of that content) to increase revenue across the board.

There are just as many pro photographers working today as there were in analog days. They are still winning contracts to shoot photo assignments (commissioned jobs). To say otherwise, one would have to believe that the number of practicing doctors has declined in direct proportion to the public’s ability to self-medicate for minor maladies with over-the-counter drugs; or because anyone can self-diagnose a serious illness by Googling their symptoms. On the contrary, there will always be a need for authoritative professional practitioners of medicine, even if they benefit by automation. The same goes for photography.

There has always been plenty of money to be made in the creative arts. The incumbents, however decided that it’s just not to be made by the creators. It became their racket. But there is more money to be made in the business of art — exponentially more — by cutting the creators in on the action.

Imagemakers need each other to succeed. The answer to the predicament of professional revenue inequality is to “organize.” But organization cannot, and should not, be expected to be proactive on their part. Nor should it be considered institutionalized organization. The trick it to create a trellis-like structure on which they can grow themselves. It must present itself in a passive and seamless manner, by proffering a network platform, a marketplace, where sellers and buyers are not only welcome but it’s an obvious place they want to be, without a top down structure and without a middleman obliterating the value of content.

To paraphrase Facebook’s CEO, if you move fast and break things, you have an obligation to fix them. Getty Images, for instance, is bullish about crowd-sourcing. As the biggest bull in the china shop, they have clumsily shattered everything valuable in sight. Many feckless startups have tried to pick up the pieces, acting like cocky matadors daring to face the bull, only to be gored on the horns of a dilemma: an institutional memory loss forcing them to remain tied to the same failed business model, resulting in market size and revenue stubbornly remaining flat.

Fixing a dysfunctional marketplace requires an acknowledgment that photographers own what they create (intellectual property) and that its commercial value is the basis for industry-wide revenue. Crowd-sourcing simply doesn’t work in the pro-sourced Enterprise segment of the Commercial Photo Market.

The hegemony of Silicon Valley thinking has made it difficult to connect photographers directly online with their existing clientele, hard to disrupt middlemen like Getty Images, AdobeStock, and Shutterstock. A new kind of intermediary is needed, a proprietary, data-driven marketplace armed with twenty-first-century technology and actionable market intelligence to go back to the future, so to speak, to both literally and figuratively restore agency for sellers and buyers.

This is an opportunity for a company with bona fide, deep domain expertise in photography, combined with Silicon Valley startup experience, to engage professional practitioners (and their clients) with the kind of product-market fit that consolidates the most premium content (previously unavailable online), builds a tall fence around it, and brings it to a worldwide market.

Photographers want a tool they can use, instead of a tool that uses them. Publishers want dynamic, exclusive, and useful content. Economic and creative outcomes for photographers and publishers are radically transformed by building The Marketplace where all industry participants want to be.

See ya later aggregator!