Ellen Boughn and the future of stock photography
John: Ellen, you’ve been at the helm of the stock market for as long as I can remember. I first put you in the late 80s. You were the owner of After-Image, the first stock agency to publish my work. You sold After-Image to Tony Stone. Since then, he has expanded his range of experience in a number of ways. Can you update us on that range of experience?
Ellen: One of my earliest memories of you, John, is bringing Sarah Stone to your office in San Francisco in the late 1980s. You had a baby Mac and you were just starting to play with Photoshop. I remember you asking me if I knew where you could get some pictures of watches to put in your photos. Free or cheap photos… so you were about to need microstock and you didn’t even know it. Me neither.
Since those days I have worked at Corbis as Executive Editor, I was the first employee at Artville Photo Collection after it was bought by Image Bank, part of the initial team that started Workbookstock, I was the first employee at UpperCut Images and had a brief and very unsatisfactory period on SuperStock. Since 2006 I have worked as a sole proprietor providing appraisal services (assessment of future income streams from stock photography collections), as an expert witness and consultant on general stock photography issues at Dreamstime (microstock) and for stock photographers emerging and seasoned individuals. I’m currently writing a book based on the 100+ blogs I’ve written on Dreamstime.
I have gone from rights managed to royalty free to microstock. I guess you could say I’ve seen it all.
John: Years ago I heard Tony Stone give a speech in which he said that “Someday a huge meteorite will hit the earth and stock photography as we know it will cease to exist.” Is that meteor getting closer? Could it be Micro?
Ellen: Instead of a huge meteor hitting and exploding the world, destroying stock photography, as Tony knew it before he left the industry, the change is more like benign growth. As it grows larger and larger, it becomes invasive and can be as deadly as a malignant tumor.
The industry has made the mistake of creating too many of the same images over and over again. This is because instead of nurturing photographers who have the vision to combine art and commerce to produce unique images within standard salable subjects, they leave creative decisions to be based on past sales results and creative research. based on the same sources. This has resulted in an overabundance of images that all look alike. I like to call them picture of the day…everyone runs out and shoots in the same style and subject with the same look on the same day it seems.
I think one of the reasons microstock exploded apart from price was that users could find unique images. Now that the major production companies are putting the same old, but ‘new’ footage on micro in large volumes, the same problem could arise there.
John: I hear predictions that Google is the ultimate stock search engine, and that one day all searches will be on Google Image Search… even including Agency Collections. Can you comment on that?
Elena: I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that Google has taught us all to search. We no longer search for anything with just one or two words. The vast amount of information on the web forces us to be increasingly specific in the use of search terms and to use more words in a search. This knowledge extends to the way we search for images. I think photographers with subject-specific collections and who have implemented best practices when it comes to SEO may find that they can make more money selling stock directly than with a corporation in the near future.
Today I am excited about the possibility that we may be at a convergence of technology and user behavior that will soon allow photographers to license their existing images.
John: I’ve heard estimates that the non-traditional stock photography market, made up of those who buy and/or license photos outside of the traditional stock infrastructure, is as high as $20 billion a year. Even if that market—comprised of family businesses needing an image for a newspaper ad, students needing a photo for an assignment, or a church group needing an image for a flyer—is only a fraction of that size. It’s still a huge market. Perhaps those buyers end up on a microsite, or perhaps, with a Google search, they end up on a photographer’s site. Do you think this is a market segment worth pursuing for individual photographers? How big do you think that market is?
Ellen: I don’t agree with the $20 billion figure. Is that from Dan Heller? I think it is and when I read his logic (I may not remember it correctly, so Dan don’t get on your horse!) I felt it was flawed. For now I recommend to photographers who have general collections of average quality… ok, face it… there is always average in all fields… put that work in microstock. I don’t feel comfortable recommending trying to reach the world of users from high school blogger to church website through direct sales unless the workflow is completely seamless. Even so, I don’t think most professional photographers want to deal with the traffic that opening the doors fully will cause. Price expectations are so low that they may always answer emails and phone calls regarding reduced license fees. The goal should be to get a certain type of work into microstock, other types into a high-level rights management collection, or license that outright.
In fact, I recommend that some images be posted on Flickr under Creative Commons copyright. I have compelling research showing that for some this is a way to build a reputation and actually make money. I look forward to presenting this and some other information on unusual places to license images at a seminar in the fall at PhotoExpo.
John: In order to effectively monetize these and other markets as individuals, outside of traditional agencies, photographers will need tools, specifically web tools, to deal with the distribution of their images, license and sales management, and abuse tracking. One possible answer to that need is ImageSpan. Do you know if ImageSpan could be a viable solution, and do you know of others on the horizon?
Ellen: ImageSpan just announced version 2.0. The ImageSpan staff previewed it for me and I was very impressed. They have apparently thought of everything. Of course, photographers still have to do their own marketing to drive traffic to the site, but the services provided by Imagespan are SEO sensitive.
John: Traditional shooters fear the demise of the industry because of Micro. Micro shooters are starting to feel the demise of their world by the entry of traditional shooters into Micro. Do you think traditional shooters should be in Micro? Do you think the entry of traditional shooters into Micro Stock is going to “ruin” it for Micro shooters?
Ellen: I think it’s a mistake that traditional RM/RF photographers have put high production value images into microstock. It’s very hard to recoup an expensive shoot, even if the resulting images are on multiple microstock sites. Also, if higher paying customers can get the same stuff on the bus, why would they pay more? Now the toothpaste is out of the tube and there is no going back. Simple, clean images in all the popular genres work great on micro and that’s where they belong.
John: How do you see the stock industry two years from now? Five years from now?
Ellen: More direct sales. In five years? Perhaps the only stock businesses are companies that add value by scouring the web for the best job within a genre… kind of photo research services.
John: What advice would you give to any shooter who wants to make a living shooting in these turbulent times?
Ellen: Think of your business like a multi-layered cake. Take your work to all layers of the business. DEVELOP a specialty and be the best in the world at it. Even photographers on microstock sites need to build their brands within the site to get maximum downloads.
John: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Ellen: I bought my book which will be published by Watson Guptill (Random House) next year.
