Getty Images For Sale

Yup, I happen to work for Getty and some of us have expected this over the last few months.
 
kbg32 said:
Yup, I happen to work for Getty and some of us have expected this over the last few months.
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Keith, what's driving the sale? Low volume of business for the images or something else. This is interesting because there was also a lot of debate regarding some of the Getty Museum's acquisitions. Are they concerned about ownership of the images themselves?
 
But the rise of digital photography and the Web created a host of competitors that charged as little as a dollar for an image. Recent events — from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister, to the latest foibles of the entertainer Britney Spears — have led to a surging popularity of low-quality but on-the-scene photos, many taken by cellphone cameras


Is there a future for the paparazzi or the independant PJ?
 
Jan, The only thing I can tell that is driving the sale, is that age old standard - greed. Jonathan Klein has been in NY for some months. Apparently now it is obvious that he was here for more then to oversee the business. He gave himself a raise and a moving bonus to be here, while the company put reviews, raises, and bonuses on hold for everyone else until April. I guess the powers that be are hoping that the company can be purchased by then. This way they won't have deal with this. My last company - MediaVast, was just purchased by Getty this past February. And just to let people know, who think otherwise, when a company is purchased, the employees don't get a thing. I was one of the lucky ones to keep my job. The owners of MediaVast walked away as millionaires. One of them actually tried to get back in the building one weekend to take some leather couches, but was caught, and Getty changed the locks that afternoon!
 
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As someone who has images with Getty I can tell you I've seen sales drop like a stone over the last few years. Getty bought Photonica a few years ago and ever since my sales have been dwindling, then this last year and a half dramatically.

Bigger ain't always better.
 
sepiareverb said:
As someone who has images with Getty I can tell you I've seen sales drop like a stone over the last few years. Getty bought Photonica a few years ago and ever since my sales have been dwindling, then this last year and a half dramatically.

Bigger ain't always better.
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I have been with Photonica for years. Worked there as well, but left before Getty bought them. My sales more then quadrupuled when the Getty sale went through. I am making 4x per month then what I was making in a quarter with Photonica alone. I only just recently have seen my royalties drop at Getty because they were removing images from the site. They removed over 200 of mine just in the past 5 weeks. Needless to say my December sales report was pretty low.

If anything, the sale of Photonica to Getty increased royalties to photographers, not reduced them.

Do you consistently submit new imagery??
 
endustry said:
I've heard of more and more instances of companies contacting folks on Flickr directly and/or simply abusing the Creative Commons license in order to attain stock. Most of the people I know who managed to sell something through Flickr make it sound like not a lot of actual contractual obligations are discussed though the payouts in some cases seem pretty fair.

One guy I know, howoever, was contacted by someone making themselves out to be a small businesswoman who didn't know the ropes and just wanted to use his image for a few local ads. He looked at the header info of her email and did a little Googling and found out she was actually employed at one of the big pharma companies as a graphic designer. Cheapskates.

At any rate, this kinda' bums me out as I had been thinking of approaching Getty about employment opps doing color correction/cleanup or content sourcing.
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When I have suggested to people that they should change their licencing to All Rights Reserved, they have all ask why? "I want coverage"..."I don't care"....I'm amazed that even though the majority of people on flickr are amatuers, they don't have any business sense. I've had my images stolen on more then one occasion, but now everything I have there has got a huge watermark on it, and is so small u could not print a decent 4x6 from the file.

I don't know why these amatuers dont care that someone wants to come along and take their work, or pay them poorly for it. That is their work, it wa stheir time, and they paid for the equipment, what gives?

I'm just waiting for the day flickr turns on its users and starts allowing the sale of images through their site, just like istockphoto.

Just a matter of time.
 
sepiareverb said:
As someone who has images with Getty I can tell you I've seen sales drop like a stone over the last few years. Getty bought Photonica a few years ago and ever since my sales have been dwindling, then this last year and a half dramatically.

Bigger ain't always better.
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Same for me; i had work with Photonica too back in the early 90's, since Getty's acquisition some images, that had sold over and over, never sold again.
 
Simon Larbalestier said:
Same for me; i had work with Photonica too back in the early 90's, since Getty's acquisition some images, that had sold over and over, never sold again.
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Simon, have you given them images since then? All ddue respect, if you haven't, that is at least one reason your sales have dropped off. In the stock industry, one has to constantly reinvent their business to flow with the times. That goes for any business.
 
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since this is now 'unofficially' OT I'd like to ask Keith... do you mean that these stock image resellers 'forget' about you if you don't supply images to them regularly or do you mean that what you gave them and sold yesterday is not selling today, so you have to provide them with contemporary images continually.
 
kbg32 said:
Simon, have you given them images since then? All ddue respect, if you haven't, that is at least one reason your sales have dropped off. In the stock industry, one has to constantly reinvent their business to flow with the times. That goes for any business.
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Actually no not to Getty because at the time (the UK office of Photonica) was taking more "creative images" the likes of which Millennium Images may support now. Getty effectively swallowed the Photonica stock and i would say from my own perspective, my work didn't fit with Getty's idea of stock images and was less marketable.

Another important element to this which hasn't been addressed so far in this thread is that during the time of my involvement with Photonica UK i was also signed to a hard core advertising agency which represented another aspect of my work. Therefore i had different work with both agencies. I didn't continue to provide new work to Photonica as the direction of my new work went in my advertising agent's portfolio.

Once Getty had taken over Photonica, my work had shifted again and i was represented by an PJ angency (Network Photographers) which required exclusive rights and in later years i joined Anarchy Images which also required exclusive distribution rights.

All this aside i was doing ok in stock image sales until Getty took over Photonica.
Had i just wanted to shoot stock images and not seek more specific representation i would naturally have given new work to Getty.
 
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