Digital Railroad restructures, lays-off 25
Digital Railroad (DRR,) an on-line image archiving service for photographers and agencies, has announced a restructuring plan that has resulted in the termination of approximately half of the company’s staff. According to Mark Ippolito, the company’s VP of Sales, the move marks a change in the main priority of the company from recruiting image providers to use the service to licensing images through its recently launched Marketplace web-site.
“We’ve executed the first half of our plan,” Ippolito says, “and now we need to focus on out-bound interaction with buyers.” That first part of the plan entailed building the base of photographers and agencies who store their images with DRR. Ippolito says the company now has a solid base of more than 1,800 photographers and 75 agencies using its archiving service.
In April of 2007, DRR launched Marketplace, an image licensing web-site through which its archive clients could market their images to buyers. The company created Marketplace at the urging of many of its member photographers who wanted Digital Railroad to add a marketing component to its services and to meet a demand on the part of art-buyers who, until then, had to search the individual collections of DRR photographers one at a time. Building an image-buying client base has become the primary focus of the company.
Ippolito says the support team for photgrpahes remains in place, but the company needs to scale back its photographer-facing sales force in order to concentrate on generating sales for its existing photographers. In response to questions regarding the financial health of DRR, Ippolito said, “This is a calculated change in direction for the company and it comes with renewed investment.”
The twenty five employees laid off came mostly form the companies principal offices in Seattle and New York City. The company also has offices in Los Angeles, Chicago and London.
Web-site: digitalrailroad.net
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