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Modern Postcard makes deal with iStock, apologizes for slight to photographers
Last week, Modern Postcard (MP,) a printing and mailing house business specializing in direct-mail postcards, announced a deal “coming soon!” to offer images from Getty’s micro-stock business, iStockphoto. The announcement came in an email to MP customers sent at 5:00PM EST on Friday, August 24, 2007. Within five hours, the company sent a second email to the list with the subject heading: “Modern Postcard Apologizes.”
In a testament to the speed with which things happen on the Internet, we gather MP received a number of complaints regarding the message included with the iStock partnership announcement. Specifically, the email included the advice to MP customers to “skip the expensive photo shoot and create direct mailers with high quality images from iStockphoto.com!” Clearly, professional photographers took exception to the off-handed dismissal of their work the wording implies.
To their credit, MP management’s made the swift apology saying the message misrepresented the company’s intentions and feelings about professional photography. The apology email goes on to say, “The target audience of this service [iStockphoto] is small / home office businesses on a limited budget that have never been able to afford quality photography and therefore have never used it.”
The email does not, however, address the question of whether, in their effort to reach that target customer, they might draw bigger budget clients looking to cut costs away from the more expensive photography they would otherwise have used. The jury is still out, though the single image volume trends at iStockphoto (micro-stock download volume growing) and its parent, Getty Images, (RM and traditional RF volumes shrinking) seem to indicate that such cannibalization is a very real threat.
Web: Modern Postcard - iStockphoto - Click here to view comments on the istockphoto forum.
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Posted in: Getty Images, Micropayment Stock Photography, News, Photographers, Stock Art Buyers, Stock Photo Companies
