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Mr. Stock Smarty Pants speaks of too many photographers, too many pictures

By Paul Henning November 30, 2007

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Mr. Stock Smarty Pants is pleased to report to you that he has been deluged with questions about the stock picture industry since his bi-weekly column of wit and wisdom debuted in About the Image a fortnight ago.  And in this, my post-Thanksgiving attempt to educate the unwashed masses, I have deigned to take on an array of questions from a rather confused fellow named Jonty (but what kind of name is “Jonty,” anyway???):

“Dear Mr. Stock Smarty Pants: Why has the internet and the digital age blown the market for stock images into a million tiny pieces.  If the market has grown why have prices come down?  Are there too many photographers?  Too many pictures?  Too many distributors?  How and when will it change?”

Jonty: Didn’t they teach you grammar when you attended school (IF you attended school, that is)? Your initial question SHOULD read, “Why have the Internet and the digital age..”.  Further, did your mother ever tell you that you ask too damn many questions? Well, they should have.  Nonetheless, let’s see if MSSP can sort things out for you so that a) you can construct a sentence properly and b) you have at least a rudimentary grasp of how the stock industry works. 

I think your estimate of the market for stock images being blown into “a million tiny pieces” is just a bit of an exaggeration, Jonty (yet another thing mom should have warned you about), but I do agree that it has been radically fractionalized with the coming of digital technology and the Internet.  This is totally logical and parallels the changes that have taken place in media in general.

In the good old days when Mr. Stock Smarty Pants was a kid watching “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” from WGN on a small black and white TV set, our choices in life were simple.  If you wanted to watch television, you chose from one of three or four available channels.  If you wanted to read a magazine, you picked up Life or The Saturday Evening Post.  Listen to the radio? You had a dozen AM stations available and FM was strictly for upper class freaks listening to classical music.  Buy a car? America made ‘em and you bought ‘em…Japanese cars looked like castoff refrigerator prototypes and ran like those rubber-band powered balsawood airplanes. 

This was the era of broadcasting, which was in its heyday from the end of World War II through the 1960s.  Life was good, the economy was booming (along with the population), and America was the acknowledged biggest and baddest kid on the block, but it was also all about conformity and reaching the broadest possible audience with your service, product or medium.  Choices? You want choices? Hey, what are you, some kind of commie-pinko-beatnik rocking the boat? Shut up and take what you’re given.

That worked for a couple of decades, but then along came those mind-blowing 1960s, things started to change and there’s been no going back.  Rebellion was in the air everywhere (along with the smoke from all those cannabis cigarettes) and guess what? It turns out that people actually DO want choices! I’m growing my hair long, so to hell with you.  Corporate life? Screw that, I’ll become a musician or a graphic designer.  Traditional theater? Hey, let’s put on a play called “Hair” and have people take their clothes off! Pat Boone and Paul Anka? Are you kidding me? Here come the Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix.

It wasn’t that society was suddenly fragmenting…those fragments already existed in various crude forms, it’s just that their desires had been sublimated in the 1940s and 50s.  Now, all hell was breaking loose and people were standing up and saying “I want MORE! I want MORE choices.  I want MORE of everything that I haven’t had before.”

And, of course, this was music to the ears of marketers around the world.  Yes, the broadcasting dinosaur was starting to crumble under its own weight.  But, in its place we had the advent of a far more effective strategy called narrowcasting as goods and services were now going to be increasingly tailored to, and marketed to, smaller and smaller segments of society.  It may seem obvious now, but attendant to the emergence of the age of individuality that was spawned in the 1960s was the realization that people responded better to a direct mail piece that said “Dear Jonty” rather than one that said “Dear Sir.”

How did this manifest itself in the 60s, 70s and 80s? There are a ton of examples, but just a few include: the rise of “pirate radio” stations in Europe and the growth of FM “underground” radio in the US; cars imported from such diverse sources as Korea, Japan, Sweden, Germany and even Yugoslavia (and, admit it, we all miss the Yugo, don’t we?); the spread of cable television and the introduction of satellite TV; the explosion of “special interest” magazines at the newsstand; the introduction and subsequent popularity of specialized food for ethnic minorities at grocery stores; etc.

In other words, we had moved from an age of generalization to an age of specialization.

Now, along come “personal computers” and a guy who really deserves the title “smarty pants” named Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web (no, it wasn’t Al Gore).  POW! Digital technology was going to make all the changes of the previous couple of decades look like a slow stroll through the park, as the rate of change was about to push the accelerator right down to the  floorboard.  And this, my friend, brings us right back to your original question…whatever it was (sorry, Mr. Stock Smarty Pants occasionally experiences a senior moment these days).

Oh, right…why is the market for stock pictures so fragmented?   

If the societal changes of the 1960s and 70s made the individual the king of Consumerland, the introduction and evolution of digital technology and computers in the 1980s and 90s made possible the marketing of goods and services to smaller and smaller segments of the marketplace.  No industry has been left untouched by this, including the stock picture industry.  Sophisticated databases, search tools, marketing software and increasingly refined websites have made it possible to a) market every sort of niche stock imagery imaginable and b) reach out to potential clients on a global scale that hitherto it would have been prohibitively expensive to either identify or contact.  The Big Boy 3 of Getty, Corbis and Jupiter are very similar to NBC, CBS and ABC.  They’re still formidable competitors, but just like David slashing away at Goliath, their days are numbered as their niche competitors slice and dice the picture market.  Big is NOT beautiful and people are increasingly put off by large corporations that are about as personalized as a phone book.  So, we see the emergence of new stock image agencies or distributors on a regular basis, and almost all of these embody some degree of specialization rather than trying to be all things to all people (a so-called “general subject” library).  This is a wonderful time to be a picture buyer: if you’re seeking images of food, nature, sports, World War I airplanes or anything else you can think of, there’s a supplier out there somewhere and you can probably find them just by Goggling!

Another reason why we find ourselves with a fragmented stock picture marketplace (and this, to some degree, addresses your question about why picture licensing fees have supposedly “come down”) is that the old rules have been assaulted on a regular basis for over a decade and a half.  The Huns have broken through the gates of the stock picture industry and you’re not going to be able to boot them out.  In many case, the ones leading the charge were revolutionaries whose prior experience was in industries other than the picture business.  Thus, they brought an entirely fresh set of eyes to our little cottage industry of stock picture sales and said to themselves, “Hmmmm…I think we can do it better.”  These renegades attacked the old “rights managed” way of doing business and brought forth entirely new licensing models like royalty free, subscriptions and micropayment stock.  The result, again, is far more choices for picture buyers.  But, what often seems to get ignored by the pervasive and very narrow focus on individual licensing fees if that these new models have also resulted in providing infinitely more opportunities for image producers to get their pictures into the marketplace, and not just selling their photos to the local ad agency or magazine, but potentially to a worldwide audience.  How cool is that??? Very. 

We could have a lengthy and spirited discussion about prices for stock pictures and whether or not they have really “come down” (for starters, I urge you to compare the prices of RF single images now compared with a decade ago!) as well as whether this is even relevant in a new era in which volume will matter far more than individual transactional prices, but MSSP needs to kick back and indulge in some turkey leftovers washed down by some choice Cognac.  However, before I sign off from this installment, I would be remiss if I didn’t answer your remaining questions:

Are there too many photographers? 

Yes, far too many, but unfortunately in most of the civilized world it is illegal to cull the herd in a way that would solve this problem.

Too many pictures? 

Yes…far, FAR too many.

Too many distributors?

From the customers’ perspective, that’s impossible.  Remember, this is the new age of unlimited choices.

 How and when will it change?

You ask too many questions…now go away, Jonty…but do come back again in two weeks, OK?

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Mr. Stock Smarty Pants, known far and wide in the stock picture industry as the unconventional genius who has allegedly been instrumental in the rise (and perhaps fall) of several major stock picture libraries, answers your questions about the stock picture industry every other Monday on About The Image.  Although MSSP is constantly on the move around the globe due to his (again, alleged) ties to both the international intelligence community and organized crime, your question regarding anything about the stock photo business will be forwarded to him and, so long as Mr. Stock Smarty Pants manages to avoid incarceration, he will consider responding to you in an upcoming edition of About The Image.  E-mail your questions to: .  Oh, and MSSP wants to take this opportunity to categorically deny any affiliation whatsoever with the company called Stock Answers™ LLC.

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