The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet…
[by Shannon Fagan]
A subject line on one of the photography email list-serves that I follow caught my eye this week, “The Web is Dead! Long Live the Internet!” Hmmmm. There was a link and click, click; I was taken Wired Magazine’s site. There, Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff have prepared a compelling article about the future of Internet traffic. I invite you to read the article as it’ll make my observations for the photo industry more compelling.
What’s occurring on the Internet has been seen in our own image licensing economy and push to future technology. “Big sucks the traffic out of small,” Milner says in the article. “In theory you can have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.” This is very familiar to what we have observed with Getty Images and the Canon Corporation. Getty is the world’s largest online distributor of stock images and illustration, and Canon is the world’s largest camera manufacturer.
In contrast to this article (where the web started with a low-barrier of entry), photography began with a high-barrier of entry and is moving oppositely in the other direction to a democratized access point. This is also occurring in music, graphic design, and illustration; perhaps legal forms, writing, and news; just about anything with intellectual property merit being shared or licensed on the Internet. “The less powerful are sapped of their reason for being by the better resourced, organized, and efficient — is perhaps the rudest shock possible to the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entry ethos of the Internet Age,” says Michael Wolff. “After all, this is a battle that seemed fought and won — not just toppling newspapers and music labels but also AOL and Prodigy and anyone who built a business on the idea that a curated experience would beat out the flexibility and freedom of the Web.” We are now witnessing a rise of low-barrier of entry to photography by the masses; something observed again first-hand at the Canon Expo in New York in early September. Evidence of why this trend will not end is largely due in part to the stronghold that Canon “as the world’s largest camera manufacturer” has over the determination of digital imaging’s future. This combination of The Wired Magazine article and what we are observing in the photographic economy begs the question as to whether it is possible for success outside of the majors?
To date, it was generally accepted that one must have “high-level” access to distribution and technology in order to succeed in photographic licensing online. In other words, to make real money, and a sustainable income, one needed to secure Getty distribution with a Canon, or perhaps a Nikon, camera in hand. There seems to have arisen an assumption amongst image content creators (and the smaller platforms assisting them) that perhaps in the future this dominance will not be as prevalent as “direct licensing” and other democratized access points level that higher playing field. This may be true. The Wired Magazine article’s macro view of what is happening on the Internet however, is interestingly counter to this argument. All stock content licensing is taking place online via the Internet. Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff give us a bit more to ponder about regarding our democratized future.
Shannon Fagan is leading up ASMP’s new Strategic Image Licensing Committee (SILC) and is a former President of the Stock Artists Alliance.
3 Responses to 'The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet…'
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Shannon, you raise a number of excellent points. As Sergey Brin points out in “Googled” the networked economy favors a winner take all approach. So, this would seem to reinforce the idea that being embedded deeply in the long tail is a very unpleasant place for a professional to be.
On the other hand, I think there are two important aspects of the equation to consider:
1) We’re not large companies. Individual photographers don’t need hundreds of millions of dollars or thousands of clients to be successful. This is different when selling microstock, but for most professionals having a dozen to twenty really good clients is more than sufficient for their business to survive.
2) The web offers great opportunities for new business models to unseat incumbents. The most successful new companies today have all done just that. I believe stock photography offers the best chance for a creative licensing/pricing/subscription model that provides more value to the customer and more profit to the photographer. It will take some experimentation, risk and failure to figure out the new model however.
It will be interesting to see how this issue evolves. Certainly, the demand for compelling visuals has increased with the proliferation of devices. It stands to reason that this should provide some opportunities for visual artists to succeed.
The core of “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet…” is about the shifts in how we access and use the information on the Internet. Most people forget that the web and the Internet are not synonymous; the web is a slice of Internet traffic delivered over HTTP. With the rise of apps, more and more data, interactions and value are being exchanged by non-HTTP methods and proprietary, closed networks.
“All stock content licensing is taking place online via the Internet.”
Well, yes. But the real question is how much is over the web (technically, if you’re licensing photos by accessing and paying for them over a browser, then it occurs over the Web) and how much is over other dedicated applications and peer-to-peer networks over the Internet. The real issue is how much licensing is done over closed gardens, closed areas where we have to get access.
“The Wired Magazine article’s macro view of what is happening on the Internet however, is interestingly counter to this argument.”
Not really.
The real question the article raises is about curation, personalization, closed gardens, and the rising power of closed gardens.
What Anderson and Wolff don’t really discuss, but could, is why certain apps and closed gardens succeed. Applying that to the stock photography industry, the question is slightly different: Why do we (as individual contributors) have to sell through big closed gardens, and not through big open ones, or smaller open ones? Why is the Getty of yesterday still the Getty of today, and what will change to shift the power away from the big access points? Why can alternative agencies succeed in some niches of stock photography, but fail in others? Why can some photographers succeed without Getty in some niches, but fail in others?
That’s the real area for thought from this article.
One thing should be pointed out. These days it’s easy to become a distributor of their own content because technology makes it possible, thus avoiding the “big” content companies.
The difficult part will be to get the “buyers”, unless the content you’re shooting is unique. That’s because Getty and Corbis have brokered exclusive deals with large agencies, textbook companies etc. to use only their content provided at a discount. Kind of like what is happening with exclusive access to sports venue and celebrities.
It’s tough to be an independent and compete with that, unless you offer something the “big” guys don’t have.
Innovate – don’t immitate.