Agency Consolidation --
Is It Working?
Is It Working?
By Dale O'Dell
While the new corporate masters of the stock industry (the big agencies) have squeezed photographers ever harder, legions of photographers have slipped through their fingers. Image-makers have been driven from the sour
Mark Getty of Getty Images is surprised and annoyed that his investors don't value his stock agency as highly as he does. Bill Gates has finally told Corbis he's tired of them spending a rumored fifty million of his lunch money every year and they'd better start paying their own way. In my opinion, it appears that the very agencies who sold out to these guys (and didn't share a dime of their multimillion dollar merger checks with the very photographers that made them rich), were in fact doing a better job than the behemoths they believed they couldn't compete with.
Oh well, now that our former stock agency "partners" have cashed their retirement checks, and the corporations are struggling with order-by-number, all-digital business models with no customer service, smart researchers and photographers are forming new alliances. The new start-ups, as well as older established agencies that didn't get picked off by corporate vultures, may well prove to be as photobuyer - and photographer-friendly as the expatriates claimed to be but never really were. I believe the light at the end of the tunnel just got two f-stops brighter.
As I reflect upon the merger-mania of the 1990's, I note two rationalizations the big guns were feeding us to justify stock industry consolidation. First is what the biz-boys call "synergy," that the new big company is more than just the combination of the smaller companies it swallowed up. Second is "market power," or the ability to restrict consumer choices.
Synergy never happened. Photographers who assimilated from smaller agencies into the corporate giants generally found themselves bound by more restrictive contracts, getting a smaller piece of the pie, having fewer images marketed and being less satisfied overall. Many photo researchers and buyers found the new corporations less user-friendly than the smaller agencies they'd previously dealt with. This tends to prove that a 100% digital business model with sketchy or nonexistent customer service doesn't always work for an industry whose prices are almost always based on negotiation. Market power appears to be consolidated by Corbis and Getty, but to a negative effect for both picture-makers and photo researchers and buyers.
With the two big agencies marketing virtually the same thing to the same clients, big-agency stock has become
Consolidation of market power has not only limited the avenues of distribution of photographers' work, but it has also brought about fewer choices for researchers and picture users. The big corporate agencies don't care to deliver images that aren't digitized, they detest maintaining analog files, have few methods to research non-digital images, and they've made historical archives practically unavailable.
This is not the way to grow an industry. These guys just aren't getting it, and as more and more researchers and buyers turn to independent photographers, and as more and more photographers leave the big agencies for more challenging work, the big agencies are going to find their product is uninspiring, sometimes incestual, stale, and eventually will be less profitable.
Dale O'Dell is a regular contributor to PhotoStockNotes. He produces cyber-generated stock photography from his studio in Prescott, Arizona. Email: dale@cybertrail.com;VF Phone: 1 520 541-0944; Fax: 1 520 541-0957; Web: http://www.dalephoto.come
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