King Kaufman: Stock photography and free on-line news
King Kaufman, whose usual venue is covering sports for Salon Magazine, weighs in with a thoughtful blog post that discusses the perceived “evils” of stock photography and compares them to the ongoing controversy regarding paid versus free news content on the web.
The article is about a photographer whose picture of a jar of coins ended up on the cover of Time Magazine. When he posted about this achievement in a photography discussion forum, it came out that he only got $30 for it via a stock photography agency. Although the photographer in question was simply pleased to see his work featured on the cover of Time, others pointed out in the discussion that followed that commissioned cover photos could run into the thousands of dollars.
Kaufman quotes several of the stock-photo opponents complaining that multi-billion-dollar companies should not be able to get cover photos so cheaply. One poster opines that if there were no stock photography sites, companies would have to pay fair rates for photos instead of rock-bottom stock prices. Kaufman compares this to the belief that if news providers stopped giving away their content free, people would buy it instead.
But, as Kaufman points out, this fails to take into account the basic principles of supply and demand. There will always be some photographers willing to sell photos more cheaply than others—and there will always be some news sites willing to offer their news for free.
If Time hadn’t found Lam’s stock photo of coins in a jar for $30, or $125, it would have found a similar photo for a similar price. If news consumers can’t get their news online for free from their favorite news organization, they’ll find it for free somewhere else.
It seems to me that a lot of the problem, both in stock photos and on-line papers, is emotional: it doesn’t feel right to people who provide the content that other people should be able to use the content much more cheaply than it is “worth”. But content providers don’t get to decide what their content is worth—at least, not solely. If they charge more than the market will bear, the market will go elsewhere.
I suspect that a number of on-line news sources will end up having to learn this the hard way.
August 2nd, 2009 at 7:58 am
That’s good classical economic theory. The problem comes when costs exceed the general market price and a previously available good disappears, except for very high priced custom items. ebooks, for example, could have this effect on literature. It’s an argument for zealous enforcement of book copyright, and unobtrusive but effective universal DRM.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
August 2nd, 2009 at 9:30 am
Art Wolfe, a nature and landscape photographer of some reknown, said in a tv show I saw recently (though it could have been on the web, sorry, I haven’t a reference for this) that the stock agencies had stopped buying his work. It wasn’t because his output had lost it’s zing, it was because they were getting so much stuff from people who didn’t value their work very highly, and in having such a hard time making money from cheap work. So he and a couple of friends got together and created their own website to sell their work (using the PhotoShelter.com web service). He also started the Travels From the Edge series about travel photography which shows on PBS.
In short, he saw the diminishing stock market and promptly changed his business model. Others have moved to workshops, and guided photo opportunities.
The pressure on wedding photographers to lower their prices, based mostly on the theory that the bride’s friend with nice digital camera can do as good a job, is being defended largely by disasterous wedding shoots by bride’s friends with nice digital cameras.
August 3rd, 2009 at 7:31 am
The question usually gets settled by quality. Does the cheap (or free) product offer the quality desired? If not, you buy the quality stuff, and you get what you pay for.
But the rocky road of the new digital landscape assures that we won’t be settling this question anytime soon, and in the meantime, established content providers must start exploring other business models or risk being inundated by the changing market.