How can photographers make money from display-ad growth?

Online advertising has been gaining market-share for years now. Unfortunately for stock photography companies marketing spend has been shiftng online, to search which is completely free of images. With marketing spend moving from high priced print to low priced online uses and search, creators of photography have struggled to keep revenues up.

In a pay per click  world there is less space for visuals as the advertising needs to invoke an immediate action rather than serve a long-term branding purpose. Recent news indicates that display advertising is now on the rise at Google with companies looking to catch eyeballs with an experience that is consistent with the company branding and visual identity. For Google, 2010 may be the year display advertising  revenues reaches $1 billion in sales. Some commentators believe this may ultimately grow to a $10 billion business

Analysts say 2010 is the year he’ll (ed. Google CEO Eric Schmidt ) deliver on that prediction.Display ads are likely to contribute a little more than $1 billion, or about 4% of Googles total sales this year—an increase of as much 40% over last year—say analysts, including Doug Anmuth at Barclays Capital . That marks an important threshold for Mountain View Calif.-based Google, which makes most of its sales from ads placed alongside search results and which has been criticized for not getting more revenue from other businesses. Demand for display ads, which include marketing messages in videos and banner ads adorning Web pages, may rise faster this year than for search-related ads, according to eMarketer. “You have to go somewhere else to get the next legs of growth,” says Jim Friedland, an analyst at Cowen & Co. via Googles Display-Ad Sales Should Top $1 Billion – BusinessWeek.

For an industry that’s been left out of this shift in marketing spend it’s now key to come up with models that allow for easy purchasing of imagery at reasonable pricing.  This huge volume opportunity will require flexibility on the side of the stock photography and video industry. Innovative models could include special, intuitive pricing, integration with advertising networks, automated sales processes and a general openness to ways that companies in this area operate right now. One thing seems certain. For a business of such volume complicated pricing models seem out of the question. There is work to do for non-microstock and subscription models if they are to compete in what could be a massive market for imagery and video.

Picture: Stock exchange | Billboard | Ilker