Panel adresses the future of stock photography

The Picture Buyers Fair in London is a distant memory, with new events around the corner over the coming months I thought it would be good to (finally) post the podcasts of the two seminars I organised and chaired at the event. The real reason for the delay is my inexperience with podcasts, but now I found the right software so here we go.

The first panel consisted of Christina Vaughan, CEO of Imagesource and President of Cepic /  Lewis Blackwell, publisher and consultant, ex SVP for creative at Getty Images and editor of Creative Review / Tim Harris, Sales and marketing manager at Nature Picture Library and Andrew Mitchel, business development at Fotolia in the UK.

The subject for the panel was ‘What’s a Picture worth? The debate about the value of images keeps on popping up. With photographers loosing revenue, publishers needing more content for lower pricing and more and more photography entering the marketplace the paradigm is truly shifting. Existing businessmodels are severely challenged while even the new ones are constantly threatened by innovation and ongoing movements in client behaviour and technology.

The panel addressed the changes from several angles. Tim Harris kicked off the debate with numbers from the Bapla pricing survey he organised two years prior and commented on changes since then. I invited Andy Mitchell to show how fast change is overtaking existing companies as he talked through the over 1 million images Fotolia already has on offer next to their paid content. Lewis Blackwell talked about the opposite site of the spectrum; images that are hard to shoot and difficult to replicate. He said he would pay more for these images but simply can’t find anyone that will supply these highly niche pictures to him. Christina Vaughan made a passionate plea to bring back passion in photography and ensuring we don’t loose the values that made us all join the industry in the first place.

The panel is a bit over an hour so you may want to take a break or two… I will post the second, picture buyers panel, shortly. The introduction is by Simon Cliffe of the British Associations of Picture Libraries, BAPLA.