Getty Images, a failed business model, that’s just been bought

February 26, 2008 at 8:47 pm · Filed under media, photography, social networks

I wrote about Getty Images being on the market last week. The price at the time was north of $1.6bn. The buyout price  turns out to have been $2.4bn. The guys at Hellman $ Friedman clearly weren’t reading this website when they went all in. What were you thinking!?!

Here’s some pap from the press release. From the Getty side:

“We are enthusiastic about entering the next phase of Getty Images’ evolution by partnering with Hellman & Friedman as we continue to provide innovative offerings to businesses and consumers in a very dynamic digital media environment.”

And the H$F MD Andy Ballard said the private equity firm will work to “realise the full potential of [Getty's] traditional businesses while furthering the evolution of Getty Images into a global digital media company”.

Can’t wait to hear how they’re going to do that. It’s certainly not going to happen by them continuing the aggressive acquisition model that has seen them acquire 50 companies in a decade, but lose serious market value over the past two year.

These guys are going to have to get out amongst the publishers, both big and super-small, and come up with a new business model. Some suggestions:
How about working with Google to rev share the yield on pages that also display ad-sense. Let’s call this one photo-sense. If a photo really does add value to an article, some ad-creative or a feature  piece let the traffic reward Getty.

On the other side, how about you let the amateurs (and pros) on Flickr tunnel through the Getty API and sell their wares straight to the  world’s photodesks.

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Getty Images, a failed business model, part I

February 17, 2008 at 11:35 pm · Filed under photography, social networks

A lot of outlets reported last week that the sale of Getty Images has stalled. With the economies of so many countries hitting rough water right now that shouldn’t be a surprise. Getty’s market valuation is $1.6bn, that’s not an inconsiderable amount of money for a collection of photographs. But really that isn’t the real problem Getty face. The issue at hand, an old media dinosaur struggling to adapt to massive market changes.

It seems Getty has been around forever but a quick check of Wikipedia shows it’s only halfway through its second decade. But through non-stop acquisitions of smaller agencies it has become a giant in an industry now dominated by very few players, just themselves, Corbis and Jupiter Media. Sound familiar? It should. There’s a lot of comparisons that can be drawn with the music industry.

Like the big music players Getty spends a huge amount of time and money chasing real and potential customers for what they claim are copyright infringements. They send thousands of cease and desist letters to websites for unlawfully using Getty images every year. They follow these up with letters claiming damages.

Many of these abusers of Getty’s images are big and medium media. National papers, as well as professional organizations on a local level. But many are small time bloggers and social network users.

Now, I don’t think for a minute Getty are in the same league as Sony et al, suing 12 year olds for six figures worth of lost earnings. After all, Getty haven’t yet brought any of these cases to court. But they’re not a million miles off.

All this seems crazy. Let’s throw out the economic and legal arguments for a moment and just look at the actual process here. User/blogger goes to Getty, looking for an image for their purpose, let’s say they’re writing a recap on a Premier League football game. Before they even begin to search they have to decide if they want a Rights-managed (RM), Rights-ready (RR), or Royalty-free (RF) image. They then have to use a not-too-clearcut price calculator, finally downloading the image in a range of sizes that may or may not be what they need.

OK you’re saying, but the guys in Condé Nast and editors on newspaper photo-desks know their way around image libraries. Well sure they do, but what I’m driving at here is this question: are there more of them (professionals), and are they more valuable than the mass market for photos on the web. Especially in the context of social media, where image and identity differentiation are more important now than ever before. Is there a whole new mass market for Getty to tap? If so they are doing their hardest to ignore it, sticking to a web 1.0 or even pre web business model of central control and expensive limited access for customers.

In part II of this one I’ll take a look at some possible ways Big-Photo® can make money in mass market, and maybe draw up a comparison with the Photobuckets and Flickr’s of the world. And I haven’t even mentioned professional photographers yet.

photography

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