For several reasons, I believe 2003 was the “tipping point” in the industry. Sometime in November of 2002 Canon shipped their new professional digital SLR the EOS-1Ds. By the beginning of 2003 Getty Images approved it as the first digital SLR camera from which they would officially accept digital files. There were other medium format digital backs on the market with more than acceptable quality, but the combination of portability and price that the 1Ds offered was tailor-made for the stock industry. By 2004 most of the stock shooters I spoke with had made the switch to digital. As photographers learned how to effectively use there new tools, their productivity went way up. At the same time the cost of entry, into the business started going down. Having digital files also cut down the time it took to get images into the marketplace. The supply of images moving into the market started accelerating.

Back to the stock photo agencies for a minute- the big three continued battling for dominance in the industry. They continued buying up smaller agencies and buying up images to add to their Wholly owned collections. Several people cashed in nicely when one of these companies bought them out. This created an incentive for more companies to get in the business, looking for an eventual payday courtesy of one of the above-mentioned companies. This major consolidation in the industry also created a ready supply of freshly unemployed executives, managers and entrepreneurial types eager to get right back in to the business. It seems like they all started new stock photo companies. One after another announced their new companies and the “big three” kept buying everyone else. I am still wondering if anybody had his or her company bought twice by Getty. With the influx of companies came an even greater supply of imagery. Now remember… I haven’t even mentioned microstock (queue menacing music). Oh… and one more thing, in 2003 Canon also introduced the Canon Digital Rebel, a prosumer digital camera aimed at photography enthusiasts, for under $1000. Why did this matter?

Because while nobody in the industry was looking, a guy named Bruce Livingstone started a company called iStockphoto. Startup Review, a blog that profiles successful Internet start-ups, said this in a case study covering iStockphoto:

“Both Bruce and Patrick (Patrick Lor, first employee and ex-President of iStockphoto) viewed the availability of these cameras as a turning point for iStockphoto because they created a great influx of high-quality photos.” (Click here to read the case study)

Although Getty never approved the EOS digital rebel for their stock collection, it was more than adequate for a lot of uses. It was the first digital camera I bought for myself (we had been shooting digitally at our studio for several years). It was possibly the “tipping point” that pushed microstock to challenge the industry. Now you could become a stock photographer for under $1000. This opened up the way for an untold number of talented amateurs to get their images into the marketplace. Even then, a lot of folks relegated microstock to the “low end” of the market. They felt (or said publicly) this was an untapped segment, and it would expand the overall market, rather than cannibalizing the existing market.

For the time being I’m not going to analyze the viability of the microstock business model, this is still being hotly debated. The fact of the matter is it did shake up the industry. I don’t know if anyone can quantify exactly, microstock’s impact on sales of traditional stock. Microstock’s growing success, however, put fear into the entire industry. So much so, that Getty Images bought iStockphoto for 50 million in cash in 2006. Getty decided if someone was going to cannibalize the market it might as well be them. I’ve assumed to this point you understand what the fuss was about. You could buy microstock for as little as $1- the next cheapest option at the time was about 150 times more expensive! Again I’m not going to get mired down in the debate over this right now, suffice to say, regardless of all arguments to the contrary, it put pressure on everyone to compete, whether the direct competition was real or imagined. iStockphoto was profitable by the end of 2002 (see the above mentioned case study) and other companies were moving into the market.

Again, it was assumed the average microstock “amateur” would produce mostly images with lower production values. However, having a community willing to exchange ideas and techniques created better and better photographers, some started making a decent living, some becoming, microstock stars. Even some “old school” stock shooters began selling microstock. Scores of photographers continue to submit to the microstock sites, some wanting to duplicate the success of the “stars”, some content to see their images published somewhere, while others just want to pay for their hobby. The common thread I perceived among microstock shooters was they felt they were going to overthrow the “old guard” fat cat photographers and stock companies. Many established photographers help add fuel to the fire by dismissing microstockers as “amateurs”. This most likely just helped the microstock community continue to band together and work harder to prove everybody wrong. The net effect was millions of images entering the marketplace.

I the beginning of 2007 I attended an excellent stock workshop. One thing I thought was funny, was being told not to shoot people on plain-colored backgrounds. It was reasoned that this was the type of image flooding into the microstock sites. We were informed our only line of defense was to increase the production values to differentiate ourselves from the competition. Honestly they were right, but the problem was, by then microstock was getting more competitive. Many microstock shooters were already using the same production techniques as the traditional stock shooters. I didn’t really think this was going to be the ultimate answer to microstock.

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Filed under: Uncategorized, Corbis, Getty, Jupiter Images, Photography business, stock photography