Recall my musings about if Flickr will move towards stock photography features? Looks like they are definitely at least considering it …
Making Money For The Flickr Flock?
He called subscriptions one of the “core ways” Flickr will make money in the future.
He also said that there were other opportunities, such as brand advertising, contextual ads, search ads and, well, then he stopped short.
“We don’t talk about upcoming initiatives,” he said. “But I will say that even today, a lot of people buy photos from Flickr users. But people have to know the person, and send them a Flickr mail and they have to negotiate a price.
“It’s a very high-friction process. Taking the friction out of that would be one of things Flickr could do to monetize,” he said. “But we haven’t made any announcements.”
But he went into details.
First off, Butterfield said, Flickr photos wouldn’t be the same product that photo buyers find on a stock photo site like Jupiterimages or even iStockphoto, which is a kind of Flickr for professionals known for its “crowd-sourcing.”
Butterfield said those sites typically trade in typical business brochure-friendly photos. For instance, he added, they would sell an image of a group of ethnically diverse 40- and 30-somethings using computers or maybe of two men shaking hands.
Flickr photos would find a different niche on the marketplace, but still a viable one, he added. And then it begins to make sense. Flickr photos are typically more, personal, more artistic.
When I gave Butterfield my card, he saw that I worked for JupiterWeb, which shares a parent company with Jupiterimages.
“Ah,” he said, “Jupiter, No. 3 in the business.”
Before the interview ended, I pointed out that iStockphoto already has a good 23,000 contributing photographers.
That’s when Butterfield reminded me of Flickr’s 4 million.
Not everyone is happy about it, there are several pro and anti conversations taking place on Flickr groups right now. I for one welcome the move if it keeps Flickr running, they can’t survive on subscriptions alone can they?
Technorati Tags: flickr, stock, photography, news
My good news is Strobists Dilemma
What a coincidence. On the same day I give away a photograph for free to be used by British Airways inflight magazine I read this from Strobist
On the one hand I can totally get your point David, I really do. And you know, I do feel a little guilt for giving my photograph away (thanks for ruining a great moment in my photography career! heh).
Having pondered on it for a little while though here are my thoughts
My last point needs some clarification. Consider web sites. A company comes to me and says “I want a web site to sell my widgets”. I say “That will be $£xx,xxx.99″. They say “Whoah, my neighbours nephews friends sister can do it for $£x”. I say “Go get them to do it then and come back to me when they make a hash of it”.
If an industry gets commoditised it is because that industry is doing a poor job of selling itself. What is the difference between me building a website and the 12 year old kid with a copy of Dreamweaver? Oh, probably more than a million pounds in profit on the clients bottom line, and I can prove it, but I am not going to do it at the kids rates. You have to decide what the difference is between your photograph and some kids $1 stock photo. If there is no difference who’s fault is that? Not the kid and not the customer, that’s for sure.
Technorati Tags: strobist, stock, photography, news