Image Choices Dwindle To Two: Corbis Or Getty

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September 07, 2000 (8:00 AM EDT)

Image Choices Dwindle To Two: Corbis Or Getty

By Cynthia Flash,

While the Internet has served as a boon for photographers trying to peddle their work, it is also threatening their livelihood as the number of companies that offer stock images consolidate into two dominant players.

Two stock photography behemoths -- Corbis Images and Getty Images Inc. -- are snapping up smaller stock photographic collections faster than a shutter in bright sun. In the process, they're raising questions about the future of the industry that provides canned photographs mainly to book and magazine publishers and advertising agencies.

Since Mark Getty founded Getty Images (stock: GETY) in 1993, the Seattle company has bought 13 major companies, including Photodisc, Art.com, and most recently The Image Bank and Visual Communications Group -- Getty's largest competitor.

Founded by Microsoft's Bill Gates, Corbis, Bellevue, Wash., has the second largest online photo collection. Its holdings include the Bettmann Archive and the recent acquisition of the leading French photo news company Sygma.

While the companies say they provide a valuable service by offering customers access to more than 100 million digital images online, the photo industry is complaining about the consolidation of an industry once dominated by mom-and-pop shops.

"Photographers everywhere are threatened by consolidations because all of these companies, as they've become more corporate, have developed teams of lawyers and everyone wants to own the photography," said Brian Seed, a Chicago stock photography consultant. "There's a big move afoot to end copyright as we know it"

Seed argues that customers aren't served well because the quality of photos being handled by the large photography houses is decreasing.

Jim Pickerell, who publishes the Selling Stock newsletter, estimates Corbis and Getty together represent $500 million in gross sales of an industry that grosses $1.25 to $1.4 billion a year.

He questions, however, if Corbis and Getty's move to transform the industry from an analogue system -- where photos were delivered on transparencies -- to a digital, Internet-based system is the way to go.

"Getty and Corbis are focusing almost exclusively on the online environment and taking what had been analogue businesses and forcing them into [the] online environment at possibly too fast a speed," he said. "They may kill the goose that laid the golden egg in the process of driving it all digital."

Getty acknowledges the hurdles it faces in moving analogue customers to its digital system.

Bud Albers, Getty's chief technology officer, said one of the biggest challenges in acquiring the companies and keeping their customers was maintaining the brand while integrating their photography collections into Getty's online system.

Getty purchased some companies, like The Image Bank, for its photographs. It bought Art.com and Photodisc for the technology, Albers said. Integrating the photos into Getty's online system was the easy part, he said.

Educating customers on the new online system takes longer.

While photographers worry that the Internet and consolidation within the industry threaten to undermine their ownership of the photos, the Internet also offers an instant community for them to congregate.

And Pickerell warns that if the photographers aren't happy with the way Getty and Corbis run their business, they will stop contracting with them.

"With all the images Getty and Corbis have online, they still at best control 45 percent of the market. Fifty-five percent of the market is looking for something different," he said.

That, he adds, makes it possible for a third party to enter the market with an even better deal.

Reach freelance writer Cynthia Flash at cynthia@flashmediaservices.com.