Photographer Shannon Fagan just returned from Dublin, where he spoke at the CEPIC New Media Conference. Shannon was part of a panel entitled “What’s next?: How will the stock media business evolve?” Shannon is President of the Stock Artists Alliance and an Advisory Board member of the Young Photographers Alliance. He has deep knowledge of the stock photography industry, both from personal experience, and from his role helping other photographers develop their businesses.
(c) Shannon Fagan
The following is an interview I conducted with Shannon over e-mail about the industry.
Tell me a little bit about how you got into the field of photography in general, and then into stock photography?
Believe it or not, it was in Second Grade. That’s when my first interest in visual pictures began. We had reading time at the end of each school day and in the back of the classroom there was a stack of magazines, shelf of books, and a row of beanbag chairs. I would race to be the first to grab National Geographic’s World magazine off the rack. And, I wouldn’t read it…I would flip through the pictures. It was my introduction to color, light, gesture, and place.
Years later, my photography interests aligned with art courses in high school. I studied figure drawing, painting, and did printmaking in professional classes, while maintaining photography and experimental darkroom work outside of class on my own. I entered college with a variety of interests at the University of Memphis and I was able to explore all of them via my academic degree. Business and art history meshed themselves with languages and writing. I majored in Art with a concentration in Photography, but the bulk of my professional training took place during regular summer internships each year in New York. I worked as a photography assistant upon graduating in 1999, and soon found my place as a professional photographer in New York City.
Stock photography was a perfect fit for all of my interests in production, creativity, business, and travel. I was good at managing my own time and taking the initiative. I enjoyed taking risks. Contracts to shoot for a variety of agencies were thus initiated and I found a support network of photographers to aid me as my business grew. I found that busy stock photographers were intelligent business owners, self-motivators, and very keen to share their experiences. I had a natural draw to them as mentors to learn more, and thus, my career took off.
Can you describe the changes in the stock photography industry over the last 5 years and how these changes have affected your peers?
I could discuss the changes in stock photography or I could discuss the changes in anything being sold as intellectual property content over the internet; ie. music, writing, news, and art. All of these have seen significant evolutions since around 2004. I point to that year specifically as it was when, in professional commercial photography, the Canon 1DS Mark II camera was first introduced. iTunes was made available one year prior. (I, however, was still listening to cassette tapes and kept my contacts on a Palm Pilot.)
This was a bellwether year for photography. The Imacon virtual drum scanner was replacing more expensive traditional drum scans. High resolution professional grade digital capture could now be obtained on a 35mm camera system at nearly half the price as a medium format digital back. Led by stock agencies, the commercial industry for photography was moving away from a reliance on film and moving towards digital exclusivity. Licensing agencies began to only accept digital files on DVD. Online portals for digital submission were soon to follow a couple years later. We saw the first layoffs of the larger agencies’ staff as workloads were reduced. For smaller agencies, there was a massive buying spree of their collections by larger umbrella distributors. There was one dirty word in the industry, and it was called Wholly Owned content.
Jump forward to five years later, and we’re now full of new buzz words: 5D, Red, micropayment, and crowd-source. The next five years will see the latter word as the most significant measure of future forecasting. And the effect it has had upon my professional aspiring peers? Pain. Justifiably. It has been a wound disseminated through the stock and assignment sectors of commercial photography businesses alike. The future of content sourcing for the next five years is no longer about being a standout due to a piece of equipment that makes creativity better, a portfolio glossier, or a lighting technique shinier. It is about rising to the top of the crowd-source through service, trust, and stratification of offering.
Are Professionals leaving the ranks of stock photographers and saying no to stock shoots?
Yes. It’s systemic and will continue for the foreseeable future. When the supply of images exceeds the demand for them, the price of the images naturally declines. When the cost to produce these same images stays flat or rises for production quality concerns; profitability decreases. It reached a tipping point in 2009. The expense outlay on a per image average basis has exceeded normal average returns in a time frame to allow for reasonable reinvestment of the earnings back into more images. Professionals are intelligently re-diversifying out of stock photography and into other less risky ventures. For some, these new ventures are not even in the realm of commercial photography. Some are of retirement age, others have assessed that a career change at this time is ideal. Once gone, these professionals in stock photography are not likely to return.
What changes do you expect over the next 3 years? Will more boutique agencies get bought by Getty or Corbis or will they close their doors?
The next three years will see two divergent paths collide. On the one hand, agencies will realize within one year from now that most of their professional photographer contributors have stopped submitting to stock photography on a regular basis. Many of these contributors will go on a hiatus, and as I mention above, likely never return again. It is already occurring now, but it will take more time to assess whether this process is a mere blip on the sourcing map, or more permanent. Looking at all of the causes on a macro scale economically, I suggest that it will be a permanent decline.
By next year we should see more changes with dramatic effect upon agency overheads. It will become naturally more difficult to supply the buying clientele with diverse imagery whose production costs are by necessity above one hundred US dollars per final selected photograph. It will also become more difficult to supply the buying clientele with diverse imagery whose production costs are above just fifty US dollars per photograph, and so on. These numbers for managing shoot costs seemed barely achievable two years ago, and yet, here we are today negotiating production budgets that are half what they were twelve months ago.
Agencies will start to aggressively recruit new talented photographers. The vast majority of this new talent, perhaps over 90%, will be part-time photographers. They will have another full time stable professional career that pays well enough to protect them from the volatility that active professional photographers will see for the foreseeable future. The remainder of this newly recruited talent will be involved in faster cash-generating areas of commercial photography such as weddings, portrait studios, or catalog work. Their time to take on stock productions will be naturally limited. It is likely that they will produce a few shoots for stock, perhaps more than several for some of them, and then retire their interests into another area of photography or elsewhere over time.
The time to recruit new talent vs. the actual returns on investment in number of shoots will become a central agency conundrum. What is saved in more highly targeted imagery per photographer will be lost by the overhead salaried time it takes to see these new recruits off to perform independently on their own. Our industry is not in a time of budgetary allowance for agencies to initiate, produce, art direct, edit, and manage many photographers at once. The photographers must be self-starters. Going back to the above, those educating themselves about entering commercial photography are likely better off at this time to hone their craft around service and initiation, rather than around what they take pictures of. This is the value added that the industry will need.
It would not be surprising if large agencies begin to focus their internal efforts to restructure themselves. Those on the micropayment side are likely to be the new content aggregators. They will find the content for sale and be the front door for artists. The large macro distributors, however, will need to adjust their services to areas of online distribution and selling that have higher barriers to entry. Over the next couple years, it would seem entirely possible that major agencies drop their reliance on money generated from licensing images, music, motion, and type/design alone. I expect to see them enter into newly found technology for search engines, advertising, distribution, or retrieval. Making money from selling pictures as a middle class income is closing its door as a business model globally. The service of the selling, that’s where I’d be looking to for future growth.
As to what this means for the artists creating the content, one can research and read many listings of articles in regards to that decision process on any major news network. To write it here would be seemingly outwardly pessimistic. I prefer to be pessoptimistic. Take the forecast and plan accordingly. This industry is focusing itself more than ever upon newcomers and transient participants. They are a crucial component of the new licensing community for low price and near-free mechanisms for sales. Flickr alone has proven that.
In the near future, do you think Google will take a major position in the stock photography business?
Like stock motion, we’ve been predicting it for years. And like stock motion, we’re still waiting for it to initiate. Note that Google focuses itself, on the search engine side, as a direction pointer to find some type of information or content. They aren’t focused on making money for that actual content that they point to – at least not directly. Google may, in turn, be telling the world that financially they don’t need to sell it, they just need to point to it. The New York Times is doing the same. They don’t sell us the health care insurance mentioned in the wellness article, nor the hotel stay noted in the vacation story to Honolulu. They inform us about it and point us in a direction from their standpoint of expertise. Look at Google, as with any search engine, to bridge itself in-between. There’s already too much competition for being an actual sales force. Google would be better positioned to give it away for free, which is in line with the general public’s perception that the content should be free anyway to start with.
Is it possible to make a living as a stock photographer these days? Does a photographer need to be signed with Getty or Corbis or both to make a go of it?
This is such a complicated answer because it really depends on the individual makeup of the photographer, first and foremost being their personality and skill attributes. I’ll answer it by touching upon all of the arrows that point to the theoretical circle of making money at something you’re passionate about. You need to be interested in your craft, which is to say, you first need to have a skill which you have crafted in order to be competitive. You need to have startup money in some shape or form. You need to anticipate what you’ll do financially while you are waiting for your investment to break even, and then later, ideally turn a profit so that you can reinvest. You need to consider creating a stable peer group of experts that you can seek advice from. You need to not take yourself too seriously; have fun with it, enjoy it, and remember that your crafted skill is your passion first, your job second. You need a backup plan. I suggest two or three of them and pay close attention to the ways in which they interlace with each other. You’re going to need to be flexible. What you want to be and who you are, are two completely separate concepts. Use your skills to speak to an industry’s needs.
You will need to have multiple contracts in stock if you want to have any remote possibility of doing it profitably. You will need to consider diversifying yourself into different licensing types of Micro, RF, and RM. You will absolutely have to be a self-starter.
Are any of the smaller agencies worth a look for photographers to try to sign with?
Any and all are worth looking at. Go with trusted support structures, proof of service, proof of sales, and who responds the best to recruit you. Recruitment doesn’t mean who chases you the most. It means that you should pay careful attention to the agencies who offer to give you the needed information that you require to initiate a contract. In this way you can situate yourself as a consummate creative contributor. Nearly all agencies have a crisscross form of global distribution now. Talk to the photographers signed to the agencies that you are interested in. Do your homework first, and then attend the class.
What should a photographer spend to make a stock image and expect to make a profit?
Ask ten different photographers and you’ll get ten different answers. Shoot at the lowest cost you can, including for free. When starting out, shoot everything that you can at no cost or low cost. That should answer this question.
Once an image is in a major collection such as Getty or Corbis, how much do you think the average image makes in a year?
It depends on how you shoot and what you shoot. In general, for the audience that is starting out green and looking to learn from their mistakes, I’d stick with $25 per image per year. Some readers might ask “why so low?” My answer is because then, when it’s lower than that, you’ll have channeled your expectations elsewhere. Put your sights aimed at $25. There will be a lot of hidden costs that’ll make up for it being higher. Remember, we’re saying per year here. Not the life of the image.
How long will the average image sell well for in a major stock collection?
2 years. The jury is admittedly out on this one. No one industry wide can give an adequate measure for it. No doubt, it’ll sell for years. As to how many years it will sell robustly on a month to month basis is clearly declining industry wide.
Do you know any photographers who are selling stock images on their own websites and or using licensestream?
I do. There are several technologies out there for direct marketing of imagery (or other forms of content such as music). It’d be wise to investigate them all and talk to the photographers using them. How will you find the photographers using these technologies? Ask the companies who are selling the products. They should have testimonials from the success storiess.
Do you think stock video will be the next boom for image makers? Will it be worth it to start shooting video for stock agencies?
This is another really tough question to answer. You’ve got fantastic questions here Greg! The competition in video is low, but will become more and more saturated. Sales have been sluggish and production costs are higher than stills. This will remain an area of barrier to entry due to cost and time to initiate a production. Motion is not as easy as setting up still shots. No one knows if and when motion will truly take off. Part of this has to do with internet wireless connection speeds and cell networks like G3. The content is meaningless if it cannot be quickly accessed and used for advertising effectively as a result. The last thing you want to do as an advertiser is use motion in a way that annoys the public. Motion also takes longer to look at, and our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.
It’s safe to say that anyone heading into motion should tread with caution for any outlay of production expense. Nearly everyone is suggesting it as a focal point for education and experimentation. Interestingly, when compared to 2003 and 2004 when agencies were actively teaching their photographers about transitioning from film to digital, we are not seeing that same process take place for initiating movement from stills to motion. This might give a bit of guidance as to the reality of what the agency needs are based on where the sales are forecast vs. what is being projected amongst the photographer crowd.
The gear should continue to get better and better; and like 2004, when the Canon 1DS Mark II became the game changer for shooting 50mb files for stock, it might be wise to wait on major investments until the path is clearly delineated. The lead into motion right now reminds me of the 2001-2004 lead into digital. Everyone then said, “are you shooting digitally?” Everyone now says, “are you shooting motion?” It took a few years for the dust to settle.
The difference between shooting digitally vs. analog film, and moving into motion vs. sticking with stills, is that motion advertising usage is entirely based on something which the stock agencies cannot control. That being the expansion rate of fast wireless mobile connectivity. The clear growth in our marketplace are devices like smartphones and tablet computers. Laptops can be included in this too, but smaller devices that include phone/contacts/email/and web access are taking hold. I will point out that if there is any prediction of a cash cow to be made in selling motion to mobile devices, one might heed what happened in stills. Still imagery for mobile phones was projected to be a potential major growth segment; but it didn’t happen. The dot com era ending in 2000 also projected a major leap in internet connectivity. The timing was off. If you’re creatively inclined, add motion to your repertoire because you’re passionate about it. Don’t do it because you feel you have to, as otherwise you might be very disappointed.
Have you changed the way you run your shoots or do business in the last 2 years?
Definitely. I’ve taken all of what I have said above and injected it into my present and future plans. The one major difference between when I started out vs. working now, is that I’ve made a conscious decision to only work with people that I genuinely trust in work ethic, commitment to the project, and service to the team. I know that it might seem obvious, but when I’m choosing a direction to move in, I seek assistance from individuals who can think on their own two feet and who have integrity. I’m asking for it, the industry is asking for it, and customers are asking for it. There are a lot of distractions now to our everyday lives thanks to the technological revolution that we crave. Thus establishing integrity is critical.
Will you continue to aggressively shoot stock in the next year?
I have plans for several ventures for which the jury is still out. I won’t say that I’m necessarily exiting stock or commercial photography, but I will say that I’m paying very careful attention to the “need” vs. the “want” of the entire marketplace; for price, for competition, for creativity, and for challenging invigoration.
