Now that 500px has been
sold to VCG it appears that the 500px Marketplace is in transition. Major contributors to Marketplace are receiving notices that their agreements will be terminated effective June 27, 2018. It is not clear that Marketplace will cease all licensing of imagery at that time, but that appears to be the case.
It seems possible that some Marketplace images will continue to be licensed in China through VCG, but that may require separate contractual agreements between the photographers and VCG. Since VCG doesn’t seem to license much imagery outside of China, sales in other parts of the world would probably be turned over to Getty Images in the same way as Corbis images were when
VCG acquired Corbis. On the other hand, there may not be any effort at all to continue to license Marketplace images.
Evidently, VCG intends to take 500px back to being just a “community,” but it is not clear how they will monetize that activity. I conducted a search for “people” on Marketplace and the only images I could find were from Hero, Caia and Hex. Getty already represents these brands and presumably all these images. If Getty is looking for more travel or wildlife 500px has a broad selection of great images in its Marketplace, mostly from part-time amateur photographers.
But there is a question as to how much more of such imagery Getty needs. Taking in more may give Getty customers more choice, but it seems unlikely that additional images of these subjects will result in much in the way of additional sales.
In addition, many of the amateurs will probably not be happy that the majority of the sales made by Getty will be at much lower prices than Marketplace has been charging. Based on some recent analysis of Getty contributor sales 76% of the licenses were for prices less than $20 and over 55% were for prices less that $10. One of the reasons amateurs have gone to the trouble to make their images available for licensing through Marketplace is that they believed their images are worth more than these low prices.
Can Midlevel Distributors Succeed?
500px launched its Marketplace about 3 or 4 years ago. There is no question that they have a lot of quality imagery, but indications are from a number of contributors that there has never been substantial sales volume.
ImageBrief closed recently after launching in 2012 and raising more than
$2.2 million in funding. Both companies have been trying to offer quality images at somewhat higher prices than the major agencies have been charging, but the prices were still much lower than what most agencies were charging a decade ago.
It appears to be an increasingly difficult to build a business that will challenge the market leaders.