Jupiterimages has acquired all the shares of Workbook Inc. from Alexis Scott giving it control of workbookstock.com. Simultaneously, Alexis Scott purchased back from Jupiterimages the print directories, Workbook.com and all the other products that help generate assignments for photographers and illustrators.
One of the things that complicated this transaction was that Workbook Inc. owned two really separate lines of business. One is workbookstock.com that represents 231,268 images from 28 RM distributors and 9 RF collections. In addition a significant portion of the images were supplied by photographers directly to Workbookstock's Co-op Stock brand. The other division focused primarily on the publishing of print directories where photographers and illustrators could promote their work.
Jupiterimages is very interested in the stock photography business, but the directory business does not really fit with its business model. On the other hand, Alexis Scott was very interested in continuing to operate the directory business which she established 28 years ago with the publication of the company's first directory of creative talent.
Alan M. Meckler, Chairman and CEO of Jupitermedia Corporation said, "with the addition of Workbook Stock and its high-end rights-managed images, Jupiterimages has strengthened and solidified its position in the rights managed marketplace. We anticipate significant marketing and business synergies between Workbook Stock and our previously purchased PictureArts collections."
Workbookstock pays royalties to photographers and distributors on virtually all its collections so this purchase does nothing to add to Jupiterimages' collection of wholly owned content.
Now that Jupiter owns it, this portal is likely to lose some of the images workbookstock currently represents such as the RF brands Medio Images, Stockbyte and StockDisc that are owned by Getty Images. Getty will certainly pull these brands off the site as soon as their contracts expire. Getty had also been representing about 7,000 ofWorkbookstock's images and is expected to terminate that association. It is not clear how much revenue either Jupiterimages or Getty is likely to lose from these moves.
In explaining why she decided to sell the stock photography business Alexis Scott said, "I just felt that one needed more and more capital to compete effectively. Given the large sales staff that Jupiterimages has marketing their images I feel that our contributors will do incredibly well with Jupiterimages."
All the Wookbook Stock employees will be retained by Jupiterimages. All operations will remain in the current offices for three or four months and then move to Pasadena where the PictureArts division of Jupiterimages is currently located.
It is expected that after the initial three or four months there will be a hot link to a new workbookstockimages site and later to the Jupiterimages site. Eventually all images will probably be integrated into the Jupiterimages brand as Jupiter is currently doing with its PictureQuest brand. Many of the images currently represented by workbookstock are also available on other Jupiterimages sites such as PictureQuest. It seems likely that the combined revenue these suppliers have been receiving will drop slightly once the sites are integrated.