Paul Melcher’s latest on the “
New Photo Agencies” is worth reading. He discusses the Community Builders, the Scrapers, the On Demanders and the Hybrids, and notes that “the barriers between pros and casual photographers are going to completely vanish.”
Melcher points out that, “these new photo agencies have no restriction on how they intend to monetize their content, sometimes accumulating different business models and reaching different markets at the same time.
With pressure from their investors, they are not in this market to build a long-lasting profitable business, but rather one that will return a massive exit, either by going public or selling to a large entity (see Instagram). That is also a vastly different perspective than legacy photo agencies.”
A huge percentage of the new image creators “enjoy taking and sharing photos for pleasure while they go on paying for their lives with other, probably more lucrative, occupations.” The technology world has decided that these photos can be monetized regardless of whether the image creators want their photos used to generate revenue for someone else, or not. And in virtually all cases the creators receive very little, if any, compensation for their efforts.
Read the
story.