Reflections On The Stock Industry

For those in the stock photo industry October is always a time for intense networking and education in New York with Visual Connections, the PACA International Conference and PhotoPlus Expo. Now that these events are over its time to reflect things learned. Here are a few of my take-aways.

PACA

Attendance at PACA is slowly declining as companies are acquired and old friends leave the industry. A total of 108 organizations were represented, 42 of them based outside of North America. An interesting aspect of PACA this year was that 3 of the 9 presentations that took place during the two day conference were sponsored by Microstock Diaries and dealt with issues related primarily to microstock distributor strategies.



Clearly, microstock is now mainstream. Despite this open door that PACA offered, only about 15 of the attendees were actively engaged in the microstock business. This may point up a difference in how microstockers learn compared to those in the traditional business. Microstockers may not need to attend events because they get the information they need through social networks on a constant basis. That information is free and doesn’t require travel. Participants on microstock blogs also get direct feedback to their questions and concerns.

PhotoPlus



The thing that struck me at PhotoPlus was the total absence of stock photographers. This trade show used to be a magnet for stock photographers. Not too many years ago there was an entire track with 9 seminars over a period of three days dealing with a variety of issues of interest to stock photographers. This year there was almost no mention of stock. If attendance to this show was any indicator it appears that stock photographers have moved on to something else and it may not even be photography.

There seems to be fewer and fewer exhibitors each year. Canon and Nikon dominated the expo with Sony, Fuji, HP and Epson also having significant presences. In the past Adobe and Lightroom had large displays on the trade show floor, but this year they were absent. There were, however, several Photoshop and Lightroom seminars and hands-on workshops that were sponsored by Adobe. Exhibits and seminars of interest to wedding and portrait photographers seemed to dominate the show.

Jack Hollingsworth was there, but his talk this year focused on social media, not stock photography. One of the things in the past year that excited him is the image quality that is coming out of the iPhone cameras. He believes, and I have to agree, that in the future more and more of the still images will come from phone cameras and be delivered to consumers on electronic devices. He promised that by this time next year he will have launched a stock agency that will represent nothing but pictures shot on camera phones.



Art Photography

There is a growing interest in creating and selling photos as fine art. Many photographers who have seen their commercial businesses decline have turned to producing images that can be sold as fine art. While such work provides creative satisfaction and encouragement for the photographer the process of marketing the images is even more challenging and difficult than finding commercial customers, and the economic remuneration is usually less.

Undoubtedly the best attended presentation at PhotoPlus was the keynote address by Frans Lanting, Thomas Mangelson and Art Wolfe. The three inspired everyone with the breath and quality of their work and their abilities to market their images both as art and for commercial purposes. In addition to being great photographers they are also very astute businessmen.

Video

More still photographers are considering stepping up to video. Canon and Nikon offer a whole range of cameras that produce excellent video quality. In certain cases these cameras can outdo traditional video cameras. It also seems clear that the demand for video stories delivered on the web will grow much more rapidly than the demand for still images. Learning to use this new equipment to tell stories effectively will be a challenge, but give of the difficulty there may be less competition in the marketplace, at least for a while.

However, when considering possible competition it is worth being aware of a few statistics. At the current rate 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, or 23,288,800 hours per year. That’s 1,513,728,000 minutes of new video uploaded every year. Every day 3 billion YouTube videos are viewed or 1.095 trillion videos per year. The vast majority of this work is shot by amateurs and of very poor quality, but there is a small portion (and given the overall numbers that’s a lot of hours of video) that is very high quality – and it is free.