Still Pictures Could Be Even Bigger Global Money Earners Than They Already Are

Philip Stone July 24, 2005

A couple of years ago a European national news and pictures agency wanted to spread its international wings by establishing an international news service. But it became quite apparent in the early worldwide sales efforts that there was little interest by global prospects in the agency’s text, but what they were interested in, and were willing to pay good money for, was the news pictures output.

Unfortunately for that national agency it was tied into agreements with international news agencies and there were disputes on what it could and could not do with its own domestic pictures, and so the opportunity to make some “real” money from international sales of its news pictures was lost for a while.

Thus there is more than a passing interest in the announcement last week that the European PressPhoto Agency (epa) has struck a deal with Corbis, owned by Bill Gates, for Corbis to market epa’s news-based photography to not just publishers but at the same time getting epa pictures into big-money arenas it really has not been represented in previously such as advertising. 

The two organizations say they will liaise with one another daily on their output to ensure best use of their resources in fulfilling the needs of as diverse an audience as they can find.

Just as interesting as that announcement was that five of the 11 European picture agencies that are shareholders in epa  – ANSA, Italy; EFE, Spain, DPA, Germany, APA, Austria, and PAP, Poland -- also signed separate agreements with Corbis for international representation.

They are all agreements that look fine on paper, but this writer, who has some 30 years experience dealing with news picture agencies, would only advise that for a partnership such as this to really work it is going to need extremely close monitoring at a high managerial level on both sides from the day of implementation to assure the aspirations of each side are being worked on as hard as each expects.

Many national picture agencies, and a lot of newspapers for that matter, are sitting on mostly undeveloped goldmines – their domestic analog picture libraries – and the fact that most of those pictures are still only analog inhibits large international sales.

Their problem is that it is costly and time-consuming to digitize those collections, but it is an investment that should rank high in their priorities. To take advantage of global sales via the web their pictures need to be digital.

Corbis itself has a big experience in digitizing libraries. In 1995 it bought the Bettmann Archive that included the entire United Press International news pictures collection dating back to even before Acme Pictures, the predecessor of UPI news pictures.

But that huge UPI collection basically consisted of shoebox upon shoebox of prints and negatives covering just about every aspect of life in the past century. Just being able to find the picture wanted was a major chore.

Corbis set upon a project in 1997 to select those pictures it thought were the best from a historical and a sales viewpoint. But the financial and time cost of digitizing more than 5 million images was daunting, even for Bill Gates, and so far only 225,000 have been digitized.

That is one of the great shames of professional news pictures today – that 90%+ of those UPI pictures are not available in a digital format. What Corbis did instead was to deposit the archive in what it calls “a state-of-the-art, sub-zero preservation facility” located down a mineshaft in Pennsylvania. The facility is environmentally controlled to preserve the prints, color transparencies, negatives etc., and on-site research is allowed.

In Europe national news agencies and picture agencies have similar digital situations. In the Nordic region projects have been long underway to digitize their photos and those agencies already enjoy good international sales. But in most other European countries it is very much a Bettmann situation – while some digitization has occurred for daily output of the past few years, most pictures covering the century are stored in shoeboxes.

EFE in Spain, for instance, has a library of some 13 million images, and has made a good start on digital conversion, but only about 12% of those pictures are done, and the project is continuing at a rate of only about 200,000 annually. At that rate it will take generations to finish them.

Not just from a historical perspective but also from a sales perspective those shoeboxes are worth their weight in gold. Prices have now fallen to the extent that major digitalization projects should be underway, but a sales strategy must first be put in place in order to select the most important pictures first.

This one got digitized...

When this writer was running Reuters media business in Europe there was a deal on the table from the Russian news agency TASS for a joint venture to digitalize some of the TASS library and then carry out joint sales. Some of those pictures of the Czar, Lenin, and other major characters of the Revolution had never ever seen the light of day and their historical importance cannot be overestimated let alone their sales value, but at that time no deal could be done because the rights to those pictures could not be guaranteed.

For some international news agencies it is a relatively recent practice to make some real money from archived photos. In the past the international picture agencies used to sell their picture service and the clients (mostly newspapers)  stored the pictures within their own archives for as long as they wanted with no additional payments due for reuse. Since the contracts in those days didn’t cover archive rights the clients figured they had those rights automatically, and the international agencies never seemed to care.

About 10 years ago the international picture agencies woke up to the fact they were leaving serious money on the table by not restricting storage rights and not charging for archival use. No longer was the picture service “sold” but rather pictures were “leased” or “rented” for specific purposes and for specific periods of time.

That one change in policy has catapulted news agency pictures into a major moneymaking business, whereas previously it was money losing. More than ever it proved that for a news/picture agency the best financial strategy is one that evolves around “producing once, but selling many times.”

And what product fits better than an archived digital picture?