"Five contributions to decline of stock"

On November 12, 2006 I posted a rather provocative reply to a post to the StockPhoto Listserv. Here is my reply in the thread "Five contributions to decline of stock:"

'A couple of months ago I gave a talk to the ASMP DC Chapter on the state of the industry. Most of the points in this article I touched on, but the people who asked me to speak gave me the task of not having it just be a "downer." They asked me to come up with solutions. I tried to. I used positive examples from the current economic theories detailed in books like "The World is Flat" and "The Long Tail" and by expanding on terms like "crowd-sourcing."

One of the positive (and simultaneously negative) aspects of the new technological and market driven changes is the great leveler known as Google. Give them a few years and Google can make the 20th Century stock portals like Getty and Corbis irrelevant, while allowing smart entrepreneurial stock shooters to license their images directly, with no commission, through Google.

"The truth is, what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google," Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft said recently. When even Microsoft is scared, it's time for all of us to take a step back to determine if we can exploit the new tools of the 21st Century, or if they will be the final nail in the photo stock industry coffin.

It's time to start thinking out of the box.

Stan Rowin

More on this later . . .

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