Another business model heads towards extinction

Last week Rupert Murdock announced that he would rethink the Wall Street Journal’s online subscription based business model. And today rumors are surfacing that The New York Times is giving up on their TimeSelect online subscription model.

These changes are undoubtedly due to the overabundance of free news content all over the web, even if they aren’t up to the standards of the Times and the WSJ. As we have discussed before, we are now entering an era of “good enough” content, whether in text or photography.

And as we’ve also seen and discussed here countless times, the “free” nature of the web and the overabundance of photographers and inexpensive imagery is pulling most pricing models of photography down. We have been trying to suggest that search engine results and branding can be a solution to this problem.

But if the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal were not able to sell their “value added” products through subscription models on the web using their superior brands, the future for plain old photographers trying to license images is probably worse.

Maybe photography-for-profit will no longer be a viable occupation for most pro photographers in the future.

And by the time those trade association's “Strategic Research Committees” finally meet, they too might be irrelevant.

The best solution remains: find your niche and exploit it. You have to find your own niche, but the trade associations could help you exploit it, if they weren't so bogged down in forming those committees . . .