About Free, Freemium and Losing Focus

Everywhere you look, someone is reviewing one or two books on Free or Freemium. Even today’s NY Times has a rather negative review of 2 books on the topic.

But to be honest, the “FREE” debate for professional photographers is just a diversion from the important topic of who is actually shaping the market and how they are doing it. You see no discussion about some very subtle changes that will greatly affect the future of the pro photo industry.

The brutal economic answer is that the Internet does in fact change other people’s businesses because of this massive distribution. We should just acknowledge that and not hide from it.

so said Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO.

Google owns Picasa, an image “sharing” service.

At one time it seemed designed to allow you to share your personal photos with your family and friends. Recently a new option cropped up in the Picasa search function: Search by Copyright Status: Commerical, “Remix Allowed,” or assorted Creative Commons licenses. You can also search by size. Do you want the full file size from a camera to use as a free stock shot in a national ad campaign? Just pick “creative commons license” and “extra large” size.

This blog is hosted by Blogger.com, which is owned by Google. The photos I upload to this blog are now in the Picasa database. Probably so are yours if you use Blogger.

And just as quietly Google’s image search has added the same functions under the “Advanced Image Search” selection.

So Google has cataloged almost every page and image on the web and now you can search by size and whether or not it’s “FREE” for anyone to use

You can’t stop technology. But you can ask for a piece of the pie.

If you know anyone at a trade association, please ask them what they are waiting for.