The proliferation of sites like Flickr (and their options for aspiring photographers to license their work) as well as cheap online stock photography web sites is apparently damaging the livelihoods of professional stock photographers. Chances are you can find the image you want, get it for a small fee (or even just an attribution) direct from the creator and if not, have a good chance of making it yourself.
He now has to produce 60 saleable shots in one session rather than the 10 he used to aim for and the budget cuts affect his entire operation.
God love him.
Funnily enough the creator of Microstock was a photographer who was trying to sell his photos and none of the agencies would touch him. So he created something which threatens to destroy the delicate balance of the stock photography world.
Tough shit.
It’s not as if someone couldn’t have seen this coming. It’s time for everyone in every industry to take a long hard look at their business model and wonder whether or not a punk kid with a laptop could take them down legally by undermining their business with something a consumer would prefer. Again, this was pointed out by Rich Segal on his blog that entire development teams in corporations need to consider that while it may take 6 months to add a feature button to a product in their workflow, a “good enough” replica of their app could be build in a modern IDE by the punk kid with a laptop, utilising services like EC2 and S3 from Amazon to provide on-demand CPU and storage.
It’s not about protecting the status quo but rather trying to pre-empt what will happen and getting in there first. It’s about not worrying about what your existing competitors might do and more about the ones who may blindside you. This should drive you to create, to innovate, to be better, to be the best.