Bye, Bye, OnRequest Custom Stock? Professional photographer, John Harrington, who runs the PhotoBusinessForum weblog, made a very interesting post a few days back, regarding a comment made by the head of OnRequest images. If you’ve been a pro stock photographer over the last few years, you likely heard about OnRequest, and noted the heaps of scorn and negative feelings about this company on many industry newsgroups and forums. The reason for so much scorn and criticism was primarily due to the business model of OnRequest, whereby buyers would submit a photo request, and then up to five photogs would, at their own expense, shoot what the client wanted. One would make the sale (maybe), get a small commission, and the rest of the images produced would get dumped into a stock library. Sounds grand, especially if you’re one of the four other photographers who likely never saw a dime for all their hard work. OnRequest then expanded on this model to build custom stock libraries for companies.
Overheard twice, according to Harrington, was the comment made by the head of OnRequest, David Norris to the effect of, “that model was interesting, but didn’t pan out.” Harrington proceeds to offer up a notable poke at what sounds like a fresh corpse on the field of this rapidly changing industry.
To my own, I certainly disliked OnRequest from the outset, primarily due to the fact that they devalued the work of the photographers. To that end, I never had much respect for photographers that allowed themselves to be taken advantage under that model. However, I’ve realized you can’t change the mind of the sheep once they’ve gone three feet past the edge of the cliff.
So is OnRequest on the road to being toast? I hope so. I certainly wouldn’t feel any sympathy for them if they faded from the industry landscape.
I posted the following reply over at John’s weblog post.
“Those that seek refuge at the bottom of the barrel, or on the lowest rung, let them be the first to be washed down the drains and sewers, never to be heard from again, save one last fading, gasping, “peep…”.
Gary, what the stock industry is experiencing now is not that much different from what the IT and manufacturing industries have been struggling with for a while – loss of revenue and jobs due to outsourcing to cheap labor markets. At some point we need to decide just how much it costs us as a society to pay the absolute lowest prices as consumers. Perhaps this is something you would want to consider in light of your recent partnership as well.
G.
GT:
As much as I respect your opinions on many matters, in this case I’ll have to cite what I see as the main difference here. This isn’t an issue of outsourcing or cheap labor markets competing in a global arena. I haven’t seen too many IT or Manufacturing models where a bid goes out to five companies under the premise of “All of you; Build it for me first, and IF I like it, I’ll pay one of you.” Of course I could be wrong on that point.
This is about taking advantage of people, and having them do (sometimes significant) work, and in four out of five cases, for nothing. That’s a far cry from simply outsourcing keywords where values are relative and work is being done in exchange for direct compensation, not implied or hopeful compensation.
Finally, as for what the stock industry is experiencing, while there are some similarities, you gotta remember, not everyone can learn code, or architect out DB programs, or knows engineering. Whereas practically anyone can pick up a camera, point, shoot, and be lured by the possibilities of making some (trivial or not) amount of money. Don’t forget, companies like iStock didn’t start in India or Malaysia, they started here in the good ol’ USA.
Cheers and thanks always for your thoughts and comments.
Gary, unfortunately that IS how it works with custom software projects as well. Larger contracts are put out to bid and contractors often develop demos and proof-of-concept code, often flying specialized “pre-sales” engineers around the world. Their development costs are so low that sometimes they can implement to whole project for free and make a profit on the maintenance. For smaller projects, there’s a multitude of bidding sites (like http://www.programmingbids.com and others like it) where developers try to outbid each other not only on cost but with demos and whatever else it takes.
In manufacturing it’s even worse – the contractors take advantage of workers that have no legal protection, minimum wage, age or safety restrictions, etc. Here too contractors may offer prototypes for free, playing the odds that one good contract will pay for all the lost ones.
G.
I’ve been thinking a lot about microstock lately and just cannot fathom who in their right mind would think that is a good deal. It is easy to get into a legit stock agency, maybe not corbis or getty but others are. I bet if I walked into Union Square right now and showed 100 strangers my print portfolio, and asked them how much would you charge an ad agency to run this photo on the billboard across the street, nobody would say ten cents. Why are photographers that stupid? okay enough thinking for one afternoon, i’m in a foul mood now.