Five Years in the Stock Photography Industry

Five years feels a long time when you start to list all the changes and developments that have occurred in this time but it seems to have passed in a flash.

It was exactly five years ago, that Claudia and I were attending Cepic in Prague to launch our new venture, Pepper Stark Ltd. We had devised a range of business consultancy, training and recruitment services that we felt we could usefully offer the global stock photo industry as it currently was.

We saw many challenges to the industry at that time, not least the difficulty stock agencies had to grow beyond or even within local markets and the ongoing challenges to increase turnover in the face of ever increasing competition. We saw ways to help people confront and overcome such challenges including amongst other things international business development opportunities, bespoke sales training courses for sales people and a recruitment service that brought new talent into companies.  

Today I asked my colleagues in the office and the clients I spoke to what they felt the major developments have been to the industry over the last five years and they all mentioned the following points:

• companies being acquired
• companies going out of business
• microstock
• downward trend on pricing, including free images
• client budget cuts

So to summarize we have seen an evolution of licensing models, pressure on price, an ever changing choice of suppliers and a hell of a lot more images. Just as companies or individuals get out of this industry, new investment and new people with new ideas and new technology come into it.

None of these are things, including some pretty tough economic times, are unique to the last five years. What has certainly become more evident over recent times though is the increasing importance of technological development and the increasingly savvy client, knowing what they want, where they can find it and what they are prepared to pay for it.

It is a necessity for companies to adapt to this. You can’t reverse trends, but experienced, confident, trained sales staff can still educate buyers on the legalities of licensing and the value of an image. Equally sales strategies and marketing activities can be more effectively targeted to ensure the right client sectors are approached with the right licensing and price point just as much as with the right type of content.

New ways to market a product and reach the client including all the opportunities opened up by social media have created so many new avenues to communicate with clients. This helps us educate them. It helps us find out a client’s current requirements. It also opens up the stock photo market further to the small business and even wider consumer market.

It’s certainly true that competition is getting fiercer for agencies as well for photographers as images become more ubiquitous and the pressure on price remains. Once it seemed enough for a sales person to name “a lot of content” and “good service” as unique selling points. Thank goodness it isn’t anymore. There is now some highly sophisticated technology streamlining the buying and selling process. There is ever more compelling content, a number of strong brands, highly creative marketing approaches, some extremely professional sales personnel, and this is all still work in progress as far as this industry is concerned.

Liz Pepper
Co-Founder, Pepper Stark Ltd