In an article about Corbis (owned by Bill Gates), New York times mentions the microstock agencies iStockPhoto and Fotolia as difficulties that Corbis will have to deal with:

Quote:

What Corbis did not foresee was the rise of so-called microstock agencies like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. These sites take advantage of the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing, or turning to the online masses for free or low-cost submissions. Thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers armed with high-quality digital cameras and a copy of Photoshop contribute photographs to microstock sites, which often charge $1 to $5 an image.

Read the article @ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/10corbis.html

Good publicity, but some would be offended at the "so-called" and "semi-professional" terms.

Reactions?


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I am a pure ameture so no offence taken and my guess is that 90% of submitters are so it is a fairly accurate stereotype.

The interesting thing from the article you missed out:

Quote:

Mr. Shenk said Corbis would announce its plans for the microstock business sometime this quarter. As for the question of how a high-end company enters that business without cannibalizing its more expensive products, Mr. Shenk said the idea was to find a new kind of customer, people who would never envision buying pictures from a Corbis or Getty.

There have been a few other articles on Microstock recently (I try to track them on my blog) so I think Corbis has been putting out the quiet word to try to drum up fre publicity.


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