Kelly Cline’s photographs pop up all over the place, in grocery stores, on Web sites, even splashed on the wall of a supermarket in Serbia.
Cline, who lives in West Seattle, takes pictures of food and sells them online through iStockphoto, a division of Seattle-based Getty Images. Her shots of hand-pressed olive oils, cheeses and California strawberries are available for anyone to purchase, and the response is so strong that Cline said she expects to make about $70,000 this year.
“I’ve never made this much money before,” said Cline, 38.
Cline is part of a wave of change hitting the stock-photography industry. The business used to consist of high-end photographs that were licensed to advertising agencies, book publishers and other companies for hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars apiece. Those photos often ended up in catalogs, brochures or magazine advertisements.
Now, Web sites such as iStockphoto sell images online for between $1 and $15, opening up stock photography to a new audience. The result: Stock photos are showing up on Web sites and blogs, and small businesses with limited advertising budgets suddenly are interested.
The new business model is often called “microstock photography,” and it could be categorized as a form of the so-called user-generated content (think YouTube) sweeping the Web.
With sophisticated digital cameras less than $1,000, amateur photographers can break into the business, submitting their pictures to microstock photography Web sites and collecting a small commission for each image sold.
It’s not a big industry. Microstock photography contributes less than 10 percent of Getty’s sales. The company won’t disclose an actual figure, but in 2006 it had $807.3 million in total sales.
There are only four or five serious competitors, and Getty’s iStockphoto division is, by all accounts, the 800-pound gorilla.
But business is growing fast, and some say they expect this to be its breakout year.
“We’re just now seeing people look at the model and say, ‘Hey, this is really successful,’
” said Bruce Livingstone, iStockphoto’s founder. “This is the year we’re going to see a lot of competition.”
Livingstone is widely acknowledged as the father of the microstock-photography industry. He started iStockphoto in Calgary, Alberta, in 2000 by giving his own images away online.
Soon, designers and other photographers joined and began trading images with each other.
Livingstone began charging money in 2001 to cover the costs of hosting the Web site, and iStockphoto has been profitable ever since. Now, it has about 35,000 contributing artists and 1.7 million images available.
IStockphoto’s big break came last year, when Getty acquired it for $50 million. Getty zeroed in on iStockphoto in 2005 when it began researching microstock photography. By the fall of that year, Livingstone was talking acquisition over breakfast in Madison Park with Getty Chief Executive Jonathan Klein.
IStockphoto fit in with Getty’s strategy of offering images at every price point for every customer budget.
Still, Getty was known for high-quality, high-end images, not the cheap photographs iStockphoto specialized in. So instead of integrating the company into Getty, Klein opted to keep iStockphoto separate and allow it to grow in Calgary. It now has 56 employees.
Some estimates place the entire stock-photography market at about $2 billion worldwide. There’s little chance of the microstock segment taking over the market, said Andy Goetze, an independent analyst tracking the industry.
“It is still a long, long way to go until iStockphoto will count for $100 million of Getty Images’ overall revenues, if ever,” he said.
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But there’s no question that iStockphoto is eating into Getty’s business. Customers who were once willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a Getty image are finding a decent image on iStockphoto for much less.
“There are people that are moving to the lower end of the market and buying images,” said Mike Roarke, an analyst tracking the company at McAdams Wright Ragen in Seattle. “Depending on how far you take this, has this created a totally different dynamic within the stock-photo business? Or is it going to?”
But Klein estimates that the customer overlap is only about 15 percent. In other words, he thinks that 85 percent of iStockphoto customers would never have ordered from Getty Images. And Getty can seize that opportunity to sell more expensive images to the customer.
Sites like Google Images also present a challenge to the entire industry. If you wanted a picture of a rose, for example, you could find dozens of nice shots on Google’s image site.
Using those images without permission from owners could amount to copyright infringement, but it is done anyway.
“Ninety percent of people who use images are stealing them every day,” said Oleg Tscheltzoff, co-founder and president of Fotolia, an iStockphoto competitor.
Getty is bringing some of iStockphoto’s best-selling photographers into its overall business, which means they could make hundreds of dollars on one sale. Food photographer Cline is one of them.
She has nearly 1,400 images on iStockphoto and has sold about 69,000 downloads.
“It’s the most satisfying job I had ever had in my life,” said Cline, who used to work at a printing company. “I can’t imagine going back to an office. I think it would probably kill me.”