Free Images No Threat To Photo Market Comment

With Getty Images giving away approximately 35 million photos for free. Some people are saying the move, which is aimed to combat picture piracy, will overturn the entire stock photo market.

The CEO of Shutterstock, Jon Oringer, is not worried however. It is because these ‘free’ images come with two strings attached. 1) They cannot be used to make money and 2) Getty are allowed to run their own advertisements on those images.

In a telephone interview with Forbes magazine Origner said, “It’s not very landscape changing at all…You can’t use their images for commercial use and 99.9% of our business is commercial use. We sell to businesses who sell other stuff, so we’re just going to concentrate on doing that.”  Oringer stated a well-known fact; the largest part of the $11 billion image market comprises of firms in the selling business, these are mainly large corporations and advertising agencies.

With this new initiative from Getty, these companies must all still pay for their pictures. Lets say they did get images for no cost; Oringer has doubts that they would relinquish control over the image to save money. “Any business that is trying to sell something should be willing to spend a couple dollars for a stock photo to not have ads in it and not distract the user from using the product they’re trying to sell…That’s what sounds strange about this,” says Oringer.

Under the new policy, media companies can use Getty’s content for free, but there is doubt that major news agencies will want to risk Getty managing advertisements which run in opposition against their own client’s adverts.

What do you think? If you have any sensible comments regarding this story, please leave your comments in the section below.

[Image via vam]

SOURCE: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/03/07/free-getty-images-no-threat-to-photo-market-says-shutterstock-ceo/