[...] Corbis has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring image
collections and other companies, hired more than 1,000 people and set
up two dozen offices worldwide. Although Corbis says it brings in some
$250 million a year in sales, it has yet to turn a profit.
Now
the company is shuffling its top executives as it takes on new
challenges, building up a business in rights management and plotting
its response to the rise of low-cost online photo services that
threaten to undermine its lucrative stock photo sales.
The
company plans to announce Tuesday that Gary Shenk, the president, is
being made chief executive as well. Mr. Shenk, 36, is an expert in
rights licensing who has risen rapidly through the Corbis ranks since
he was hired in 2003 from Universal Studios, where he started a small
licensing unit.
Steve Davis, 49, the departing chief executive, will continue as a senior adviser after 10 years of running the company.
The
move into rights clearance, which involves sorting out the questions of
who owns what material and how much they should be paid for its use, is
a departure from the original vision for the company.
Mr. Gates
started Corbis in 1989 with the idea that people would someday decorate
their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork —
interspersing, say, Stanley Tretick's shot of John F. Kennedy Jr. playing under the desk in the Oval Office with photos of their own families at play.
That
is not how things have worked out. But meanwhile Corbis has built up a
formidable stash of historical photos, including those in the Bettmann
Archive. In 1999, Corbis acquired the licensing rights to the Sygma
collection in France, and two years ago it did the same with a German
stock image company called Zefa. It licenses those images for an
average of about $250 apiece. [...]
In all, Corbis represents or owns the rights to more than 100
million images, including some of the most famous photographs ever —
Arthur Sasse’s photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out and Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate. And Corbis handles the licensing of millions of other images on behalf of thousands of photographers.
The
archival photos bring in about half of Corbis's sales, but the company
also has a stable of professional photographers who generate stock
photos for advertising and media clients — images of children on
playgrounds, people sitting in business meetings and men in khakis
swinging golf clubs.
Over the past few years, Corbis has moved
beyond newspaper and magazine clients to pursue advertising and graphic
design agencies, as well as corporate marketing departments, which are
turning increasingly to high-quality stock photography rather than
doing their own expensive photo shoots.
Those customers are also
buying from Corbis's growing library of 30,000 short video clips —
mostly generic scenes of, say, people shopping or running down the
beach.
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 on...]
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