As we all know, the Big Three stock agencies are in a period of turmoil, with the emergence of microstock, photo-sharing, crowdsourcing and other changes seriously cutting into their profit margins — as well as the earnings of professional stock photographers.
In this environment, I guess it’s only natural to expect the disruptive innovations to become more and more dramatic. Which, I suppose, is why a number of people have told me recently that they think Google will ultimately gobble up the entire stock business.
Frankly, I doubt it.
True, Google Images reaches the largest number of prospective buyers in the world. Google indexes copyrighted images and allows users to search the Web for image content. Google Images currently indexes more than 1.1 billion images.
Keywords are based on the following:
Because of its ease of use, the everyday user often gravitates to Google Images to grab images for everything from high school projects to cookbooks — usually without regard to copyright. Ad agencies, design firms and PR agencies also “borrow” Google Images for preliminary mockups of advertisements and brochures.
However, experienced photo buyers know not to use Google Images. The search engine typically directs them to lesser quality images and presents perplexing copyright issues.
Image theft, of course, is one of the biggest threats to the income of the professional photographer — and nowhere are images easier to steal than through Google. While software programs such as Google Grab and Google Internet Ripper are available for the purpose of snagging all of the free pictures a user wants, what’s to hack? Most people just right-click and download images to their hard drive.
In sum, Google Images is not likely to emerge as a competitor to stock agencies anytime soon, because
[tags]photography, photo blog, Google Images, john chapnick[/tags]
December 28th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
ahhhh.....................boring
December 28th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
dude if you want to get a life start now and go take your first good picture you dumb ass pussy ass bitch
December 28th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
u need to shut up he is very good your just mad that you prabaly couln't comprehend it ! you bujie a** ni**a
October 19th, 2009 at 5:42 am
hehehehe... and try to sell it.
October 11th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Remember HAL from Kubrick'S 2001 A Space Odyssey?
What will Google do to those they fear?
Google will do nothing FOR us. There can be some crumbs falling from their table down to us but you actually can be happy when they don't harm you.
Are you aware (and some of the writer here are very well aware of this issues and have written about the 'your online identity') of what it could do to you?
Just ignoring you and your business because you blockhead insist on taking pictures instead of writing (blogging) is already killing your business. Now they sell adwords etc (is that seen as bakshesh or just bribery)
Cheers folks