In a speech at PhotoPlus Expo in 1998 Jonathan Klein told the stock photography community, “We also know that the stock photography industry has not historically focused on the needs of customers and, frankly, needs to in order to SURVIVE!, That is where we are now.”
He went on to say, “The stock business that does not care deeply about customers and does not drive quality and creativity will not survive the next five years, let alone the next century. … The stock photography sector has undergone a period of rapid change in the last few years, the most fundamental of which is that the customer now expects more and more service values at the same cost to him or her as in the past or even at a lower price.” See
here.
For the last 20 years Getty Images has basically operated on the principle of giving the customer everything they want, no matter what. That seemed to work for the company for a while, even if it wasn’t necessarily always in the best interest of image suppliers, but around 2006 it began to fall apart.
Getty’s gross creative revenue in 2006 was
$634.1 million. The average price per RM image licensed was about $536 and the average price of a RF image was about $242, but they licensed about twice as many RF as RM.
In 2016 gross Creative revenue had dropped about 56% to roughly $280 million. Based on an analysis of sales of some of Getty’s top producers the average license fee for RM was in the neighborhood of $90 and the average for RF in the neighborhood of $45.
At the end of 2006 Getty had
1,767,214 images in its collection, with RM representing 55% of the collection. During 2006 they licensed rights to 1,660,208 uses of creative images.
Today, Getty has 20,313,712 images in its collection and 32% of the images are RM. It is unclear how many image uses they licensed in 2006, but if we estimate the average gross license fee at around $65 it would have been about 4.3 million images licensed, a significantly smaller percentage of their collection than in 2006.
Reasons Why Customers Aren’t Always Right
1 – Customers Always Want Better Quality And Service For Less Money
2 – Customers Sometimes Have Unrealistic Expectations
3 – Giving Customers Too Much, For Too Little, Can Hurt Suppliers
4 – Declining Revenue Can Result In Poorer Customer Service
5 – Some Customers Are Bad For Business
6 – Customer Demands Can Affect Employee Morale
7 - It Gives Abrasive Customers an Unfair Advantage
There is a need for a balance between the best interests of: Customers, Suppliers and Employees. Suppliers and Employees can't always be ignored in favor of Customers.
More customers are not necessarily better if the prices they want to pay and the demands they make are unreasonable.
To succeed, in addition to providing top quality and excellent service, a business must find a way to establish a bottom line and in a friendly, non-threatening way to tell certain customers NO.
Also see
here.