The search leader continued expanding its image-related offerings with Similar Images, an experimental search feature from Google Labs. While Google did not pioneer the underlying image-recognition technology or image-to-image searches, the company’s increasing attention to all things visual offers insight into online image-consumption trends. For stock producers and marketers, this foreshadows both opportunities and challenges.
Then…
Google Image Search has been around for years but has never been seen as relevant by stock-industry insiders, who consider it ineffective compared to the highly focused search results delivered by stock Web sites. The search company’s leading technology was always dependent on the general public for textual information, such as image keywords and file names. While many stock-industry buyers used Google Image Search for inspiration and general research, most of them still ended up with photo researchers and stock agencies when seeking specific subject matter. Consequently, stock agencies did not see Google Image Search as a threat, because it was not a viable option for buyers looking for a very specific combination of image size, content, composition, availability and myriad other factors.
Though the opportunities offered by search engines to harness site traffic are universally recognized, the stock industry’s investment in this area has been limited. Yes, leading stock companies have invested in search-engine advertising and site optimization, but all such activities have been largely aimed at people searching for terms such as “stock photography.” Most stock agencies have kept their image catalogs inaccessible to search-engine robots for fear of ever-increasing online image piracy, preferring to restrict incoming traffic to their Web sites to only those visitors who search for “stock photography” and are willing to pay for it. In turn, this means that people searching for photos of specific subjects through Google Image Search get image results largely from online publications showing licensed images or from Flickr—and very few images that are available for licensing.
For example, a Google image search for “Capitol Hill Washington DC” returns images from Flickr in positions 1 and 7. The only stock image available on the first search-results page is from Alamy at number 16. Anyone who does not know what stock photography is—which is well over half of the world—will highly likely get this image through Flickr.
This has become a very serious issue for traditional stock agencies. Traffic to traditional Web sites is declining due to many factors, from the pathetic state of the economy to the rising popularity of photo-sharing and microstock photography. Agency and individual photographer refusal to make their images more easily accessible via search engines may prevent image piracy, but it is also preventing sales.
And Google’s new Similar Image search is about to shift the general public’s image-search traffic even further away from traditional stock companies.
…and now
Some photographers and agencies have already figured out that search engines and social communities are the way of the future. All of them make their professionally keyworded image collections available to search engines for indexing. Photographers and smaller players also use services such as PhotoShelter’s SEO-optimized Web sites and ImageSpan’s LicenseStream, both of which help the general public find images and conduct transactions outside of the traditional buyer-agency relationship.
Everything points to a continuous increase in the general public’s demand for images. Google’s recent launches of search by color and for similar images show that Internet leaders see online imagery as a growth area worthy of financial investment. Image-licensing transaction volumes keep growing, but the traditional-agency share of both transaction numbers and revenues is shrinking. The unavoidable conclusion is that new, non-traditional buyers are responsible for all transactional growth.
Most traditional shooters and agencies have yet to figure out how to put their content in front of this new audience. Worse yet, many traditionals do not even want to consider it, believing that selling to the general consumer necessarily equals bottom-barrel pricing, devaluation of photography and the death of all things they hold dear.
As evidenced by the recent demises of so many, including a top-three U.S. industry player, traditional agencies are becoming less and less relevant in a market where only a small portion of transactions is coming from the traditional image buyer—a trend that shows no signs of abating. Traditional agencies and the stock photographers they represent are competing for a shrinking pool of dollars.
Google is making it increasingly easier for every small or non-traditional stock outlet—Internet-savvy solo photographers, small studios, image-sharing Web sites and microstock businesses—to put their images in front of an eager pool of buyers. Google’s newest product is based on image-recognition technology and thus demotes the importance of keywords, which have been the stock agency’s greatest asset. As Google continues to improve its image-search engine, traffic will move increasingly toward the “right images”—those best indexed in the public domain—and away from traditional stock agencies who keep their inventories to themselves.