PhotoShelter Collection shuts down after one year of business
PhotoShelter announced today that it will close down the PhotoShelter Collection, its stock service that the budding company had hoped would make revolutionary steps in the microstock photography sales industry, after just a year in business.
“We knew that sales would be challenging, but we honestly underestimated the complexity of sale,” CEO Allen Murabayashi’s stated in a corporate blog posted today. “Licensing photography isn’t like selling a widget on eBay. It’s intellectual property fraught with clearance issues.”
In an official release announcing the closure, the company said that despite initial skepticism, it was impressed with photography quality and had received good feedback about the service, which they had hoped would give a large number of photographers access to stock photography money while still receiving a fair deal—photographers who sold photos through the PhotoShelter Collection kept 70 percent of the profit. Other large stock sites pay far less; istockphoto.com, one of the largest internet-based microstock photography sites, gives photographers just 20 percent of sales revenue they earn.
Still, PhotoShelter’s service simply wasn’t lucrative enough, quick enough.
“Buyers welcomed the Collection as a much needed alternative - whether they liked the access to content never before seen, or simply because they appreciated our approach to better treatment for photographers,” the organization said in an official statement. “Our unique approach, however, was insufficient to change buyer behavior on a grand scale and generate revenues quickly enough to satisfy our goals for this product line. Hence, our decision is to close the Collection.”
The collection will fully shut down effective Oct. 10. Leading up to that date, the company has announced rolling deadlines for final offerings of its services: No new photographers can sign up starting today, forums will be taken down on Sept. 12, the front end of the site will be removed on Oct. 10, and all accounting pages associated with the site will come down Nov. 10.
Comments written in response to Murabayashi’s blog were alternately scathing and supportive.
“For those of us who are professionals this NOT a game. Receiving email announcements like this out of the blue is NOT fun, especially when you’re devoted hundreds of hours of your time to the, now failed, enterprise,” wrote a reader who identified himself as “Terry Smith Images.” “The rest of the stock industry is doing just fine. Despite the CEO’s insistence, the collection failed due to the people running it, not because of the industry.”
“Your overall attitude, innovative approach, candor, openness of information with the surveys and fairness to the photographer were really, really commendable and something we looked up to at Cutcaster,” wrote competitor John Griffin.
Murabayashi noted in his blog that Getty Images powerful hold on much of the world of stock photography has left little room for startups like his to edge in.
“The use of stock imagery isn’t growing fast enough to create a displacement opportunity, and Getty is far too aggressive (and smart) to allow secondary players to displace them in any fashion,” Murabayashi wrote.
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