Photographer-owned companies purchase bankrupt SuperStock
Three private photography companies–Rubberball, Glow Images and Blend Images–have won an auction for the bankrupt stock agency SuperStock, Blend CEO Rick Becker-Leckrone confirmed this week.
SuperStock was owned by the public media company a21, which announced its bankruptcy Dec. 4. SuperStock will now become a private company, Becker-Leckrone said, and the three buyers will remain separate and also private. However, they’ll be working closely together and have come up with an industry-appropriate double-entendre for their collaborative effort: RGB.
Becker-Leckrone said Blend spearheaded the “due diligence” end of the RGB venture and that the three companies, all of which are owned by photographers, frequently compare notes and “have always been good friends for many years.”
RGB’s winning bid was for more than $2.8 million.
“When we knew that SuperStock was under distress, we thought there might be an opportunity there to be able to work with a wider group of photographers and be able to license content in areas that we really haven’t been in before,” Becker-Leckrone said. “SuperStock licenses a lot of content in the rights-managed base and our three agencies really have a lot of experience in the royalty-free space, so it just seemed like a good match.”
He also mentioned that Rubberball’s stock video content will also be thrown into the mix.
Lanny Ziering, Blend’s Director of Business Development, will be named SuperStock’s CEO. Becker Leckrone said that would be the only direct “cross pollination” between the companies and SuperStock at this point, although Blend, Glow and Rubberball will all have seats on SuperStock’s board of directors.
One of the first issues the new alliance will address is how much they’ll be able to pay photographers who were owed money when SuperStock tanked. Becker-Leckrone said money has been set aside, but said it would require a much closer look at the company’s finances before determining precisely how much they’d be able to offer each photographer.
“Now SuperStock is actually owned by photographers, and our alignment has clearly always been and will always be with the creative community, so we’re going to see what we can come up with,” Becker-Leckrone said. “I guess our message is going to be, ‘Bear with us, we have empathy, we’re photographers too.’ I personally shoot for all the major agencies and so I…I get it.”
Becker-Leckrone theorized that three major factors led to SuperStock’s downfall: Debt, the cost of running a public company, and other sagging a21 properties leeching from SuperStock’s profits.
“As a public company, they had brought in investors who had bought shares in a21 and they just simply accumulated too much debt,” Becker-Leckrone said. “When notes started coming payable, there just wasn’t enough cash in the kitty to make some of those payments.”
He said that by making SuperStock private, they’ll eliminate red tape and can drastically reduce overhead costs and some staffing requirements. While he said there would be some downsizing, Becker-Leckrone said they’d try to keep the majority of SuperStocks’ current employee base on board.
Another issue is that of SuperStock’s enormous office in Jacksonville, Fla., which they obtained when SuperStock was more involved in producing original content rather than simply licensing it.
“They’ve managed to sublease some of it, but the lease per square foot is really kind of out of whack with the revenues that they’re generating,” Becker-Leckrone said. “What we’re looking to do is find a nice creative space–more reasonably priced–in the Jacksonville area, and hopefully close to where SuperStock is now for the convenience of the employees.”
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