February 25, 2008
Well, some people think there is a future in selling stock images and not the advertising space around it. I thought $1.5 billion was a full price for Getty Images and then a US private equity firm pays $2.4 billion for the outstanding stock to go private. The good news for us is that it appears to be a seller’s market for stock media companies which possess great collections. Obviously, the acquirer, Hellman & Friedman, is looking at total industry growth potential and not the existing internals at Getty Images. Still, Getty is the industry leader and it will be interesting what changes the new owners bring. The story by Jemina Kiss from guardian.co.uk
Photo library Getty Images is to be bought by US private equity firm Hellman & Friedman for $2.4bn (£1.2bn).
The offer exceeds the expectations of City analysts, who had predicted the stock photo giant would sell for around $1.5bn.
Jonathan Klein, the Getty Images chief executive, said that the industry expertise of Hellman & Friedman would benefit the company's staff, customers and partners.
"Our board of directors has thoroughly evaluated strategic alternatives for Getty Images and has determined that this outcome is in the best interests of our stockholders as it provides them with superior and certain value," Klein added.
"We are enthusiastic about entering the next phase of Getty Images' evolution by partnering with Hellman & Friedman as we continue to provide innovative offerings to businesses and consumers in a very dynamic digital media environment."
The Hellman & Friedman managing director, Andy Ballard, said the private equity firm will work to "realise the full potential of [Getty's] traditional businesses while furthering the evolution of Getty Images into a global digital media company".
Getty Images has been aggressively acquiring both online and offline rivals and dominates the stock photography market.
More follows…
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February 23, 2008
The magazine WIRED is to technology what ROLLING STONE has become to music; a bit snarky and juvenile with a just "too cool for school" attitude which generally makes both publications unreadable for me. Youthful exuberance is not always sophomoric, but it can be tedious. Still, I try to keep up with what the younger generations are saying and thinking. One story about a videographer with a studio in his station wagon struck me as obtuse. What's new about gathering stock footage on the cheap? We have been doing it for seven years and from places not reachable by car.
The story which did deserve attention was blazoned across the magazine cover "Free!" by Chris Anderson. It put forth the proposition that the new price for many products, especially those currently sold on the internet as applications or as content will in the future be free. We agree. At some point, when there is advertiser support for our content downloads, we will probably make our collections available for free. This is a chicken and egg situation because we must reach a critical mass of advertising before we convert our business model...and once it is done, there is no going back. It's up to the advertisers and maybe you. Your letters might help convince some hesitant ad buyers to make up their minds. Send to : gary@worldclips.TV Subject: Free! Thanks.
February 19, 2008
I was surprised to see www.revver.com sold for so little. A $5 million buyout for a company which had a pretty good business model...better than www.YouTube.com with generally better quality content and less chaos. Their venture capital contributions had exceeded $12 million and I guess investors could not see a light at the end of the tunnel. Google apparently has no immediate need to have YouTube be profitable. Eyeballs do not equal profits until advertising is sold to reach those eyeballs, and I still do not see many paying customers anywhere on the site. How did YouTube merit its buyout price of $1.65 billion? I sold my shares in Google after they announced the acquisition.
That said, Brad Greenspan’s (founder of MySpace) Life Universe has picked up a potentially valuable property in www.revver.com at a bargain basement price. Our selfish interest is that the production values used by the producers who submitted their work to Revver were consistently better than YouTube’s unedited, non-discriminating video landfill. These are the content producers more likely to take the next step to use green screen and stock footage....our future customers at www.WorldClips.TV Good luck Brad in making us revere Revver.
February 12, 2008
The simple answer remains. Direct download all of your royalty-free HDV and NTSC stock footage requirements from www.worldclips.tv
The myriad of questions confronting the stock footage industry and compressing them to byte size will be the point of this newsletter.
I still get calls from aggregators who want to sell my clips for a pitiful percentage. Mix my work with cellphone shots taken from a moving car. No thanks. Who buys from these trash merchants? Certainly no one more than once. The real joke is one of these aggregators sells 20 shit clips on CDs for $600 and someone is buying them. If you see a site that has lots of contributors, you can be certain that you are buying crap. The guy that wanted me to put my stuff on one of these sites called the "Crappy clip". The good stuff, they sift out and rights manage. Videographers, independent business people, this is a bad deal. When they get bought out for millions, you will get nothing.
We get asked at www.worldclips.tv to rep other shooter's work all the time. I tell them to start their own site. It's cheap, I now use www.godaddy.com for my blog and they make it easy and cheap....and they do offer shopping basket functions. Sell DVDs, build your own brand name, but stop feeding these parasites. They are all dead meat anyway when the low end market goes all free, advertiser sponsored or Apple, Adobe or others buy up collections and give them away to sell their lagging consumer editing systems. When they call, tell them you are not interested in a partner, only a buy out price. You risk having your assets in legal limbo in any partnership that goes bad.
Our assets at
www.worldclips.tv
remain easy to buy and download but a bitch to upload. We have thousands of clips on deck waiting, so if you do not see what you need, give us a call at 888-440-2547. We probably have it and can get it to you using our .mac site. Thanks for reading- Gary
