Crowdsourcing in Photography

A camera in every hand - and an easy space to upload. The story of iStockPhoto

Daniella Zalcman interviews Bruce Livingstone, iStockPhoto CEO and Founder

Since 1920, stock photography agencies like Getty Images and Corbis have built an industry out of providing images to advertisers and designers for hundreds of dollars a photo. But with the rise of crowdsourcing and the growth of online image sharing came iStockPhoto; and the microstock house—sites that sold member-generated images for as little as a dollar each—was born. iStock’s founder and CEO, Bruce Livingstone, sat down with me to share some of his thoughts on the company’s beginnings, its subsequent acquisition by Getty Images, and the future of stock photography.

Daniella Zalcman: What’s the story of iStockPhoto?

Bruce Livingstone: It started in 1994 when I was working at a place called Image Club Graphics. They were the first company to put clip art on CD-ROMs and market them by catalogue, and I used to enter credit cards numbers manually to process orders. I was going to university at the time and majoring in theology, and this was my afternoon job. When the company got better technology, my job was eventually phased out. Thank god, or I’d probably still be there.

Anyway, so they asked me to come up with a job for myself, so I built this Web site where you could buy fonts and clip art online. I showed it to them and they didn’t think it was going to work. I remember I told them that this was going to be the future of their business, and they laughed. So I quit.

In 2000 I went and got a business together. I had the money and the idea but I had no products to sell, so I started teaching myself how to be a photographer. One summer I took about 2000 photographs and decided to start giving them away.

Q: What made you decide that there was a market for microstock?

A: At the time, people were coming up with words like e-business and i-business and all those cheesy naming conventions, so I decided on iStockPhoto, bought the name for $25 from Network Solutions, and started giving away these photographs. In 3 months, I had people all over the world saying they wanted to share their photographs as well. My intention was to get people to start using the site and to get used to the idea of sharing work and engaging in conversation with people all over the world

In late 2000, iStockPhoto got our first hosting bill for $10,000. We realized we were kind of screwed and were going to have to either shut it down or start charging something. It was so easy—I asked the community (which at the time was about 500 people strong) if they were okay with that, and everyone agreed. We worked out the budget, and it came out to around 25 cents a photo, so that’s where we started.

Q: What do you think motivates your contributors? Is it money or some other incentive?

A: The monetary rewards are an added bonus, but I don’t think they’re everything for everyone. I think our core group of photographers, our 2000 exclusives [photographers with portfolios exclusive to iStockPhoto], are motivated by the reward of being part of an elite club that engages in creative discussion nonstop. And sometimes you get to see your work used somewhere—on television, on billboards … and to me that’s even greater reward than the money.

Q: How is being an iStock photographer different from being a Getty photographer?

A: I don’t know that it is. I actually think that even within the more traditional companies like Getty, the use of the word "professional" is being dropped, because it’s really difficult to define "professional” in a world where really anyone can take a decent picture. And you take a look at a photographer like Lise Gagne who’s sold 500,000 photos, and if she’s not professional then I don’t know who is. I wouldn’t be surprised if she hasn’t sold more photos than anyone on the planet.

Q: What did it mean for you to sell iStockPhoto to Getty Images? How will that change iStock’s future and, perhaps more important, how will it change Getty’s future?

A: All of business is about mergers and acquisitions, really. All our competitors are looking to get bought by someone, and I think this year you’re going to see 25 to 50 percent of them get bought or disappear.

When I first considered joining forces with Getty, we were at the point where we wanted to grow internationally and we needed a whole bunch of cash to do it. I met with Jonathan [Klein, the CEO] and it seems like we were cut from the same jib and had the same ideas about the future. He had a great deal of respect for what we’ve done. And he understood we were pioneering this innovation that Getty had never seen before. He said that acquiring iStockPhoto was the most important thing to happen to photography since the invention of royalty-free.

Q: On a more general note, what do you think the next phase of crowdsourcing will look like? Have we hit its true potential?

A: I think not. I mean, I think there are some really interesting things going on when you look at YouTube, for example, but no one with a serious brand will advertise there because they don’t want to be associated with copyright infringement. I think the monetization aspect of crowdsourcing has just started.

As far as making any serious money in crowdsourcing, iStock is the formative experience as a business. It’s a model that truly works and it’s not based in advertising. We pay royalties directly to people based on their work.

Q: Do you really think there's wisdom in crowds?

A: iStock is different than most crowds. You look at people on MySpace, for instance, and they’re considered a crowdsourced community. But really, they’re not connected by anything other than being on the same Web site. Whereas you look at iStock, and it’s truly a microcosm where everyone’s connected by the same passion and the same system, and it’s stronger because of that.

There’s wisdom in a community, but there isn’t wisdom in a crowd. Crowds are connected by information and communities are connected by shared passion.

Q: In the world of crowdsourcing, most business is conducted over the Web. How well do you know your crowd, personally?

A: The events let me really get to know people well, sixty to a hundred at a time. I certainly don’t know every photographer, but I talk to everybody who wants to strike up a conversation. If somebody in the office asks me, "Do you know whose picture this is?" I can say "Yeah, oh, y’know, it’s so-and-so." I suffer from a combination of photographic memory and being a social butterfly. Also, I don’t remember people’s real names, just their member names.

Q: You’ve said in past interviews, “Change at the right speed for the right reasons.” How has iStock adhered to that?

A: For iStock what that means is that we have some really big plans, but if we carried them all out today it would seem really foreign to people. So we usually try to prepare people emotionally for what’s to come and we launch things a little bit at a time. In the early days we used to completely redesign the site and move things around and people would be like "Oh, this is horrible!" and we’d have to give them a few months to catch up and get used to it. Now our whole structure is to make very small changes—design, aesthetic, user interface changes, sometimes business changes—and those have to be done with a lot of care and a lot of thought. We can’t do everything at once or we’d never get anywhere.

My philosophy is, go ahead—throw a brick in the air and see what happens. Usually it ends up landing on someone’s windshield, but hey, you can repair it. And at least you’re throwing something in the air and trying something new. That’s Web 2.0