Getty Up

This note from Getty is floating around the Internet and many of the reasons given seem valid:

There has never been such exponential growth in demand for imagery. This is a good thing. More and more imagery is needed by customers for their projects. This is excellent news. Also, customers' time and budget constraints are greater than ever. Customers need to find the broadest and deepest collections of imagery for all their communications more quickly, more simply and at appropriate price points. This is particularly the case for online usages where volumes are enormous and time constraints are acute.

As the global leader in the imagery industry, we recognize our responsibility to respond to these facts in a way that is in the best interests of photographers and customers.

Most of the growth in imagery demand today lies in online usage. How do we know? We are the major participant in every part of the market, from micropayment to assignment photography, and everything in between.

We know that in the second quarter of 2007, iStockphoto, the inventor and leader in microstock, licensed 4.25 million images - the overwhelming majority of these at a very low resolution, indicating web use. For the same period, Getty Images' web-use licenses for rights-ready and rights-managed imagery were less than 1 percent of iStockphoto's volume.

We ask, why are the best collections of imagery in the world not attracting online buyers? The answer is simple. For online usages where the volumes are very high and customers are frequently updating their communications on a daily basis, the requirements are speed, simplicity, appropriate pricing and imagery that does the trick.

Traditional rights-managed licensing does not meet these requirements and so these collections are missing a huge opportunity.Our new web-resolution product was created to address this opportunity. Quite simply, you - our photographers - were missing the exponential growth of the online market.

Our new product opens this opportunity to you by providing your imagery quickly, with greater simplicity, at a file size that is perfect for this new market and at an appropriate price point.

It is very early days, and we already know that it is working. How? Customers are telling us:“I bought an image today for web use for $49,” said a multimedia editor at a large customer in the broadcast and publishing field. “Getty Images might be trying to get the microstock users to come back to buy licensed photographs. I see it as buyers, such as myself, saying to our marketing dept, ‘Hey, I found a great pic for only $49! Do we have the budget for that?’ and they say, ‘Totally! Go buy it!’ That's exactly what happened to me today, and I feel like a new option for stock has opened for me.”In addition, our UK sales team reports the sale of 102 images at the new web-res price with an online agency customer who'd done little business with us all year, but who came to us rather than go to a micro-payment site for these web uses.

We are not unaware of certain concerns that have been raised. Our interests are aligned. Our new web-resolution product recognizes that rights-managed and rights-ready imagery has always and should always be licensed and priced based on usage.

The new product is just that - a new price for a new usage at a newly created file size. The new file size, which is half the size of the smallest size previously available at Getty Images, protects the value of your imagery, as well as the copyright, by making it impossible for these images to be used in any other way than online.

Customers will also want this imagery for use across other mediums, and will therefore require different licenses at higher prices, and of course, at larger file sizes. Furthermore, we will continue to protect copyright and intellectual property through our various programs to find unauthorized uses of our imagery, and to bring them into compliance.

In listening carefully to feedback from photographers, we have decided to reduce the duration of rights-ready and rights-managed web-resolution licenses to 3 months.

We believe that this serves the interests of both photographers and customers and are grateful to photographers for your assistance in improving the product.

Getty Images has introduced many new products, services and licensing models since its inception more than a decade ago. We have worked together with photographers in the interest of all participants in the industry.

We thank you for trusting us with your talent, hard work and creativity. We will continue to do our utmost to repay that trust.

I can't speak as to the veracity of this, but I looks like it came from Getty Images in response to the reaction to their new Internet pricing options.