The PhotoShelter Collection:
dead in the grass
PhotoShelter announced plans to shut down The PhotoShelter Collection, a stock photography marketplace geared toward casual photographers.
The premise of the Collection, which launched last year, was to give ordinary people an opportunity to license and monetize their personal photos. As a result, stock photo buyers could access more candid and realistic photographs while circumventing the high costs of iStock or Getty, and digital camera mavens could turn hobbies into low-overhead side businesses.
Through the Collection, image buyers could also place requests, which photographers could fulfill at leisure.
Speaking on behalf of the company, Theresa Freeman of PR firm Matter Communications expressed PhotoShelter's intent to focus on its personal archives business.
The company is "financially solid," but the Collection simply wasn't "bringing in the revenues hoped for," she said.
CEO Allen Murabayashi of PhotoShelter corroborated her statement in a blog post:
Even though we are in the midst of our best month ever of sales, we believe that the growth trend isn't step [sic] enough to sustain the stock photography business in the long term.
So we are exiting the stock photography marketplace, and getting back to our roots with the Personal Archive, which still gives individual photographers the tools to market and license their images themselves. That business is doing quite nicely, and we look forward to continuing to support photographers and photography.
Murabayashi also argued that "despite the naysayers, the photography [available on the Collection] was actually quite good," but lamented that a "crowd-source model for stock will likely never work."
PhotoShelter's Personal Archive — the business upon which it plans to focus — enables users to upload and store images.
As of September 11, image buyers will no longer be permitted to download images. The PhotoShelter Collection officially shuts down on October 10. Read the implications for existing Collection photographers and image buyers.
All credit lines will be closed once outstanding invoices are collected.
