[Foundation-l] 1.6 Billion USD to spare? How about liberation of some pictures

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 22, 2008 8:05 PM, Ben McIlwain <cydeweys at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's no wonder they're trying to sell now, when they think they can
> still get $1.5 billion.  They see the writing on the wall; the
> simultaneous advancements in pro-sumer level digital cameras and growth
> of free content repositories like Flickr* and Wikimedia Commons have
> decimated their once lucrative business.  And it's only going to go
> downhill for them from here.
>
> *Of course, most of Flickr's content does not qualify as free content,
> but even the small percentage that does makes up many millions of
> photographs, more than enough to threaten Getty's business model.

Success is less about the content, and more about *the collection* and
the search. Google made its first zillion billion not because it
controlled a lot of content but because it helped people find a lot of
other people's content.

Getty Images' *collection* is impressively comprehensive for some
classes of use and their search and cataloging is really good.  Today
image search on the internet (or on flickr) stinks compared to
GettyImages' manually classified collection. (i.e. search for 'child
reading a book' 'family with icecream').  And all their images are
available for use (at a price..).

I think this is an area where commons really has something to offer:
Universally editable metadata could make for impressive search power,
and free licensing means all images are available for use (sometimes,
with copyleft works, at the price of freely releasing your own work).

In any case, unless they've had a couple of bad quarters 1.6 billion
sounds like a attractive price given their revenue track record and
standard methods of valuation. Last time I looked it up
[http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-December/035670.html]
they had revenues of >800 million/yr.