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

[White Cat]

If you want to make a name seems like commons is the best place to advertise
your work if you ask me. Freely license at least some of your work (for
example low resolution versions), and you can sell the others (high
resolution version). This is an avenue we can take. Of course I would prefer
high-quality high-resolution versions but we don't always get what we
prefer.

   - White Cat

On Jan 23, 2008 5:28 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
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