How the free community Web site is successfully commercialized

The stock photography refers to the inventory type, which can be authorized to the client to use the image database. Many publishers, magazines, advertising agents, film producers, web designers, visual artists, interior designers, and creative departments of large companies use the stock photography (below) to complete the idea. Using the stock photography saves time and money relative to hiring photographers, but lacks a little control over creativity.

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Nisan Gabbay: I am pleased to announce that this week's case study was first completed by a reader from startup review Kempton Lam. Kempton is a management consultant who specializes in helping start-ups. For more information, see Kempton Background and blog. Kempton followed the same process as I created these case studies, and I acted as an editor to ensure that the format of the article was the same as the startup review format. If you also want to be a guest author of startup review, please contact me.

Why do you want to introduce (IStockphoto) in startup review?

iStockPhoto is both an online community for photographers and a source of high quality, low-cost inventory pictures. As of October 2006, iStockPhoto's inventory photos included about 1.1 million of the pictures provided by more than 23,000 photographers. In 2006, iStockPhoto was expected to sell 1 million to 1.2 million of its photo licenses from the library, ranging from 1 to 40 dollars per unit. iStockPhoto's success opened a new market for inventory pictures, mainly for customers who could not afford to buy from traditional high-priced images like Getty Images and Corbis. Its success attracted the attention of Getty Images, who bought iStockPhoto in February 2006 with $50 million in cash.

Interviewed by: Bruce Livingstone,istockphoto's founder and incumbent Ceo;patrick Lor,istockphoto's first employee and former president; Paul Connolly, An independent consultant specializing in digital media and stock picture markets. Especially thanks to iStockPhoto's Kara Udziela and Yvonne Beyer, they helped create this case study.

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Key success Factors

Provide a free alternative to previous high-priced services

iStockPhoto a "micro-stock picture" market by providing a very low price but high quality inventory picture. iStockPhoto's innovation is that all of its images (initially initiated) are royalty-free and easily downloaded over the Internet. In 2000, high quality pictures free license to use in the stock picture market is a change in the rules of the game move. Through iStockPhoto, those from the novice to the half professional photographer's pictures, the first time to reach a huge market. iStockPhoto has also made it possible to drastically reduce the cost of customers who cannot afford traditional stock pictures (graphic designers, small businesses, non-profit organizations, etc.).

When iStockPhoto became popular, the site's host and bandwidth costs increased, forcing Bruce to face a decision on how to pay the 10000-dollar bill each month. Bruce's public discussion in the istockphoto community eventually allowed the community to decide on an acceptable solution. In February 2002, the community decided to charge 25 cents per picture to cover the maintenance costs of the site, 20% of which were owned by the photographer.