It’s 11:30 p.m.on the night before an “everything riding on it” presentation. The “do or die” project has your eyes transfixed on the computer screen, tracking the disparate elements of a brochure, a Web site, and a PowerPoint presentation. The text is down on the page, but the visual content is still indicated by empty blocks marked FPO – “for position only.” Your challenge: add some very powerful images, photos and illustrations, at the right price and just in time to bring the whole media show to life. It is times like these that the world has discovered the cursor arrow points to the Northwest…Seattle, Washington.
A decade ago, few would have imagined that Seattle would become the capitol of stock photography and digital images for download, representing such world-class portfolios as The Bettman Archives, The Ansel Adams Collection, Hutton Getty Images, The Stock Market, National Geographic, and others. Before the first Photodisc (a Getty brand) CD-ROM was released, Bill Gates had already begun negotiating the digital rights for some of the world’s most famous artwork. Gate’s outlook, which some would call the most visionary of his career, created the framework for the company we know today as Corbis.
In a rare interview, we hooked up with Corbis CEO/President Steve Davis, who just may be the most important person in Washington technology you’ve never heard of.” Steve is also President of The Washington Technology Alliance, a former human rights crusader, and an intellectual property attorney. At Corbis, Davis shares the title of CEO/President with colleague Anthony Rojas, each focusing on different areas of the company.
Seattle24x7: When Bill Gates founded Corbis, his fascination with collecting digital art was well known. How much of an influence does Bill have on the company’s operations?
Davis: The company was founded on his vision. Today, Bill’s role is that of a board director since he is the primary investor. Bill’s personal art collection is his own. He has asked us to look at his house as a sort of testing bed for the future, so we have a license agreement with the Gates as a private client.
Seattle24x7: Where is Corbis today in terms of revenue and profitability?
Davis: We were founded in 1989, and were in R&D for the first 4-5 years. As we’ve grown, there has been a heavy up-front investment in acquisitions and the technology for digitizing images. Therefore, we are not yet profitable at this point.
Seattle24x7: What are your projections for growth?
Davis: We’re comfortable that we’ll get to breakeven next year based upon some fairly prudent calculations. We have about 1300 employees right now worldwide and our projected 2001 revenues are $170 million. That includes a 20% growth projection over global 2000.
Seattle24x7: Corbis appears to be organized around three areas: Professional, Consumer and Business Communication.
Davis: Right. We have some incubation activity like documentaries and our footage relationships but the primary three are: the creative professional market — that’s everything from e-media broadcasters, book publishers, advertisers, and corporate communication, where our customers are professional art buyers or photo editors Then Business Communications and Consumer.
Seattle24x7: Your Business Communicator Group has an impressive new Web site: BizPresenter.com. It’s a kind of PowerPoint heaven, a “one stop shop” for photographs, illustration, design templates and advice on puting it all together.
Davis: Yes, this part of the business, including the BizPresenter.com Web site, is directed at the enterprise market, not creative professionals but the marketing, sales or PR staff. A subgroup of this category is the small office/home office (SOHO) market. We’ve just announced new keyword search capabilities for BizPresenter.
While this area may never be as huge as the creative professional market, it is, nonetheless, a very healthy business. It’s also a pure E-commerce business. It’s all digital. which means it’s convenient, and it also has a good cost model.
Seattle24x7: You’re one of the few stock photo leaders to offer gifts and frames for prints with the customer’s favorite images. Who are the buyers at the Consumer end of the business?
Davis: Our Consumer business is for those people who are buying images at home for personal use only. If you want images for wall art, for a screensaver, or for your X-mass letter or book report. With the advent of multimedia authoring software in the home digital publishing as well as high quality color printers, a new consumer demand has been created across the broad mass market. This is a very different market in that people are spending their leisure money and time as opposed to people purchasing for business out of a company budget.
Seattle24x7: There has been enormous consolidation in the stock photo industry, out of which have emerged two global leaders: Corbis and Getty. Is this the relative market share we’ll see for some time to come and do you think that this is healthy competition in terms of setting price in the marketplace?
Davis: There’s good, healthy competition between Getty and Corbis. At the same time, both of us combined represent than less than 30-40% of the market.There are a lot of competitors still out there. The fact that we’re both in growth suggests that our pricing structure is not anti-competitive either.
Seattle24x7: How would you compare the two companies?
Davis: We are a very different strategic company than Getty. Corbis is very diverse in the kind of collections it represents. We deliberately have not bought big companies, and it has not been for lack of capital availability. We’ve wanted to build an architecture and a platform that covers the broad range of material, celebrity, commercial, historical, fine art, royalty-free, photojournalism etc. We’re taking a very different approach in trying to create a single integrated approach. We know from our early results that it is benefiting clients a great deal.
Seattle24x7: Some analysts in the industry have talked about a critical mass of images. Is there a finite amount of material that a stock company can ultimately catalogue and market? There are only so many landscapes, for example.
Davis: There is a finite amount of material at some point that you can reasonably market. There’s no question. And I think one of Getty’s challenges, is that they’ve aggregated so much of certain kinds of material that they’re trying to sort out how do we differentiate one from the other.
Seattle24x7: In the creative area, there has always been a supposition that royalty-free product would not canabalize stock image sales? Yet there appears to be a lot of crossover. What is your view?
Davis: In my view, “royalty-free” is a bad term. It’s not a bad business, and I understand the marketing strategy behind using it, but in and of itself, the term has done as much damage as good. The images are neither royalty-free from the photographer’s perspective, who get paid and get royalties, and it’s also not royalty-free for the client. As an intellectual property lawyer I can tell you it’s a “one-time flat fee” royalty. Our approach is to present both areas as complementary. We were the first site to put the entire portfolio under one brand and on the same site.
Seattle24x7: Corbis has essentially made stock photography a systems-integrated business?
Davis: Yes, absolutely, we’re trying to retool the traditional stock image model in two ways. Both providing a wholly integrated approach where we’ve taken major leadership in the industry, and then secondly, we’re doing it with an all-digital workflow. And then we can go into new markets where we can take the same architecture, technology and content and leverage them in new markets. so we’ve enveloped the consumer market activity, and the newcomer with Bizpresenter.com.
Seattle24x7: Thanks for the update, Steve.
Larry Sivitz is the Managing Editor of Seattle24x7.
=========================================== Corbis
15395 SE 30th Place, Suite 300
Bellevue, WA 98007
Phone: (425) 641-4505
(425) 957-9253
URL: www.corbis.com
Corbis was founded in 1989. It is a privately held company whcih owns the digital rights to 65 million images.
Major Products and Services
Corbis Professional Licensing
The professional licensing division provides creative professionals with the industry’s only one-stop shopping service for traditionally licensed and royalty-free images.
Corbis Consumer
The consumer division is the market leader in bringing fine art and photography to consumer and business audiences through the Internet. Here consumers can frame their favorite image, license a digital image for their personal use, create greeting cards and calendars or send photo-realistic e-cards making Corbis The Place for Pictures on the InternetTM for all audiences.
Corbis Business Communicator
Targeted to business people who need images to create compelling Power Point presentations, web sites and some collateral material; but who are limited by design expertise, time and budget, this is the newest offering from Corbis.
Sales & Revenues
$170 million in projected revenues for 2001
Projected 20% growth in 2001.
16% growth in 2000, but 35-40% growth excluding our editorial business
Committed to profitability by end of 2001
Funding
Corbis has a single, sole investor. This is founder Bill Gates.
Infrastructure
1,293 employees
Some very limited hiring is occurring at Corbis.
Offices in Seattle, LA, NYC, London, Paris and Hong Kong. An office in Malaysia is opening in 2001.
