Interesting developments today!

Getty Images announced that they purchased stock photo micropayment site istockphoto.com for $50 million. This purchase suggests that Getty Images has validated what we at Jupiterimages have been stating for two years: the great growth in the image market is going to reside with image buyers with limited budgets. These buyers will buy lots of images, but do not want to pay huge prices. Getty Images' business was built on the idea of charging through the nose for images. Now times are changing due to Web marketing and a variety of other busines pressures.

Jupiterimages recognized this trend dating back to 2003 and accordingly has purchased many prize properties that appeal to the budget conscious image buyer. I have been calling this trend the "Wal-Martizing" of the commercial image marketplace. Few believed me, but now we have the Getty validation of the importance of this "new" marketplace.

This trend does not mean that the so-called "higher end" of the image marketplace is dead. On the contrary, the high-end buyer is here to stay. However the big growth in the next 10 years will be on the budget side of the image marketplace.

Our Photos.com competes quite effectively with istockphoto. We bought photos.com in 2003, and it continues to grow smartly. It too offers (through its subscription plans) photos for as little as $1 apiece. The major difference between the two services is that photos.com has photos that are shot by professionals whereas istockphoto's images are shot by amateurs and fledgling professionals. The other difference is that photos.com owns its own photos and thus has far greater operating margins than a micropayment site.

Our recent investment for nearly 50% of Haap Media and its two Web sites: stockxpert.com and stock.xchng illustrated our savvy in understanding the value of the potential growth of stock photo micropayment type operations such as istockphoto. We believe that stockxpert.com is a significant player in the micropayment arena and that stockx.chng is one of the largest image community sites in the world (check out the Google rankings on both of these fine properties).

In the meantime Jupiterimages has continued to build and to aggressively compete at the higher end of the image market -- one in which our market share is growing. We recently added 30 additional sales people from across the USA -- many of these individuals have joined us from image companies that are well known in the commercial arena. These seasoned professionals joined Jupiterimages because they recognize that the better growth opportunity in the high end market place is now with Jupiterimages.

My final comment today is that we served Getty Images today with a demand letter that it stop selling images from our recently purchased French company Stock Image (which includes Pixland). I might be wrong, but I doubt anyone in the image business has ever told Getty Images to stop selling a brand(s)? Many readers of this post know that Getty Images has made lots of news over the previous 10 months telling Jupiterimages that it would no longer distribute images owned by Jupiterimages' brands. Now the tables have been turned.

Jupiterimages is now self-sufficient. It does not need any involvement with Getty Images to be successful. Jupiterimages now has its own powerful worldwide distribution arm to go along with a network of over 220 other distributors.

We look forward to working with anyone in the image business that wants a fair and mutually beneficial business arrangement. In the meantime we continue to work hard at keeping the lead as the largest owner of digitized images of all types in the world.