The article says that Getty is still deriving most of their revenue from generic stock photos? That was quite surprising to me, since Wikimedia Commons among other sites provides plenty of such images under "free content" licenses (including images in the public domain). Perhaps the typical downstream reuser is unwilling to resort to these for some reason?
Stock imagery is an art in its own right. Every newbie photographer thinks they can do stock images, but they can't.
Knowing what people want is key, along with the ability to perfectly execute it. For example "woman in blue dress sitting under fall tree looking at moon" might convey some of of commercial message that is used to sell everything from ebook readers to insurance and nets the photographer a fortune in licensing or royalties, but on the the other hand maybe nobody is interested in it, and if you cannot execute it perfectly, nobody will accept it into their catalog.
Why this Hanukkah photo is better than others, I don't know, but Shutterstock is featuring it right now so I guess it sells well and the colors and tones capture a popular trend:
> Why this Hanukkah photo is better than others, I don't know, but Shutterstock is featuring it right now so I guess it sells well and the colors and tones capture a popular trend:
It perfectly captures an advertisement aesthetic.
When I visited your link, I spent several seconds thinking the page hadn't loaded properly. I could see the caption, but not the image.
Then I realized that the image was in fact there, but my eyes were skipping over it in the exact same way I ignore banner ads.
Most of those images still require visible attribution, which is a non-starter for most commercial use. Advertisers don't want a big "image from flickr user foobar" right on top of the photo in their glossy magazine ad.
Yes, publicity rights will always be messy. But there's a ton of free content that doesn't involve depicting actual living humans, where those would be an issue.
Anything free is going to ding your search ranking - just reverse image-search any image from Unsplash and you'll find thousands of content-farm clickbait adware using the same image. If your revenue is dependent on search ranking, that can get expensive really fast.
Okay, take the free image and apply some arbitrary "filters" just to make it harder to programmatically match. You've still paid $0, vs. the hundreds of dollars that Getty asks for.
