ImageBrief

» see imagebrief.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Stock photography in 2011 worked one way. You needed a picture of a woman laughing at a salad, you searched a catalog of millions, and you licensed whichever of the existing images was least wrong. ImageBrief inverted it. The buyer wrote a brief with a budget and a deadline attached, the brief went out to the photographer pool, and photographers submitted work against it. If yours was chosen you got paid and the agency got a photo made for the job rather than found near it.

Simon Moss launched it in Sydney in 2011 with Meg Moss and a third co-founder, Kris Sugandhi, and moved the commercial side to New York at the end of 2012. Money followed the idea: a $700,000 round in March 2013, then more, over three million dollars in total from Australian and American investors. The closing note claimed 70,000 creators and 12,500 agencies and brands across 169 countries by the end.

I have no standing in this one. I have never bought a licensed photograph or sold one, and the buyer side of commercial image licensing is a trade I know only as a reader of its obituaries. What made me stop on it is that the structure is familiar from a completely different industry: post a requirement, collect proposals, pick one, pay the winner. Engineers call that a request for quotes.

~ the dossier ~

~ the reverse marketplace ~

When you invite many suppliers to produce work before anyone has agreed to buy it, all of the cost sits with the losers. Jim Pickerell, who covered the stock trade for decades at Selling Stock, wrote it up plainly when the site closed: photographers had found that the hours spent reading briefs and assembling submissions did not return enough to justify the hours. The model only paid for people who already had enormous back catalogs and could answer a brief out of inventory. Everyone else was working on spec.

Pickerell also noticed the briefs themselves degrading in the final year. More of them looked like fishing expeditions, buyers gathering free mockups to show a client rather than genuinely shopping for a license. A marketplace that cannot police that ends up as a supply of unpaid labor with a search box on top.

~ the warning signs ~

Around 2016 the operational tells arrived in the usual order: staff cuts first, then payments to photographers running late and support requests going unanswered for longer. None of it was announced. All of it was visible first to the people who were owed money.

~ one week ~

The closure message on 1 March 2018 thanked everyone and named no cause. The signature read Team ImageBrief, with no founder's name on it. Photographers were given seven days to download their license history and their assets before the servers were wiped, which for anyone who had been submitting steadily since 2012 was a week to retrieve six years of business records.

imagebrief.com still answers today. It redirects to a site called Cadence and Crescendo, which has nothing to do with photography and everything to do with a domain that came up for sale.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »