Interview with Bryan Zmijewski, Lucky Oliver
There’s a new player in the online stock photography market: Lucky Oliver. Lucky Oliver offers photographers and illustrators a venue to sell their work while netting royalties of 60% (and sometimes more) on each sale. For customers, it offers afffordable prices, quality images, and a tagging system that improves search results.
Bryan Zmijewski, the “chief instigator” at Lucky Oliver, was nice enough to spend some time talking to us about his company and how the stock photo and wireless picture frame industries may find common opportunities in the future.
Disclosure: Lucky Oliver is a business partner of Frame Media, the sponsor of this website.
What is Lucky Oliver?
Lucky Oliver is a community-based stock photo site. We’re working with photographers and illustrators to help them sell their photos and illustrations to small business, marketers, and consumers.
When did you start the business?
We went live in June 2006 and transitioned the site to a buyer focus in December 2006. We’ve been focusing now on trying to market the site and get our images out there to a larger audience.
What does the name mean?
Like every company, you’ve got a limited pool of domains, and we were looking for something that was very personal and kind of matched our persona of being more conversational. The overall theme of our site is focus on people and education. “Lucky” is the upside of that, finding the good information and the good photos. The “Oliver” is the personal part, just being the average joe looking for information.
A lot of stock photo companies out there already. Why start another?
I’ve been a designer for 10 years and I’ve had a consulting firm that’s helped a number of start-ups and finding good imagery is still very difficult. It’s not a process that’s been figured out.
We figured there’s a lot of opportunity to create something new in this industry. The two parts of that are:
1. Working with a group of people and coming up with a collective vision of what you’re trying to do, it creates a different pool of images.
2. And two, technology wise, we’ve used the [existing] tools for a long period of time and they’ve never been adequate. We have a baseline toolset right now that we’re building off of to keep expanding the service so that designers and small businesses will have more tools to work with. The technology aspect of the site will increasingly be a larger part of what we’re doing.
What are the technology tools you’re using?
Our site is built off Ruby on Rails, a new programming framework. Our idea was we wanted to work with something that was going to be scalable and allow us to quickly iterate and prototype, knowing that we’re going to have a dynamic community. The other thing we’ve done is what we call sticky words, or a tag-based system. Everything has meta data attached to it. One of the things that’s unique in our site is that on every page of images you’re given 28 related images, which is one of the best results sets in the industry right now.
How do images get tagged? Are they tagged by users or do you have staff reviewing them?
Right now, our photographers and illustrators do the tagging and are reviewed by a bouncer team. That bouncer team looks at the data that’s put in there.
We’re going to be releasing a new tool that will help further through technology to limit the errors in some of the tagging. A lot of it’s subjective. It comes down to the curator of the site and what they want tags to represent and mean. So we’re really figuring parts of that out.
Do you see yourself in competition with high-end stock-photo houses like Corbis and Getty or more budget-priced offerings like iStockphoto?
I look at the world as being divided into two different pieces right now. There’s traditional licensing that the Gettys of the world have really dominated over the last five years.
On the far other end of the spectrum is photo sharing. Basically people put up their photos (online) and can easily access them. A lot of them allow Creative Commons licensing, but it’s not enforced and there’s no real contract with the buyer or with a user and the content creator.
The photo-sharing world is dominating as far as the volume of people sharing photos and ideas, but very little money is actually exchanged in that relationship. On the licensing side, it’s a small subgroup – basically catering to a lot of industry and smaller niche players – but they tend to have a greater volume of sales coming from people looking at their images.
We see ourselves as in that middle ground, being able to serve a large audience with imagery. In some ways we’re probably a competitor to other microstock companies, but we feel there’s more to evolve in that business model and try to make it attract a lot more people.
How are you reaching out to this network of photographers and illustrators? How do they find out about you?
In our initial few months, we focused on creating relationships with photographers, how to do things, what we were getting right, what we were getting wrong, and working with them to get images up on the site. After you do that long enough and people start to understand your passion, the word of mouth starts to spread.
Right now, the way we attract photographers is a link at the bottom of our web page. For the most part, it’s word of mouth that encourages other photographers to submit to the site.
How do photographers get compensated for their work being on Lucky Oliver?
Every photographer and illustrator gets a percentage of the sale (of their work). Right now, exclusive photos that are only sold on Lucky Oliver, earn a 60% percent royalty. If you’re a general submitter (submitting a photo that is also available elsewhere), you start off at 30%.
You can gain more royalties based on different programs we have. We have a lot of drives where we ask for specific content and offer the royalty rate based on those submissions.
What do you make of the emerging wireless digital picture frame market?
I think it’s sort of like the beginnings of digital cameras. When they first came out, they sounded like a good idea, but it was kind of cumbersome to get the photos onto your computer and after they were there, there wasn’t a whole lot of software to do anything with them. Now there are so many services, having a digital camera is actually more practical than having a film camera.
I see the digital picture frames as being something similar to that. For the longest time you could get a digital picture frame, but the hassle of trying to do anything with it was just too much to overcome. There were just too many obstacles to make it easy.
I see the space growing out of the usability of the complete system – from purchasing it at the store to installing it to getting in your household or giving it as a present.
Do you see the wireless digital picture frame space as a big market for stock photos?
This is a conversation I’ve had with numerous people, about the general consumer’s ability to understand why they’d want to pay some amount for content. As consumers start to understand that having content from other people is nice, I think they’re going to be willing to pay small sums of money for that.
An example being, if my vacation is in Ireland, and I want to plan all the logistical pieces, it would be nice if I had some inspirational visuals around me to get me excited about my trip. If I’ve never been to Ireland, having those photos would be great. Thinking about it after I come back from my trip, even if I did take 500 photos, there’s always someone who is going to have some inspiring imagery which is going to mix well with my collection of imagery.
So, the fact that you can pull in places you’ve been that you may not have gotten a great shot of with your own personal snapshots I think (makes it) a feasible market. I think there’s going to be a number of people willing to pay for that service.
Is there a different compensation structure for photographers whose work is displayed on frames for photos sold normally?
This is something that we’re looking at, but I think there’s going to be – without overcomplicating licensing … personal use of an image is very different than using it to market a product or service that you’re trying to earn money off of. So in the case of a consumer just using it for their own enjoyment, that’s a different model.
If it’s only a digital image that’s rotating through a bunch of your own (images), I think you have to look at that like a different type of license.
A different type of license in terms of how the consumer buys the image, or how the photographer gets compensated for it?
Both. We look at licensing as a handshake between two entities. In this case, you’ve got one individual who’s a creator and one individual who’s enjoying the content, so that handshake probably needs to address each person’s concerns: getting compensated and having something that’s affordable. Unlike a piece of art that might stick around for ages and ages, this might be something that someone wants for a month or something.
It’s a tricky question because we haven’t worked through how that unfolds. There’s an opportunity, the question is just how does it unfold?
Have you heard from photographers about what they’re thinking about the space?
Right now I think our industry is kind of a hole on the user-generated content side. It’s still very new. I think the opportunities are coming at us left and right. I think a lot of our photographers look to us to weed through the opportunities and try to make some decisions as to where their art might be profitable and make them money.
But you don’t get the sense that there’s a group of really forward-looking photographers out there who are saying this is going to be a big revenue source for us?
No. I haven’t heard one peep from them. I think there’s tons of opportunity, but until you actually see it in action, it can be a little hard (for them to see) how an artist might make money off of it.
How do you envision people will get the content from a Lucky Oliver into their frames? Would it be done by an RSS feed, direct downloads, some other model?
We’re working on ways of distributing our imagery and an API (application program interface) would probably make the most sense, in which we’ve got some easy way to move images from one server to the next.
So you’d envision it being done through an intermediary relationship rather than direct to consumer?
Probably, yeah. Our job is to help foster a great environment for artists and illustrators to submit imagery and help them manage that imagery. Whereas other companies, like Frame Media, are more focused on how to work with the hardware.
Do you see a business application of stock photography and wireless frames?
Sure. If you look at it as not just taking pure stills, but taking designed images that tell a story, you could start looking at billboard-sized things. If you needed anything from hotel lobbies to elevators, anywhere there is a digital screen that needs a refresh of content, it seems like there’s opportunity there.
Do you have a sense of what kinds of photos generate the most downloads on Lucky Oliver?
Right now, we’re so early in the development of the site that collecting the data points and trying to make sense of them is a little difficult. Concepts and people within a shot are usually larger sellers because they tell a story of some sort or convey an idea. Landscapes are also big. I would imagine for a picture frame, landscapes be more viable because people want to see cityscapes, landscapes.
What do you expect from the convergence of wireless frames and stock photos in the next 6 months?
I think it’s going to be a kind of wait and see thing, as we see what kind of things people want from imagery on wireless frames. I think a lot of it, like our business right now, is figuring out what works and doesn’t work. There’s going to have to be some experimentation from sets of images to pick and choose to abstract stuff, or do people want something very literal? I think those are going to have to play out a little bit before you are able to nail any one business structure or model.
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