text: After publishing my report for agencies, I’m now spending more time talking about this part of the business. That has now culminated in a huge opportunity that I’m very excited about. This year I’m hosting three sessions on the program at the PACA International Conference.
  I’ve picked three topics that I feel are at the core of what makes the difference between growth and contraction for stock photo agencies today. They’re aligned for an audience of primarily traditional, non-microstock, agencies. And the content is based in microstock, the area of knowledge where I can add the most value.
  For anyone still not familiar with PACA, they’re a member based association representing stock photo agencies, libraries and distributors. Their annual conference is the highlight of the industry calendar. It’s both a networking mecca and an educational conference where experts from within and beyond the industry share knowledge on topics of the day.
  While focussed on North America, PACA counts most of the world’s bigger stock photo companies among its members. Shutterstock and Dreamstime are also both members, as is iStockphoto parent Getty Images.
  This year the conference is open to photographers and buyers to help broaden the conversations. ASPP, ASMP and other photographer organizations are involved in the program and helping bring in photographers to participate.
  Are your customers telling you they want one thing but buying something else? How do you know? Is there benefit in profiling stock photo customers by numbers – how many are there, how much do they spend, how frequently do they buy, and what do they buy?
  Are you increasing profit with social media, or just increasing brand value, customer satisfaction and other intangible assets? How can you track social media revenue and effectiveness? How do you know if the people you are reaching are potential buyers, and if not, where can you find them? What are the most effective tools and techniques being used by stock photo libraries today.
  Where did all our contributors go? What can a stock photo library do to lower the cost of doing business for contributing photographers? What technologies is everyone else using to reduce, displace or eliminate ingestion costs? What do photographers want, and how do they evaluate where to place their content?
  Tom Kennedy, former Director of Photography for National Geographic and Washington Post Managing Editor of Multimedia, will be speaking about ‘Understanding the Changing Media Landscape’, sponsored by ASMP.
  Gail Mooney, photographer and filmmaker, will talk about the innovative distribution methods she used for her “Opening our Eyes” documentary, sponsored by ASPP.
  Two of the most evident lessons microstock has learned from the traditional agencies are distribution and collections.
  For the first five or so years of microstock there was no distribution. Microstock agency portfolios were silos. Distribution in the traditional market has, for the life of the microstock business model, been a complex web, often described as “everyone distributing everyone”. That distribution is now fully integrated in the microstock market too.