22 Feb 2009 UGCX in Review

UGCX was amazing! The photography track was full of amazing speakers from all parts of the industry who each presented fascinating and useful information. I won’t go into the detail of each session, but here’s a sample of what was said, announced and presented.

News Breaks

Corbis made a major announcement just days before the conference. They’re moving SnapVillage content and buyers over to their new Veer Marketplace where microstock photos will be available alongside traditional and midstock content. SnapVillage will be phased out completely by the end of the year. Stephen Shankland, Daryl Lang and Paul Melcher all had interesting thoughts.

iStockphoto announced the launch of iStockaudio during the opening keynote by Bruce Livingstone and Kelly Thompson.

Who Was There?

In addition to the amazing speaker roster I detailed here, there were a few surprises and new friends among the attendees who I’d like to thank and shout out:

PACA‘s Executive Director, Cathy Aron. Gustavo Baez of Glow Images. BrightQube‘s CEO, Lee Corkran. Shannon Fagan, photographer and SAA President. Ozmo‘s Robert Gaggin. Steve Gibson from Microstock Insider. Sean Locke of sjlocke fame. PhotoShop Stock guru John Lund. Trevor Lush. Michael Masterson representing ASPP. Shalom Ormsby. Trinette Reed and Chris Gramly from Plush Studios. Yis Tigay of ImageRevolver. Robert Walters, CEO of PantherMedia. Nicole Young aka nicolesy, photographer and blogger.

With so much of the industry represented we took the opportunity to gather everyone together for a two-hour roundtable discussion of the state of the stock photo industry on the Monday night.   As you can imagine, the discussions were incredible, sometimes heated, but generally very productive in promoting understanding between microstock and the traditional macrostock market. And what a rush to be among so many greats of the industry.

Press Coverage

There was a lot of coverage of the event and fortunately for us, much of it was photography related. Some even

Stephen Shankland, who covers the digital photography market for CNET News was at the event and reported on the iStockaudio announcement with additional gems from the iStockphoto keynote. David Needle at InternetNews also covered the keynote in detail.

Brian Shields from KRON4 interviewed Fotolia’s Chad Bridwell, myself, and traditional stock photographer Chris Gramly among others from the event.

Rasmus Rasmussen reflected on what he learned at UGCX and Rahul Pathak made his impressions clear on the LookStat blog.

There was quite a few people tweeting live from UGCX as well as the official @UGCX account itself. Additionally, there’s a collection of press coverage on the UGCX website itself.

Photos of the event are being collected in the UGCX Flickr group, seen in this slideshow:

Quotable

Here’s some of the more interesting quotes from the event I’ve managed to gather:

Kelly Thompson: “Quantity of images has never been a problem in microstock”.

iStockphoto keynote introduction: “[on iStock] a file is downloaded every single second”.

Bruce Livingstone: ‘It’s easier to build a business with community if you are part of that community

James West: “It’s the ‘wild west’ of stock photography. And that’s not a reference to myself!”

Jack Hollingsworth: “I never said the industry was dead. I said it was broken.”

Yuri Arcurs: “My RPI in microstock has dropped from $8 to $6 per month.”

Rasmus Rasmussen: “Where was I going with this? Can you repeat the question, please?”

Andres Rodriguez: “The gap between professionals and hobbyists in microstock is getting bigger every day.”

The Next One

UGCX is moving to Boston New York in October. Keep an eye on the UGCX website for details.