Joel Miller, Global Director of Content Sales at SmartFrame Technologies, discusses new opportunities in the stock photo industry and describes his role in protecting and monetizing digital image content
What brought you to the position you’re in today?
Fresh out of film school, and after a year working as an assistant film editor, I decided to work for one of the first stock motion agencies, Film Search, which was bought by The Image Bank (and then ten years later, Getty Images).
I spent 12 years running sales divisions for The Image Bank and The Associated Press’s Wide World Photos (now called AP Images). After that, I moved to the vendor side, helping photo agencies monetize image assets through print-on-demand services, and then compliance where I led two of the world’s largest copyright-compliance businesses: PicScout and ImageRights International.
In February of 2020, I joined SmartFrame. Given the company’s focus on both protecting and monetizing images, it felt like a perfect fit.
How did you get involved with SmartFrame?
During my time working for compliance companies, I saw SmartFrame at all the industry conferences and quickly became interested in what it was trying to do.
It made a lot of sense, but I knew it would take some convincing since so many agencies had almost become dependent on copyright infringement and compliance. Once I saw that monetization was part of SmartFrame’s plan, I was excited and came on board.
Describe your role at SmartFrame
SmartFrame’s primary focus is to monetize images through in-image advertising.
There are three pillars to that effort: image owners, publishers, and advertisers. My focus is the first of the three, so I work with photo agencies and content providers to make their images available to publishers as SmartFrame embeds.
My goal is to bring agencies and content providers to this new model so we can increase their overall revenue through in-image advertising. The current model of image licensing will never go away, but how that content is delivered will change.
Delivering it through streamed embeds will not only protect image content from copyright infringement and loss of attribution, but also bring additional revenue through in-image advertising.
What have been the biggest changes to the industry during your career?
The digital age. When I first started in the photo industry, clients either searched for images through catalogs that were sent out multiple times a year, used lightboxes to view chromes that were curated by researchers and shipped, or came in to view chromes on agency lightboxes.
When I worked in the NY Image Bank office, we had a row of ten giant lightboxes that were often filled with clients or company researchers, and we had a traffic division that spent hours a day chasing down chromes from clients that held onto them for too long. The digital age changed all of that!
What are the biggest challenges faced by image libraries and content owners today?
Protecting images and finding new ways to monetize them are probably the biggest industry challenges.
Once an image gets licensed and used by a client, it is no longer ‘protected’ and is lost in the wind without attribution. Anyone can simply drag and drop it to their desktop.
It’s why so many agencies today rely heavily on copyright tracking and compliance companies, depending on, and forecasting for, that revenue.
The real challenge is finding meaningful ways to monetize their images that make it either easier for their clients to use – integrating APIs, for example – or making the image more valuable for their clients, such as by having the image do more with CTAs, ad revenue, and the generation of data and analytics.
What are the biggest opportunities?
While the nature of the online ecosystem has presented problems for the industry, this freedom to easily view, share, and repurpose images has also opened up huge opportunities.
Image libraries are currently spending a large amount of time and resources trying to discover illegal use of their images, which can often feel like fighting a losing battle.
Instead of working against this free-sharing culture, it’s now possible to work with it, and even make money out of it. By streaming images rather than using easy-to-steal formats like JPEGs or PNGs, stock libraries can better protect their assets while making money from in-image advertising.
Under this ‘get-paid-as-you-go’ model, the more views an image gets, the more revenue it generates. This means that what has historically been the scourge of the industry becomes its biggest generator of income.
What does the future of the industry look like to you?
The digital age has brought with it challenges for the stock industry, but I believe the potential opportunities outweigh the negatives.
Image streaming offers a new monetization model for stock libraries that can generate enough fresh revenue to match and exceed the traditional licensing model for online images.
Considering that global digital advertising spend amounted to $521.02bn in 2021, I think it’s a very exciting time for the industry. We’re on the brink of a whole new era of photography in which more money goes in the right pockets.
The sooner libraries adopt this new monetization model the better equipped they’ll be for the future.
Want to learn more? Browse the website to discover our unique image-streaming technology and contextual in-image advertising system, or view our latest vacancies
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