Interview with iStock CEO

Another article, this time an interview with istock CEO Bruce Livingstone. Talks about how it all started (from photo sharing site) and what the new batch of competition is going to do to istock(ironically from photo sharing sites like Flickr).

Extracts of the article are below with a link to the full article at the bottom:

iStockphoto sees new rivals everywhere
CEO Bruce Livingstone is bracing for online competitors to do to him what he did to the traditional stock-art market.
By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: April 4, 2007, 4:00 AM PDT

iStockphoto Chief Executive Officer Bruce Livingstone thinks of his company as Web 1.5.
The site, where members can sell their photos or graphics as "stock art," employs the Web 2.0 idea of user-generated content. But Livingstone founded iStockphoto in 2000 when the Web 1.0 e-commerce idea still prevailed. The company resembles eBay: when a customer buys an image, iStockphoto charges the seller a commission.
iStockphoto survived the dot-com bust by selling stock art for dramatically lower prices--as little as a buck a pop--and became profitable at the end of 2002. At present, 35,000 members upload about 30,000 images each week and customers download one every 2.5 seconds. A year ago, Getty Images, the dominant seller of stock art, acquired iStockphoto for $50 million.
Other "microstock" companies including Fotolia, Dreamstime and Shutterstock remain rivals, and photo-sharing sites pose a new threat. A revamped Zoomr will let photographers sell their images and keep 90 percent of the proceeds, compared with just 20 percent to 40 percent for iStockphoto. And there's talk that Yahoo's photo-sharing juggernaut, Flickr, might move into stock art.


Link