The question of revenue from cultural institutions selling images was raised in conversation at the Culture Grid Hack Day in Newcastle quite recently.
There was a suggestion that (regardless of whether images are available on Flickr Commons) only the big commercial picture libraries can make money from cultural institution images because only they are set up to sell and manage the selling of images sufficiently efficiently and to generate enough volume of sales to be profitable.
Janet
Janet E Davis
--- On Fri, 11/3/11, Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: The "revenue from free" question
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Friday, 11 March, 2011, 10:50
> At the (very excellent) Bits 2 Blogs
> conference yesterday, someone - I failed to get her name -
> claimed that picture library revenues for a certain
> institution dropped hugely "as a consequence of them putting
> their images on Flickr Commons".
>
> This conversation happened in the context of the "what
> about free / open?" debate which seems to have been rumbling
> on for a long time, presumably because this is A Hard
> Question To Answer.
>
> On the other hand, the lady in question seemed to be able
> to state fairly unequivocally that revenues are downwardly
> affected by "free", which sort of implies that research of
> some kind is being done.
>
> We've had some interesting conversations on-list about
> this, but never seem to really move the conversation forward
> - Nick Poole mentioned some research that the Collections
> Trust are doing (Nick, if you're there, give us the
> lowdown...!) - but I wondered how we might enable a frank,
> open discussion about the culture of "free and open" and how
> this affects (either upwards or downwards) our existing
> sources of revenue?
>
> Mike
>
>
>
> Mike Ellis
> Research & Innovation Group
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