Prosthetic Device

But keeping the personal archive business. From an email to contributors:

Photographer Dennis Stock Buy From Art.com

We’re contacting you today with some unfortunate news – we will be closing The PhotoShelter Collection, effective October 10, 2008. Going forward, our team will refocus heavily on enhancing our original product, The PhotoShelter Personal Archive, which several thousand photographers use for bulletproof storage and online image sales directly to their own clients. Our financial position remains solid and we look forward to working with the photography community for years to come.

An excerpt from lessons learned at their blog:

1. Stock photography is a slow growing market dominated by a single player
There was a single moment for a company to capitalize in stock photography, and Getty took it. The use of stock imagery isn’t growing fast enough to create a displacement opportunity, and Getty is far too aggressive (and smart) to allow secondary players to displace them in any fashion.

2. Research Requests move too quickly for individuals to react in a timely fashion
We believed that using the crowd to fulfill research requests would give us an enormous advantage over the competition, but the nature of the industry is such that many research requests are due within a day, making it nearly impossible for non-fulltime stock photographers to react. Research requests are therefore relegated to what they’ve always been – namely the locating of existing images within an extant library that are ready for immediate licensing.

3. Buyers desire more diversity, but convenience (aka subscription deals) triumphs this desire
The largest consumers of stock photography are often locked into subscription deals, which makes it very difficult for them to consider alternate sources. Subscription deals are very bad for photographers, but great for business.

4. A crowd-source model for stock will likely never work
Licensing a photo is not a simple proposition. It is not like selling a widget. There are huge intellectual property issues, technical issues, and meta data issues that are difficult for even full-time pros to grasp. Companies that represent collections of stock photography have to build entire divisions of staff to deal with rights clearances and lawsuit that arise from improper clearance.

Read more information at their FAQ.