The stock photo industry is under pressure from a variety of new models. The original model - Rights Managed Images - still accounts for nearly half of all image sales. RM refers to images that are licensed for specific use (Royalty Free images, once downloaded, can be used by the purchaser forever). The new rage, microstock, is of course part of the large RF sector.

Nobody talks about Rights Managed images these days. When articles appear about stock photos, 90 percent of the coverage deals with RF.

A neat anomaly is the growth in our Rights Managed business while most of our competitors have shrinking sales in this category. Why?

Our competitors have quality. But we have even better quality. And we will also have super specialized collections such as FoodPix which was created over a number of years by Jeff Burke and came to us through our PictureArts acquisition. We also have among our many RM offerings Workbook Stock which is a terrific general interest RM collection that is unique in the RM space.

Another factor: RM images are not under assault by the microstock revolution. The RM model is impervious to the growth of microstock because of rights issues and the quality demanded by the typical RM buyer.

All of our RM collections were once distributed by Getty Images. We all know that Getty decided several years ago not to distribute Jupiterimages' RF and RM collections. This Getty decision plus our high-quality images accounts for our RM sales anomaly. Now buyers of RM images have learned that they can only get our specialized Workbook, Food Pix, Nonstock and several other of our RM collections directly from Jupiterimages and selected distributors (not including Getty and Corbis).

Additionally and most importantly we have a terrific and motivated creative team around the world that ensures the continuous growth of our RM annual output. With this team and the way things work in the stock photo industry we should be able to continue to take RM market share.

Business decisions made by others as well as our decision to purchase superb RM collections have provided us with a great RM opportunity. The irony in this post is incredible!