Flickr, Getty Images Offer Payday to Amateur Photographers

Yahoo is partnering with Getty Images to turn the Flickr online photo community into a treasure trove of resources. Getty has announced it will be offering select Flickr members the chance to license their work for publication in media outlets all over the world. With clients in 100 countries, Getty is the largest distributor and provider of photographic images for media outlets in the world.

Reports suggest Getty is willing to pay up to $240 for the photographs it uses. Over the next few months, the image provider will be checking out available photos on Flickr, and when they find something they like, Getty will invite the image owner to participate in the pilot program. (Source: shareholder.com)

"We are excited and proud to be partnering with Flickr to offer our customers even more choice for their projects," Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images said in a statement. Mr. Klein said that Flickr is the ideal partner for Getty and that its library of images will enable his company to offer a much wider range and richer amount of content to Getty customers. Flickr is one of the largest online photo sharing sites on the web with over 2 billion images and 27 million users to date. (Source: nytimes.com)

While this news may have some Flickr users excited over the prospect of turning their hobby into a side business, this has to have regular photographers concerned. The maximum $240 that Getty is offering is the standard rate it pays for professional photographs, but it is possible that Getty may end up offering much less, turning Flickr into a fire sale for images. (Source: pcworld.com)

Photographic journalism it seems is just the next profession under threat in a troubled industry. Newspapers, especially those owned by Sam Zell's Tribune Co., have been firing staff all over the U.S.; some fret over the fact that 'citizen journalist' Mayhill Fowler broke two of the largest stories during the Democratic presidential race through fairly devious means, and newspapers around the world are outsourcing their writing, layout design and editing to a small company in India.

Maybe Andrew Keen is right: the Internet really is killing our culture -- or at least my job, anyway.