“It’s amazing how fast things are changing, which makes it also hard to predict. A year ago everyone was on the NFT bandwagon, and now we’re already in the phase of disillusionment, not in the least because the bottom fell out of the crypto market — and who knows if that will bounce back anytime soon. Today generative AI is the topic du jour.
“I think two trends will continue and increasingly impact the entire photo & video industry. One obvious one is AI – and that is already shaking up all kinds of different part of the photography value chain, from capture (computational photography that is making non-traditional cameras, most importantly, smartphones better and better), to enhancement (all the way to automatic masking, AR effects, upsampling of low-res images – you name it) to curation and culling (smart selections of photos that matter most).
“Another one is the increased fragmentation of photo sharing solutions. It’s no longer the big social media networks that cornered the photo and video sharing market. On one hand, Facebook/Instagram and Twitter are losing their appeal, especially to younger users. Consumers as well as pro photographers are now attracted to innovative new alternatives. Take BeReal, for instance, which completely changed the metaphor of serendipitously sharing photos. Or VSCO, one of our panelists, which decided to go back to its roots by focusing on addressing the needs of the more serious photographers rather than chasing eyeballs for their apps.”
What do you think are the industry’s biggest challenges at the moment?
“I would say the #1 challenge today for more or less every industry player except Apple is the spiraling customer acquisition costs for new users. With Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy, online ads have simply become less efficient, i.e. the costs to recruit new user is spiraling.
“This affects startups who in the past could afford supplementing their guerilla marketing/PR efforts with targeted Facebook ad buys that would easily pay for themselves; now that is a lot harder. But it also affects the big guys, like Snap, in terms of what they can now charge for their advertisements.”
How can photographers innovate using today’s (and tomorrow’s) technologies? How do they need to evolve to take that next step?
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