Corbis revealed its 2005 results at its annual New York marketing meeting, confirming that it has yet to turn a profit after a year of several acquisitions, including digital-asset management software provider eMotion, and a sales-force restructuring. The company's organic growth for the year was just four per cent, while overall growth topped 34 per cent. According to Gates, the year ahead will see Corbis attempt to overtake key rival Getty Images.
"We do see the advertising market changing," Gates told Media. "A lot of it is going to be presented digitally and have more interactive elements, and will help our clients make it easy to pull those kinds of packages together."
Gates, who founded Corbis in 1989, admitted that the company's marketing model had evolved to target the advertising industry -- in the absence of the consumer demand that he envisaged all those years ago. "Some of things we've had to adjust was figuring out what kind of business or market there would be around that," Gates noted. "A lot of the early thinking was consumers having neat digital displays and it ended up that there wasn't enough business in that."
Corbis has made a significant investment into the photography assignment space, and is also beefing up its royalty-free archive to combat increasing competition from the likes of Jupitermedia. Gates noted that the demand for royalty-free images is well illustrated by the mobile medium, where Corbis has taken its lead from Asia.
"We've done very well taking the image archive and providing it on the mobile phone," said Gates. "Just like the music on the mobile phone, the imagery on the mobile phone is well beyond what people expected, and we're doing a lot of content creation that's targeted at that market."
