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| © David Alan Harvey |
| Evan Nisselson |
Evan Nisselson
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Digital Railroad
On List Because: His Web-based platform and archival software may empower individual photographers and small photo agencies to compete with megaagencies in the global marketplace
Secret of His Success: An evangelical zeal
Quote: "Photographers have spent too much time complaining about the business instead of taking the steps they need to become effective at marketing themselves."
Website: www.digitalrailroad.net
A little more than two years ago, Evan Nisselson was making the lonely rounds of photo trade shows and high-tech conferences, trying to drum up interest in a new business he was launching called Digital Railroad (DRR). An enthusiastic promoter, he nonetheless had his work cut out for him, because DRR was something new -- a Web-based platform that would allow photographers to easily and inexpensively create and maintain their own online archives. His basic pitch to photographers went like this: "If your work is not digitized in a searchable archive, it's basically just sitting in a box."
Nisselson's platform allowed subscribing photographers and small photo agencies ($50 a month for 20GB of storage, and a $99 setup fee, waived if you pay annually) to either create their own home pages from a template or to link their own existing Websites to an online archive searchable by keywords. The idea was to enable photographers to break away from the "tyranny" of big agencies like Corbis and Getty and to sell their images directly to clients.
In that sense, DRR was as much a philosophical proposition as a technological one. A former photojournalist and photo editor for the Saba agency (later sold to Corbis), Nisselson takes an evangelical fervor to the job of selling DRR. Early on he signed up clients like the Redux agency (owned by his former boss, Marcel Saba) and the VII agency. Later, armed with $5 million or so in venture-capital backing, he added an executive team that included a new president, Charles Mauzy, formerly of Microsoft. According to Nisselson, DRR has signed up some 700 photographers and 35 photo agencies from 53 countries as subscribers, as well as some 21,000 photo buyers.
So far, the company hasn't achieved the goal Nisselson set out for himself: to revolutionize the marketing of photographs on a grassroots level. In December, however, the platform added new technology that, Nisselson says, will put the last piece of the puzzle in place: Buyers now will be able to search for images across the entire DRR platform, rather than just through individual sites. That will make DRR a self-contained photo marketplace. "A real community of photographers," as Nisselson himself says. To be sure, DRR faces competition in this new marketplace, particularly from PhotoShelter (photoshelter.com), whose nimble technology has already created a searchable community of photographers. Perhaps the biggest question, though, is how Nisselson's vision will fare in a future of giant online photo communities, such as flickr.com (see page 2).
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