Lucky Oliver, the Silicon Valley-based Microstock photo company, has announced that it’s throwing in the towel, apparently by May 15th, 2008.
On a personal note, I’m saddened by this news, as Lucky Oliver was the a company that spent a lot of time and energy on what I found to be a really effective and compelling layout and user experience. In fact, I found myself actually admiring the way that they did what must be mundane UI work, always with wit and style.
Not only that, but I was fortunate (okay, “lucky”) to have met Bryan, the CEO, and found him to be smart, witty, and engaging. One can’t live in Silicon Valley, though, for very long without seeing and feeling the wreckage and failures. Google gets a ton of press; The Lucky Olivers just sort of fade away.
Our best to the Oliver team. We wish them–here it comes–Luck.
For discussion: how does this affect the MicroStock space in general? Is this an indication of some degree of saturation? Is this town not big enough for (pick your favorites)? Discuss.
1 comment so far ↓
As a contributor to Lucky Oliver, I’m sad to see it go. On the flipside, I sold approximately 1/20th of the stock on their site that I did on my iStockphoto portfolio. Literally, I have sold over 1,000 images on iStock in the time it took to sell 49 images on Lucky Oliver.
Not to suggest that they did not do all they could to make a great user experience but I think that it was too little, too late. Getty snatched up iStock and made it a huge force with millions of images by top shooters and amateurs alike. I think Lucky Oliver and other smaller stock sites lack a large selection of really high quality images. When it comes to microstock it’s all about quality of the image and concept. There’s no room for mediocre photos anymore.
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