About View Stock

View Stock

View Stock, also written Viewstock, is a Chinese stock photo agency based in Beijing that started its business in 1993 supplying pictures to the commercial market. A detailed trade survey of China's stock photo market recorded the agency in unusual depth: it had published three catalogues of about 1,500 images each, held about 150,000 images on file and about 75,000 online, all keyworded in Chinese, represented about 110 photographers and employed an operating staff of 14. Seventy per cent of its sales were to customers in Beijing and Shanghai, and its gross annual revenue was about 625,000 US dollars. View Stock's Beijing parent operation was led by Lu Yi, whose Beijing-based Dashi Design served customers of the parent company. Because the agency's public record is concentrated in that survey, this profile presents its operations as they were documented at the time.

Founding and the catalogue era

View Stock began in 1993 with the aim of supplying pictures to the commercial market — the same founding year recorded for Panorama, the largest agency in China, which underlines how China's commercial stock industry was essentially created in a single early-1990s moment, as advertising demand grew and agencies formed to license photography to it.

In its first era, the agency's marketing tool was the printed catalogue. View Stock published three catalogues, each containing about 1,500 images, with a distribution of 6,000 in China. The catalogues put a selection of roughly 4,500 pictures in front of thousands of potential buyers across the country at a time when the Chinese advertising industry had no established online picture-buying infrastructure. Catalogue publishing of this kind was the standard sales method of the international stock industry in the film era, and View Stock's three editions show a small agency investing in the same model at Chinese scale.

The collection: film files and the online library

The survey recorded that View Stock held about 150,000 images on file, of which about 75,000 were online, all keyworded in Chinese. The Chinese-language keywording mattered: the collection was organised for Chinese buyers searching in their own language, rather than adapted from an English-language library, which was one of the barriers that limited foreign agencies' and foreign photographers' direct access to the Chinese market in the same period.

As with other agencies of its generation, the physical part of the collection was fading from use. While View Stock had about 150,000 images in its film files, the survey found that by then the company was almost never asked to research those files or ship out film. The working collection was the online library, and the film holdings — half of everything the agency had accumulated since 1993 — had become a legacy archive that customers no longer consulted.

Drum scanning and digitisation

Most of View Stock's online images had been drum scanned to about 40MB, the survey recorded. Drum scanning was the high-end digitisation method of the period, used to convert film originals into large digital files suitable for commercial reproduction, and a file size of about 40MB marked the images as intended for serious print and advertising use rather than screen-only purposes.

The detail also shows where a small agency's investment had to go in the transition years. Putting 75,000 images online was not simply a matter of uploading pictures: the film originals first had to be scanned at reproduction quality, then keyworded in Chinese, before they could be searched and sold. View Stock's documented figures — half its total holdings digitised and keyworded — represent a substantial completed programme for an operation with a staff of 14.

A sales model without e-commerce

View Stock's website was a showcase, not a shop. The survey recorded that the site was not e-commerce: customers had to call to negotiate price. The customers were then billed for the usage, and virtually no one paid by credit card. This negotiated, invoice-based model was characteristic of the Chinese stock market of the period, in which average photo buyers showed little interest in purchasing pictures online with immediate payment, and in which agencies dealt with customers personally rather than through automated licensing.

Negotiation fitted the agency's market. Stock licensing prices depended on how an image would be used, and a telephone sale allowed a small staff to price each use, maintain relationships with repeat commercial customers and bill established clients on account. It also limited scale: every transaction required staff time, which is one reason an agency with 75,000 images online still operated with the sales structure of a much earlier era of the business.

Customers in Beijing and Shanghai

View Stock's sales were geographically concentrated. Seventy per cent of the company's sales were to customers in Beijing and Shanghai, China's two largest advertising and publishing centres, and the agency itself was Beijing-based. The remaining sales were spread across the rest of China, in a market whose commercial photography demand was centred overwhelmingly on the biggest cities.

The content mix showed the same dependence on imported imagery found at larger Chinese agencies. About 30 per cent of View Stock's sales were of mostly business and concept images that had been produced by agencies operating outside China. Business and concept pictures — generic corporate, lifestyle and symbolic imagery — were precisely the categories Chinese advertisers demanded and Chinese production had not yet supplied in volume, and even a domestically focused agency like View Stock earned nearly a third of its revenue from foreign-produced material.

Photographers and what stock paid them

View Stock represented about 110 photographers, and had two staff photographers who shot mainly concepts. The survey's account of their earnings is one of the most candid records of photographer income in China's early stock market: none of the agency's photographers made a living from shooting stock. The top photographer earned about 10,000 US dollars a year from stock, and the average photographer earned about 4,000 dollars a year.

Those figures explain the structure of the supply side. Stock photography for View Stock's contributors was a supplementary income layered over other photographic work, not a profession in itself, and the agency's own production — the two staff photographers shooting concepts — was a small, targeted effort aimed at the business and concept categories its customers bought most. The model matched the market's size: an agency grossing about 625,000 dollars a year could not have supported a large body of full-time stock photographers.

A small operating team

View Stock operated with a staff of 14. That team covered the whole documented workflow of the agency: maintaining a 150,000-image file, running the scanning and keywording programme that put 75,000 images online, publishing and distributing catalogues with a circulation of 6,000, negotiating every sale by telephone, billing customers for usage, and managing relationships with about 110 represented photographers and with the overseas agencies whose business and concept images supplied about 30 per cent of sales.

The comparison with China's largest agency is instructive. Panorama, the market leader, employed between 150 and 200 people; View Stock performed the same basic functions — collection, digitisation, marketing, sales and photographer relations — with roughly a tenth of that headcount, at a correspondingly smaller revenue scale. The survey's portrait is of the Chinese stock industry's long tail: small, durable specialist operations beneath a handful of large players.

Lu Yi and Dashi Design

View Stock's Beijing parent operation was led by Lu Yi. Alongside the agency, Lu Yi's Beijing-based Dashi Design served customers of the parent company, Viewstock photo services, which was described as a provider of photo illustrations for advertising, literature and the internet.

The pairing of a stock agency with a design service under the same leadership reflects the agency's commercial-market orientation. Its customers were advertisers and publishers who needed finished visual material, and a design operation serving the same client base sat naturally beside a library that licensed photo illustrations for advertising, books and online use. The documented record of View Stock's leadership is limited to this connection, and the profile does not go beyond it.

Place in China's early stock market

View Stock's significance in the record of China's media industry is as documentation rather than scale. Founded in 1993, it belonged to the first generation of Chinese commercial stock agencies, and the trade survey that profiled it preserved the working details of that generation — printed catalogues with a distribution of 6,000, drum-scanned files of about 40MB, telephone-negotiated prices, invoiced payments, photographer earnings of a few thousand dollars a year — at the moment the industry was moving online.

Its figures also mark the distance between China's stock pioneers and the market that followed. Within a few years of the survey, China's commercial image market was estimated at about 30 million US dollars with Getty holding approximately half of it, and the industry's centre of gravity shifted to large online platforms. View Stock, with about 625,000 dollars in gross annual revenue and a staff of 14, represents the small-agency foundation on which that later, platform-dominated market was built, and the survey-era record of how such an agency actually worked is the reason it can be profiled at all.