Chai: from photography enthusiast to "agent"

20 12 in late may, a photo of miss Chen, a girl from Nanjing, and Zuckerberg, the boss with a value of 187 billion dollars, appeared on the internet, and the number of hits exceeded150,000 in just three days. Zhao Mei, the photographer of the photo, never dreamed that she just uploaded the photo to a "photo bank" and earned 654.38+10,000 yuan at once. In fact, all this is due to Chai, a "photo agent".

Mature opportunities in the internet age

Chai Yu 1974 was born in an intellectual family in Shanghai. After graduating from the Department of Journalism and Communication of Nanjing University at the age of 22, she worked as a photojournalist and photo editor in the photography department of China Youth Daily.

Chai's job is to process photos sent by photographers all over the country by express mail every day. However, due to the limitation of theme and layout, only one tenth or even less can be really used, and the rest are often thrown away because no one wants to keep these "outdated goods". Chai Jijun thinks it is a pity to do so. Maybe the editor of another newspaper is worried about the lack of these pictures!

As a photographer, Chai knows that it is not easy to take a good group of photos. For example, some works reflecting the western customs and exotic natural scenery often require photographers to climb mountains and even risk their lives, which is difficult for outsiders to understand. So, he tried to transfer some photos to his peers in other media, and then mailed the manuscript fee to the contributor. Although exhausted by "asking for trouble", Chai still saw the surprise and gratitude in the author's letter and felt very valuable!

One day in April 2000, Chai and an IT reporter were working together to choose a topic about Zhang Chaoyang and other Internet heroes. While eating in the newspaper canteen, this colleague said to him: "Internet people will burn money. How about we do a business that can make money without burning money? " Chai Jijun suddenly thought of recommending pictures to others. Being in the photography circle, I am well aware of the needs and pain points of this industry: on the one hand, it is difficult for the author to accurately find the right "husband's family" for his works, resulting in a lot of waste of photo resources; On the one hand, there are hundreds of newspapers and publishing houses. Because of the lack of communication with photographers, editors are anxious and distressed about not having good pictures every day. Few media set up their own image databases, and the efficiency between photographers and image demand agencies is very low because of the lack of intermediary service providers.

Chai Jijun realized that photos are very suitable for marketing on the Internet.

In fact, some people wanted to buy and sell pictures in the past, but "in the era without the Internet, the cost was too high." Chai said that before the advent of the Internet, commercial creative pictures mainly relied on copying positive films and product atlases, while news pictures mainly relied on a huge satellite transmission system. Large institutions such as Xinhua News Agency and Reuters control this channel, and only they can afford expensive satellite transmission and usage fees. Internet has completely broken the monopoly of large institutions on the picture market by digitizing pictures and easily uploading and downloading them.

Colleague Li Xueling agreed with him very much, so they began to write business plans while looking for technical partners and financing.

"The picture is coming."

Xiao Li quickly persuaded Chen Zhihua (now vice president of CFP) to join. On May 1 2000, the website was officially launched, and Li Xueling named it "Photo", which means "Here comes the picture".

Like all entrepreneurs at that time, the three young people hoped to get investment to expand their business quickly. At first, they found a traditional business owner in Shenzhen, who is also a photography enthusiast and interested in doing photography business. However, when he explained this investment project to other shareholders, he was unexpectedly strongly opposed. They said it was absolutely impossible. These two people have nothing yet. We haven't invested millions yet. What happened to our brains?

So, now that only one person is full-time, firewood and firewood are both * * *, this small website is still struggling to start running.

Interestingly, from the first day of its official operation, this photo trading website began to generate income for Chai and his photographers, and Sina became the first buyer of their pictures. One available data is that in the first month, more than 40,000 yuan of pictures were successfully sold. Soon, Sohu also became a customer of Chai.

The influx of cash not only made Chai see hope, but also boosted the confidence of those photographers. Soon, more than 50 professional photographers gathered to upload pictures to participate in the transaction. Within half a year, more than 1000 photographers took pictures online.

In 2003, Li Xueling hopes to transform the company from a professional photo trading website to a photo community. He said that we should not pay too much attention to the cost of renting several servers. Although it doesn't make money, it can make the company grow bigger quickly. Of course, there are still drawbacks. Everyone is worried about "burning too much money"! Seeing that his idea could not be realized, Li Xueling sold his 10% shares to investors for 100000 USD, and then moved to Netease as the editor-in-chief.

After his good friend left, Chai, who had no hope of promotion in the system, made up his mind to resign from the unit and devote himself to expanding his photography career.

"like sesame company"

The most interesting thing recently is that Zuckerberg, the Facebook owner worth $1870 million, held a low-key wedding in his back garden on May 9, 2065438. At that time, only 65,438+000 relatives and friends were invited, so everyone celebrated his 28th birthday. Unexpectedly, he got married. Who is the bride? Everyone guessed that it must be a stunning beauty. It was not until the appearance of Miss Chen, a little girl from Nanjing, that people discovered that she was plain-looking, dark-skinned and even a little fat. Zhao Mei, a girl from China who was present, immediately took photos of her. After obtaining the consent of the parties, she uploaded several photos of her life that she usually took for Miss Chen to Chai Jijun.

Unexpectedly, after these pictures were adopted by major websites, the number of hits exceeded150,000 in just three days. It is no exaggeration to say that the powerful shock wave generated by this group of photos far exceeds the full-page text report in the newspaper. Many Chinese and foreign media bought these photos online. In just three days, the author Zhao Mei earned 654.38 million yuan. Maybe in a few days, a brand-new BMW will enter the house beautifully.

"We are like a sesame picking company, picking up those sesame seeds together." It took Chai and his partners 12 years to turn a small photo agency business despised by most people into a high-threshold visual image information industry. He even has some "hubris": from 2000 to now, we have images of important events in China and the world. Relying on the threshold of content accumulation, it will be difficult for latecomers to shake CFP's leading position in this field.

Today, Chai's company has grown to more than 3,000 contracted photographers and artists, updating 2,500 photos every day. In addition to 4,000 domestic newspapers, TV stations, advertising companies and websites, we also cooperate with more than 100 overseas photo agencies and copyright agents to sell pictures. This small company, which was unknown in the past, has now become the largest photo library in China.

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