COVID-19: How’s the photo agency doing? United Archives

Here at PAN we are in communication all week long with photo agency owners, both stock and editorial, discussing how their business is under COVID-19.

This from Frank Nikolaus Golomb at photo library United Archives

Dear Will,

We analyzed some soft data since the shutdown is in place in Germany to find out, if there is a drop recognizable. To keep this transparent, we grouped all downloads starting from the 1st of January into weeks (7 Days, 13 Weeks) and reduced extreme peaks (there were two of them in the first quarter with 70% more than usual to average.

We can see a drop down in Week 10 (minus 30%, March 10.-17.) which is the week of the shutdown and reorganization to homeoffice for everyone. In week 11, 12 and 13 traffic went back to a normal average level. Saying this, and having in mind, that the relevant dataset is only 3 weeks old, I can carefully say that it looks like there is no significant Corona effect at the moment in the traffic area.
However, we might see a drop in cashflow later this year. We can not say anything about this perspective today, because we have timelags of months between a download and a cash-in based on this download today. However, if businesses disappear, it might mean a drop in turnover.

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