Taking (Photo) Stock: BrightQube Seeking Venture Funding to Enlarge Burgeoning Web Picture Business

Lee Corkran has spent most of his life working in photography, graphic design, and online media. He’s participated in changes that have transformed his industry as he moved from jobs at the former Sigma photo agency, a news photo provider, to Kodak, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard’s San Diego-based Imaging and Printing Group.

Based on the insights he collected along the way, Corkran told me he concluded a few years ago “that no real innovation” had been applied to the way stock photographs are provided online. So he started BrightQube, a Web site with a proprietary method of displaying stock photos and other images as if they were arranged on a photographer’s light table. Corkran launched BrightQube early last, before the teeth of the recession really took hold, in a fiercely competitive market of Web-based stock photo providers. Yet the number of BrightQube users has grown, and the business is generating enough revenue for Corkran to begin looking for venture capital.

Lee Corkran
Lee Corkran

“I just really have an intense desire to build an online business around photography and imaging,” Corkran says.

Stock photos and images have long been the meat-and-potatoes staple of advertising agencies, graphic artists, and the publishing industry. Agencies typically license images on a photographer’s behalf, and the image catalogs they once published on glossy paper to display their inventory are now increasingly available online at sites such as GettyImages.com, iStockphoto.com, and fotosearch.com.

Corkran contends, however, “going to a digital stock photography site is like going through a Google search, with 300 pages of results.” Users have to click through pages of images, which can make it difficult to select and compare photos.

“This paginated approach becomes kind of an obstacle,” Corkran says. “The existing stock photography sites have pretty much taken a print catalog and put it online. It’s not necessarily what the buyer is looking for. It’s more about what the seller wants to promote,” because favored images tend to be placed on the Web site’s first few pages.

BrightQube offers a different approach by providing

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.