100,000 contributors, unlimited possibilities

Patrick is President of Fotolia North America

Refreshed from a relaxing vacation, Patrick Lor, BA'90, MBA'01, is ready to talk business, back on the campus where it all began.

As the North American president of New York-based Fotolia and co-founder of the first online crowd sourced stock photo website, iStockphoto, Patrick’s career has grown in tandem with the capabilities of the Internet.

Patrick’s interest in computers and software had a modest start with a practical purpose. “There was a Mac computer lab on the 11th floor of the social science building where I found myself doing a bunch of different things, both school-related and not,” he says.

With his interest tweaked, the path to his dream job became clearer. But Patrick freely admits he had a lot to learn about himself. Fresh out of school, he secured a job as a digital designer with the City of Calgary. His foray into the corporate world started with his next job at Adobe where Patrick worked on a team producing a monthly 72-page catalogue of photos and fonts with a print run of one-million copies.

By 1999, Patrick says he was having a “mid-life career crisis,” so he started his EMBA at the Haskayne School of Business to help find his passion and grow his managerial skills. Two years later, his MBA brought with it the realization that the corporate world wasn’t for him. So Patrick began searching for a new entrepreneurial venture where he could do something new, exciting and with worldwide reach. He eventually partnered with a colleague from Adobe to launch iStockphoto.

“I chose this venture because I knew I could hit the ground running,” Patrick says. His experience with software development made the online stock photo business a natural fit. The stock photo industry is well established, but advances in technology have made today’s industry remarkably different from its modest beginnings.

Only fifteen years ago, purchasing stock imagery meant picking a photo from a giant catalogue and paying a few thousand dollars for it. With the advent of CD-ROMs, both price and delivery time decreased. In 2001, the Internet had the power they needed and Patrick and his co-founder revolutionized the industry with the launch of iStockphoto.

By that time, “the Internet was already there and people were already sharing photographs,” he said. “So we said, if you have a photograph that’s digital, upload it to our site and if someone buys it, we’ll give you a piece of that.” Patrick then took his expertise to the then new-kid on the stock photo block, Fotolia, in his new role as president, North America in May, 2009.

Fotolia has websites in 12 countries, 100,000 diverse contributors worldwide and an archive of 10,000,000 royalty-free vectors, images and videos. Over one-million images starting at $0.75 USD are downloaded each month by over two-million Fotolia members.

Anybody can use Fotolia and anyone can contribute to Fotolia. “Almost anyone can take a great photo,” says Patrick. “At the simplest levels, we have contributors whose only qualification is that they have a 12 megapixel camera. We have moms who make money by taking pictures of their kids, but we also have professional photographers who hire models and shoot with lighting, props and make-up in studios.”

When the team evaluates the photos for inclusion in Fotolia’s collection, Patrick says that difference between amateur and professional photos with natural light is often negligible. Every day, 30,000 to 40,000 images are uploaded to Fotolia and roughly half are approved. “No matter how many images people submit, we’ll get through them,” he says.

With its growth potential and boundless reach, Fotolia has helped stay-at-home moms earn extra cash, amateur photographers refine their passion and professionals reach a new customer base. “We’ve launched careers in a way that really knows no bounds,” Patrick says. “I don’t think we really know the extent to which we’ve affected people’s lives.”

Then take world economies, for example, where a dollar in Canada spends much differently than a dollar in Russia.”We constantly hear stories from Russian contributors who say the thousand dollars they made from Fotolia totally changed their lives,” he says.

Internet anonymity can sometimes dilute the human element of a web-based business, but at Fotolia, the Internet only enhances the human connection. “We don’t take credit for anything,” says Patrick, of Fotolia’s success. “We attribute out success to our contributors.” All 100,000 of them.