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This story is not about stock photography. Lately, I have been concerned about the state of Democracy in the U.S. This story outlines some of my thoughts. It is an issue that should concern every U.S. citizen, and maybe citizens of other countries. If you have friends who might be interested in this subject, please feel free to forward the story or use the information in any way.
It should come as no surprise that, in recent years, online waivers and release forms have grown in popularity, especially during the past year. They’ve made it much easier to collect information while maintaining pandemic-approved standards. The stock photo industry, for example, has benefitted from online photo release forms. It provides an effective and efficient way to collect releases from models and online waivers will continue to be utilized as a better approach to signature-collecting.
I launched Selling Stock in 1990 with the goal of helping professional photographer understand the stock photography business and the opportunities it offered. For a couple decades many photographers earned significant additional revenue from the licensing of stock images. A large number earned their entire living by producing photos on speculation and licensing them as stock.
The chart below allows you to easily track the growth trends of Shutterstock quarter-by-quarter over the last 11-years and see the number of images in the collection, number of downloads and the gross quarterly revenue at the end of each quarter. You can also see the average revenue-per-download and revenue-per-image-in-the-collection trends.
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2020 revenue of
$180.9 million up 9% compared to $166.4 million in Q4 2019 and up from $165.2 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download was
$3.91 per-image compared to $3.44 in Q4 2019 and $3.79 the previous quarter. The average revenue per download for all of 2020 was $3.68 compared with $3.43 for all of 2019.
Photographers got a late Christmas present when President Trump signed the massive 5,593-page, $1.4-trillion omnibus spending and COVID-19 relief bill, titled the
Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021. () Buried deep within this omnibus spending bill was the 63-page
CASE Act.
I purchased my first Nikon camera in 1958 when I lived in Tokyo. At that time Nikon was the premier Japanese camera company.
Nikon has announced that they will now move all manufacturing of new equipment from Japan to Thailand. The reasons are simple: Blue Collar workers in Japan average
$18.94 per hour -- Blue Collar workers in Thailand average
$4.15 per hour.
After
my article a few days ago about
Wirestock's questionable deal with Freepik, I got some comments and pointers that I want to summarize here.
If Jon Oringer of
Shutterstock donated his annual salary of $4,598,580 to image creators who produce the products Shutterstock licenses, and divided it among creators based on the number of images licensed, how would that benefit image creators?
If you use
Wirestock to aid you in the process of filling out descriptions, titles, keywords and other required fields, and submitting images to stock agencies you need to read this story by Robert Kneschke (first published in German) and consider taking action before December 19, 2020 if you hope to earn much from your images in the future.
Wirestock’s “Instant Pay Program” could be a way to help the middleman make more while the image creator earns less for the images he or she has produced.
Shutterstock doesn’t want their contributors revealing how much – or how little – they earn. Presumably, this is because they believe that if contributors knew how little they might receive for the imagery they submit they wouldn’t bother to submit anything.
According to aerial stock agency
HOsiHO it is becoming harder and harder for video images creators to earn enough to support themselves. See its appeal to Stock Image Banks
here. There has been a decline in assignments and prices for the use of video clips have declined so much that professional independent videographers are finding it difficult to justify continued production.
There are many businesses where one or more “middlemen” are needed between producer of the product and consumers. Digital technology is making it increasingly possible to reduce, or eliminate, the need for middlemen in many industries. When this is possible (assuming the technology developer doesn’t take a disproportionate share of the price the customer pays) the creators of the product can get a fairer share of the amount the consumer is willing to pay and has more control over the price charged for the work performed. This can benefit consumers as well as producers by giving them more direct access to the creators of the product they want to use.
Getty Images has announced an exclusive partnership with
GLAAD, the LGBTQ media advocacy organization, working together to challenge harmful and cliched visual stereotypes of the LGBTQ community, through the launch of their first collaborative effort, a set of guidelines aimed at improving the visual representation of the transgender community. As part of a broader commitment, this new partnership encourages the creation of authentic, diverse imagery and videography, aiming to empower the media and advertising industries to choose visuals which authentically represent the LGBTQ community.
The United States Copyright Office recently created an
informative webpage dedicated to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; an influential law established in 1998 relating to copyright enforcement in the new digital age. The page provides a brief overview of each section of the law and its respective application.
A number of stock agencies are complaining that they don’t get enough new submissions of in demand imagery. See
here. They are seeing increasing requests for "diversity," "African American," "Black Lives Matter" and say that images showing more minorities and ethnic groups are needed. For the most part they are very unspecific about what these images should show.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced its
2021 Color Trends report. By analyzing pixel data from the year’s top downloads and mapping each pixel color to a HEX code, the report reveals the three fastest-growing colors that will tell the story of 2021, as well as local favorites from around the world.
Photographers who want to earn a portion of their living in the future creating images need to quickly learn and start using Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) skills. (See
this story)
The
National Geographic Image Collection, owned by The Walt Disney Company, is scheduled to close effective December 22, 2020. National Geographic
was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox for $725 million in 2015. In March 2019 Fox was sold to Disney and Murdoch and his family became the second largest shareholders.
Shutterstock has announced the buyout of AI-driven music platform
Amper Music for an undisclosed sum. The move adds to a growing trend of stock image sites getting involved in rights-free music. Earlier this year, Adobe
inked a deal to carry rights-free music catalogs from both Epidemic Sound and Jamendo, while Getty Images also hosts a royalty-free music library by
Epidemic Sound.
Those setting prices for photography are focused entirely on profits for agency managers and
compensation for capital investment. They give very little
consideration to the well being of creators. Compensation for stock
photos is widely out of balance with production costs. Changes are
needed. Photographer need more control over how their work is priced and a larger share of the fees customers pay. With new technology such changes are becoming increasingly
possible.
We are living in a time when Artificial Intelligence is dramatically changing the way visual content is created. It may not be long before stock photographers are no longer needed to produce photos for commercial use. Photographers will still create photos for personal use and their own entertainment, but visual content for commercial purposes will be created by graphic artists using AI to tell the story and produce the effects their customer needs.
This story first appeared in German on
Robert Kneschke's website. Why photographers give away their pictures on platforms such as Pixabay remains mostly incomprehensible to me even after this article. Sometimes, however, the authors do not even know that someone else is illegally offering their images for free.
Adobe Stock has released
Adobe Stock Creative Insights, a data report revealing information collected from Adobe Analytics on 149+ million U.S. visits and millions of asset uploads to Adobe Stock between January 2019 and September 2020. As recently revealed in
Adobe’s State of Creativity survey, 91% of creatives admit that COVID-19 and nationwide protests have inspired them to incorporate real-world issues into their work, with 87% reevaluating the subject matter of stock imagery in campaigns.
Shutterstock has reported Q3 2020 revenue of
$165.2 million up 4% compared to $159.1 million in Q2 2019 and down from $159.2 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download was
$3.79 per-image compared to $3.40 in Q3 2019 and $3.61 the previous quarter. Total image and video downloads for Q3 were 43.4 million compared to
46.3 million a year earlier and down from 44 million from the previous quarter. At the end of the quarter Shutterstock had over
350 million images and
20 million video clips in its collection, for a total of 370 million pieces of content.
Hopefully this story about my photo career will help young photographers understand how difficult it will be to make long-range plans for their future. Many businesses are changing at an increasingly rapid and unpredictable pace. Whatever you think you want to do in your 20s may turn out to be impractical, or unfeasible, sooner than you expect. What seem like an exciting opportunity today may soon disappear.
Adobe has announced that they are putting together a $500,000
Artist Development Fund to commission artists from “underrepresented communities” to create diverse assets for AdobeStock’s portfolio. It is still unclear as to exactly the type of images they will be asking photographers to shoot. Also unknown is whether the contracts will only go to photographers from “underrepresented communities” to do the shooting, or whether they may go to any photographer who is willing to shoot “underrepresented community” subjects.
The first Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA) virtual conference starts Sunday. Online sessions for the week-long conference will begin most days at 11:00am EDT and end by 5:00pm EDT. All sessions will be available online and you can attend from the comfort of your home. No need to travel.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced the addition of Editorial Video, a new premium, full-service editorial video offering that is now available for license. Critical Past, Celebrity Footage and Viral Hog are just a few of the new partners who will distribute their engaging video content worldwide through Shutterstock’s Editorial Video. In addition, current partners’ epa and London Entertainment will begin providing high-quality video via the new service.
Many photographers who have entered the stock photo business in the last 5 to 10 years have trouble understanding why photographers who have been producing stock photos since the 1980s and 1990s are so unhappy with how the business had declined. I’d like to provide a little historical perspective.
Adobe Stock has launched a
Free Stock Image Collection containing about 70K images (50K pictures, 15K Vectors and 6K video). The first version has been built from the work of a few top contributors who have a significant volume of images in the main collection.
An article in Popsugar says
stock photography has a diversity problem. According to the author more stock images of black and brown people are needed.
In my previous story about the
Google Licensable Badge I made a mistake about when the badge would actually go live. It actually started appearing on the site on 31 August 2020. It will be interesting to see how much Google’s new Licensable Badge will help or hinder stock photo sales. To test it I did a search for
“Office Workers.” Then you are given several options including one for “Clip Art” which seems to be all illustrations. and another for “Stock Photos”. I clicked Stock Photos and among the options given are “Royalty Free” and “Stock Photography”.
Dreamstime has announced the start of a celebratory month to mark its 20th anniversary this September. Dreamstime.com was registered in 2000 and disrupted the stock photography market by lowering prices manifold and enabling many photographers to join the industry. In 2004, it gained a top 3 position and has continued to experience sustained and rapid growth, evolving from a handful of photos to featuring 145+ million files in its online library and employing its own proprietary AI, PhotoEye, for filtering the now steady 3 million monthly approvals in 2020.
The IPTC, the global standards body of the news media will be conducting its 2020 IPTC Photo Metadata Conference online this year and it is entirely free for anyone to attend. The conference will take place on Tuesday 13 October 2020 from 15:00 to 18:00 UTC time. (That’s 11:00 to 14:00 EDT.)
In an effort to better understand how the global pandemic and cultural movements have impacted the stock imagery industry, Adobe surveyed 600 global creatives in July 2020. Creators feel challenged in today’s creative environment, and 82% of respondents believe 2020 has forever changed the way they will create.
A
Getty Images photographer asked if I could explain how Getty calculates its Premium Access (PA) deals where prices for image use vary widely? He pointed out that on his most recent statement he had a number of PA sales for $0.11 and one for $286.00. The vast majority of PA sales (roughly 60% of all sales) are near the low end, but there are also occasional extreme outliers.
Last week Google announced it’s intention to launch
Google Licensable Badge a function that will place a badge on images which require licensing before use when they are found by anyone doing a Google search. It is expected the launch will happen in the next couple of months.
A young man studying photography wrote recently and asked if I could supply him with some accurate stock photography analysis. I told him I could, but he
wasn’t going to like what I had to say. (This article is free to all readers, but there is a number of links within the story that require payment if readers want more detailed information.)
The schedule for the Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA) Conference, October 25-30 is now available
here. Online sessions for the week long conference will begin most days at 11:00am EDT and end by 5:00pm EDT. There will be two keynote addresses. On Monday at 11:00am Paolo Malabuyo, Director of UX at YouTube will speak on Embracing Complexity.
With the decline in public sporting events due to Covid-19, and thus the need for photo coverage, many sports photographers have seen a significant decline in demand for their services. But media companies still have time slots and space to fill. Consequently, they are turning more to documentaries and coverage of historical events to fill their gaps. In the UK this is great news for archies like Colorsport whose collection of sporting imagery goes back to the 1880s.
If you are a U.S. photographer hoping to earn at least a portion of your future living expenses from selling or licensing rights to the images you produce,
it is time to seriously reassess your business plan. If photography is a hobby. If the pictures you produce are for personal enjoyment and their earning potential is unimportant. If you have no need to earn revenue from your efforts, by all means continue to take pictures. But recognize that no matter how great your images might be, in all likelihood any future financial compensation you receive will be miniscule compared to the time and effort expended.
The Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA) Conference will be virtual this year and available to registered attendees for a full week from October 25th through Friday the 30th.? It is expected that there will be nearly 25 sessions, including two keynotes, nine panels and more than a dozen roundtables, all conveniently stretched over the week and available to you from the comfort of your home.
The Google Licensable Badge concept has been discussed for more than
two years and seems to be getting closer to a release. Photographers will need to put a code in the IPTC header of each of their images. When a Google search finds such an image it will display the Licensable Badge with the image indicating that the image needs to be licensed for use. The viewer can then click on the badge and determine where they need to go to negotiate a license for use.
In June German photographer Robert Kneschke did an indepth analysis of the portfolios on the Fotolia website. Adobe displays all the images it represents on both the Adobe Stock and Fotolia websites, but less information is displayed on Adobe. The following information should be an accurate picture of what can be found on Adobe Stock as well as Fotolia.
If you’re a freelance photographer trying to earn a living taking pictures, and finding photo jobs few and far between during this Covid 19 pandemic, you should read
this story. Adam Pratt is one of many freelancers who has seen the demand for his services as a photographer decline. As a result he has re-invented his business. He has been able to use his photography skills and training to turn from taking pictures to organizing personal photos for families.
On Wednesday
Shutterstock announced a public offering of 2,580,000 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $48.50 per share. Of this total 2,064,000 of the shares are owned by Jon Oringer (Shutterstock's Founder, Executive Chairman of the Board. The other 516,000 shares are owned by the company. Mr. Oringer will net
$100,104,000 from the sale of his shares and the company will earn $25,026,000 from its sale of 516,000 shares bringing the total for the public offering to $125,130,000.
If you would like insight into the kind of images that are in demand and what you should be shooting you might want to take a look at
AdobeStock. Adobe offers some features other major agencies don’t. Exploring the site could help you decide what kind of images might earn the most money for you.
After publishing our article
“Getty’s RF ‘Market Freeze’: Expensive Customer Mess?" I received the following clarifying message from Matthew McKibben, Getty Images, PR Manager in The Americas. He said:
Getty Images offers customers anything they want, but their decisions don't always seem well thought out. In November 2019, Getty Images ended the "right managed" license model, with which image buyers were able to buy, among other things, exclusive image rights for certain regions, industries, etc., which they called the "Market Freeze" feature.
ustomers need a better way to quickly review a selection of images than most stock photo sites offer. They don’t need more images. They need to be able to review the best images quickly. Twenty-five years ago this was possible by reviewing the images that had been placed in tightly edited major agency print catalogs. Now that editing is gone. The current marketing goal seems to be to throw as many images as possible at customers and force them to spend their time doing the editing. Historical trends indicate that most customers have found the mages used by other customers to be most useful for their purposes as well. Most customers are not looking for an image that has never been used.
I define Professional Photographers as individuals who are earning a significant portion of the money they need to support themselves and live comfortably from licensing use to the images they produce. The number of such individuals is disappearing rapidly. All indications are that the number will continue to decline.
I can remember when I was primarily an assignment photographer and occasionally sold outtakes from assignments on the side. Most of the income I needed to support my family came from assignments. Stock sales gave us a little extra. Demand for stock started to grow and it became harder for me to get assignments as I was working in an area where the competition was stiff from a lot of top quality experienced photographers. Buyers wanted to pay a little less than it cost to do an assignment. They liked having instant access to the stock image they needed and not having to spend a lot of their time organizing assignment shoots.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2020 revenue of
$159.2 million down 2% compared to $161.7 million in Q2 2019 and down from $161.3 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download was
$3.61 per-image compared to $3.44 in Q2 2019 and $3.42 the previous quarter. Total image and video downloads for Q2 were
44 million compared to 46.6 million a year earlier and down from 46.8 million from the previous quarter. At the end of the quarter Shutterstock had over
340 million images and
19 million video clips in its collection,
Shutterstock has entered into a partnership with Microsoft to give brands access to the stock photography company’s library of images for use in ads. The API integration with Microsoft Advertising will give advertisers on the Microsoft Audience Network
FREE ACCESS to millions of commercially licensed images.
Shutterstock’s gross revenue in 2019 was
$648,500,000. Total royalties paid out to all contributors in 2019 was about
$181,730,000. Total Shutterstock stock owned by Jon Oringer is worth over $650,000,000.
A
Getty Images photographer reports that he gets a lot of sales to a Scottsdale, Arizona company called
Design Pickle that offers full design services to businesses. Getty licenses these photo uses for
$0.17. The photographer gets a
$0.03 royalty for his work.
Now that all of
Getty Images’ Creative Image offering is Royalty Free the company seems to be trying go occasionally get a somewhat higher price for certain uses by offering a
Market Freeze. They tell customers, “With Market-freeze, you can rest easy knowing we'll remove this image from our site for as long as you need it, with custom durations and total buyouts available.”
Great Escape Publishing has published its first annual
GEP Stock Photography Index 2020 which ranks, rates, compares and contrasts the top 10 online stock-photography sites.
Covid-19 has required everyone to re-think their business model and how they communicate with interested parties. Among the questions that footage professionals have are: How have they adapted to the exigencies of remote work? Is demand for archival content holding up? What can media companies do to fully unlock the commercial potential of their archival collections, and which technologies show the most promise in this evolution? See the webinar.
If photographers are serious about trying to earn a portion of their living from photography they should probably focus on producing video rather than still images. Or maybe when they organize a video shoot also shoot some still images of the same situations. Recently, I was talking to Cameron Gough of
Envato in Australia. He pointed out that the majority of the company’s earnings come from graphic related content and only about 10% to 20% of downloads are of still stock images. He also noted that video footage was the second highest type of content in demand without giving a percentage.
In March 2020, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court
ruling held that Congress lacked authority to abrogate state’s sovereign immunity from infringement suits in the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 (CRCA). When Congress passed the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act, it was responding to pressure from filmmakers like Rick Allen – as well as movie studios, software companies, and many other IP stakeholders – who said states were abusing sovereign immunity to avoid paying licensing fees.
Since the 1980s “The legal and political environment has been tilted substantially in favor of shareholders and against workers,” according to Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard, and Anna Stansbury a Phd candidate at Harvard University. This story discusses the way this principal has played out in the stork photo business.
The French publication
BBN Times has published a report outlining four reasons why businesses should use professionally produced photos rather than pictures shot by their employees or amateurs. To read the full story which is in English click
here.
Getty Images has passed along a keywording tip to its photographers who may be taking pictures related to Black Lives Matter.
What’s an image worth? Owen Franken sent me his image (shown below) of sliced duck in a Paris restaurant as it appears on the Getty Images website. The list price on Gettyimages.com for a large file is
$475 Euros. If all the customer needs is a very small file, only suitable for online use, the price is only 50 Euros. Getty licensed this image to a customer in Canada for
$0.14 and the photographer received
$0.03 for his work. The photographer’s royalty share of the gross sale price is 20% so actually the photographer was only entitled to $0.028, but in a moment of generosity Getty rounded the payment to the next highest cent.
After reading my story “
Copyright Protection For Photos Is Dead” Paul Melcher wrote, “If there is no more copyright, then there is no more licensing. If there is no more photo licensing then there is no more reason for the existence of ‘Selling Stock’"
Recently, I was asked to provide a list of some of the best agencies that license footage. I provided the following list and recommended that the videographer try to put the same clips with multiple agencies, non-exclusively, in order to maximize sales. Pond5, Shutterstock, AdobeStock, iStock, Dissolve and Storyblocks.
Mobistok in Hamburg, Germany has announces a new platform for licensing uses to stock images which puts power back into the hands of photographers. Anyone who shoots images with their smartphones can go to Mobistok to put their imagery up for sale. While many stock photo websites make it a bit more difficult for individuals to sell their photos, Mobistok has been created from the ground up as a seamless way to sell photos and videos.
The stock photo industry has developed into a business with
No Bottom Line pricing. Some customers can get as many images as they want for whatever they are willing to pay. That is why more and more frequently royalties paid photographers are in cents, rather than dollars. I can’t think of any other industry that operates this way.
The two major trade associations for those who license stock photo images and video are CEPIC and DMLA. The DMLA (Digital Media Licensing Association) is primarily a U.S. organization that usually has its annual conference in late October. CEPIC (Coordination of European Picture Agencies Stock, Press and Heritage) is based in Europe, and usually draws attendees from around the world. CEPIC normally has its annual Congress in late May or early June. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic it was necessary to postpone its 2020 Congress. The 2020 Congress has now been re-scheduled to take place from May 19 through 21, 2021 with no actual Congress occurring in 2020.
A couple days ago we told you about the sad case of
Stephanie Sinclair who
had an image used by Mashable after she told them that $50 wasn’t a
sufficient payment for permission to use her copyrighted image. After 4 years a judge in the Southern
District Court of New York decided in Mashable’s favor saying that if a
photographer posts a picture on a “public” Instagram account anyone can
use that picture for any purpose whatsoever without permission or
compensation.? But now
Instagram tells Ars Technica, their TOS doesn't give companies like Mashable the right to make such uses. Which legal opinion is right?
One or my readers, Amyn Nasser, recently asked, “Isn’t it about time that ALL photographers started using copyright watermarks on all images that appear on social media platforms?" To a certain extent many photographers and agencies have tried for a decade or so to reduce infringement by placing watermarks on their images. For the most part the effort has been a total failure. This story will explain some of the reasons why.
Photographers interested in licensing rights to the images they produce, or in showing their work in hopes of getting assignments, have a dilemma. The only way they can earn money is to advertise and show potential customers what they can do, but the very act of showing in today’s Internet environment creates a huge risk that the images will be grabbed and used without compensation.
Self-employed, freelance photographers are being hit especially hard by the covid 19 pandemic. Most normally work from one short-term job to the next. They tend to be paid by the job, or the project, not a salary. Often these jobs last only a day, or less in terms of hours spent. When everyone is sheltering in place and much of the country closed down it is impossible for many photographers to find any work at all. The CARES and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) programs have focused on helping salaried employees, not those who are self-employed.
On May 21, 2020, the United States Copyright Office published its long awaited 512 (c) report and issued recommendations. The Copyright Office’s report looks at Congress’ intent in enacting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which offered service providers safe harbors to provide incentives for internet platforms and copyright owners to cooperate in order to detect and deal with copyright infringements in the online environment. The Report looks at that balance in light of the changes in the internet in the past 20-plus years and concludes that the current operation of the section 512 safe harbor system is unbalanced, with copyright owners bearing too much of the burden to deter piracy<
One thing that has bugged me lately is the host of ads I receive almost daily offering detailed reports of "Global Stock Photography Market Potential Growth" for the next 5 years. I haven’t paid for or read any of these reports, but I am pretty sure they are all scans. I hope no one is throwing their money away on these reports, or worst yet, believing them. The creators of these reports ask unsuspecting interested parties for fees ranging from $3,400 to $3,960 to read their fanciful industry growth predictions.
The Appellate Court of the Second Circuit in New York has decided an important important case for photographers regarding registrations and “Look Back” periods for copyright damages (Sohm v. Scholastic Inc., No. 18-2110, 2020 WL 2375056 (2d Cir. May 12, 2020). The court upheld the validity of the copyright registration procedure utilized by photography licensing agencies like Corbis Corporation, and held that courts may award copyright damages only for the three-year period preceding commencement of the action.
Photographers hoping to earn enough producing images to support themselves need to look for another line of work; one that has a better guarantee of income for time invested. The business of photographing meetings and events is unlikely to ever come back to where it was before Covid 19. As the world works its way out of this crisis, there will be fewer small or large group events and more Zoom meetings that are not conducive to photography. But stock photography isn't the answer either.
I've been on hiatus for about a month. My wife and I have just sold the home where we've lived for 42 years and moved into a condo apartment about one-third the size of our former residence. Making such a move, only about five miles from where we formerly lived, and getting rid of a huge amount of the stuff that we've collected over the years has been a challenge.
On May 26th Shutterstock announced that in an effort to cut costs and increase profits as of June 1, 2020 it would dramatically reduce future royalty rates paid to contributors. The new rates will no longer be based on a contributor’s lifetime earnings. At the beginning of each year all contributors will start with zero downloads/licenses and a 15% royalty rate. Previous sales history will be disregarded when it comes to determining royalty percentage. The number of downloads needed to rise to a higher royalty level are as follows:
The chart below allows you to easily track the last 10-year growth trend of Shutterstock quarter-by-quarter and see the number of images in the collection, number of downloads and the gross quarterly revenue at the end of each quarter. You can also see the average revenue-per-download and revenue-per-image-in-the-collection trends.
Considering the cost of producing stock photos, it is hard to see how an average annual return of $0.49 per-image accepted into a stock photo collection can be enough to cover out-of-pocket costs let alone provide any kind of hourly return for time expended. Hourly return will certainly be far below the U.S. minimum wage.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2020 revenue
$161.3 million compared to $163.3 million in Q1 2019 and down from $166.4 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download remained flat at
$3.42 per-image compared to Q1 2019 and down from $3.44 the previous quarter.
Footage.net has published the results of the Footage Industry Pandemic Industry Survey, which captures a real-time snapshot of how footage companies are responding to the pandemic-related disruptions that began to take hold worldwide in early March.
Founder John Griffin has announced that he will be closing the microstock site Cutcaster on Saturday April 25, 2020 after nearly 12 years of operations. He gave everyone a few days notice so buyers could make use of any existing funds they have on account and he encouraged contributors with more than $5 on account to request a payout before the closing deadline.
Shutterstock, has announced a three-year extension to its long-standing exclusive distribution deal with the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster, ITV. Currently,
this collection contains 40 million news, sports, entertainment and archival photos and they add 20,000 images of current events daily.
Shutterstock, Inc has launched an annual subscription for
Shutterstock Footage. Shutterstock’s collection of 18+ million HD and 4K video clips are now available for license through a range of cost-effective monthly plan options or for less than $9 per clip through an annual plan.
The
Digital Medial Licensing Association has appointed Elaine Vitt as Executive Director. Ms. Vitt brings a unique set of skills to DMLA, with significant experience in journalism, international marketing & communications, non-profit trade association management, event planning and content generation.
VisualSteam’s
“7th Annual Survey of Creative Pros: Stock Image Licensing” is a must read for stock image creators and stock agency managers who want insights into what leading, major stock photo buyers need, where they are going to purchase images and what they are looking for in the way of service. It is well worth the $79.99 price.
Stock photo agencies need to pay more attention to the time limitations of their customers and provide more efficient search options. As image collections get larger and larger searching for the right image becomes harder and harder for the image buyer and requires more and more of that buyer’s time. The problem with the current default search procedures is that customers must look through too many irrelevant images before they find one they can use.
Design Pics Inc., based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada has assumed the interim management of Masterfile during the bankruptcy process. Masterfile first filed to restructure its business in
April 2017 and was unable to make any royalty payments to photographers after
January 2018. According to information supplied to creditors by Harris & Partners, the insolvency trustee, as of March 3, 2020 Masterfile had total assets of $270,000 and total liabilities of
$4,092,654.41. They owe royalty payments for the images they licensed to 530 stock agencies and independent photo creators.
It turns out that the link I provided for Alamy’s list of photo needs only works for me. Readers have found that when they click on the link it simply tries to open their Google Mail page in a browser.
So here’s the list.
Most of the country, and the world, is now “sheltering in place” and doing everything possible to minimize contact with others. Under these conditions freelance photographers will find it very difficult to produce new, marketable images. The following are some ideas for ways to t productively occupy your time and better prepare to generate revenue when life gets back to normal.
The
good news is that under the new Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act virtually all self-employed freelance photographers should be able to qualify to receive
$600 in federally funded COVID-19 pandemic benefits for up to 13 weeks. In addition, some may also qualify for up to 26 weeks of regular state unemployment.
This program extends coverage to those who ordinarily would not qualify for state unemployment, including the self-employed, independent contractors and gig workers.
House of Pictures, the picture agency for premium interiors, has been part of Image Professionals GmbH since
October 2019. The Munich-based agency group unites various leading specialist picture agencies under one roof. The website
www.houseofpictures.com has undergone a complete re-launch, presenting new agency content, updated functions and a revised, fresh design.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that its footage offering is now available for license in SD, HD, and 4K for customers using
iOS and
Android applications. With over 17 million videos in the collection, searching, saving and licensing footage content allows customers to create engaging video content from a mobile or tablet device.
The U.S. Supreme Court says sovereign immunity protects state governments from copyright infringement lawsuits and has decided that it is OK for U.S. states to grab any photo they can find and use it without notifying or compensating the creator. The specific case that brought the matter to the nation’s highest court was filed by Rick Allen, an independent film producer and director in Fayetteville, North Carolina, who in the 1990s filmed the salvaging of the Queen Anne's Revenge, the flagship of the pirate Blackbeard, that had run aground at Beaufort, North Carolina in 1718.
“Sheltering in Place” will certainly hurt many photographers. Photographers won’t be able to get out to shoot new images. Customers won’t be coming to your studio. You might be able to shoot still lifes in your home, but getting props may be difficult. So what can you do to pay your bills? One possibility, particularly if you have a large stock photo collection, is to check out
Canva and see if they will pay a one-time fee to purchase rights to a significant number of your images for inclusion in their Free collection that they make available to their Graphic Design customers.
When the question of market leaders in the stock photo industry comes up the names photographers usually think about are Getty Images, Shutterstock, AdobeStock, iStock and Alamy. Maybe they should be thinking about the Australian company
Canva. The users and buyers of photographs are people who design products that needs visuals. Canva has been built to provide a host of services designers need to do their jobs.
As I pointed out in
yesterday’s story EyeEm is the single largest supplier of stock images to Getty’s Creative Collection. Currently 8,005,719 of the 30,472,764 images in Getty’s Creative Collection have been supplied by EyeEm. That’s 26% of the total collection making EyeEm by far the largest contributor to Getty Creative.
Due to the unforeseeable circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic the CEPIC Congress 2020 cannot be held from 27 to 29 May. In order to avoid the negative impact this cancellation would cause registered delegates, CEPIC has been able to secure new dates of 30 September to 2 October 2020 at the existing venue, Gran Meliá Victoria in Palma de Mallorca. There will be a Welcome Reception on 29 September.
This week, the U.S. Copyright Office announced some changes in its special handling requirements and some additional information about the impact of the coronavirus on the copyright registration system. You can find the complete announcement
here.
In the last four years there has been dramatic shifts within the Getty Images Creative Collection. It is unclear how this has affected gross revenue generated as Getty has stopped providing a public breakdown of the revenue segments of its business. Nevertheless, it is believed that since 2016 annual gross Creative revenue has consistently generated about $280 million of the company's roughly $850 million in gross revenue.
Since June 2018, CEPIC has been actively collaborating closely with Google, and later with IPTC, and DMLA to find a way to make Google Image Search users aware that certain image found need to be licensed. On Wednesday February 26th at 3pm EST there will be an online Zoom meeting on Google Images Licensable Badge – Nuts & Bolts with Doug Dawirs, Senior Technical Adviser of the DMLA and hosted along with industry experts to explain, and gather input, on the upcoming UI,
Schema.org and IPTC changes. To register in advance for this meeting go here:
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/vpMucu-trDIu6pKIFcgRfuu5EPnVgsQlHQ
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2019 revenue of
$166.4 million up 3% compared to Q4 2018 and up from $157.42 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.44 per image, up from $3.40 in Q4 2018. Total image and video downloads for Q4 were up to
47.7 million compared to 46.8 million a year earlier. At the end of the year Shutterstock had over 314 million images and 17 million video clips, for a total of
331 million pieces of content in its collection.
Alamy has been acquired by
PA Media Group a UK-based news and information business. Founded 20 years ago, Alamy has one of the world’s most diverse creative and editorial stock imagery collections, comprising almost 200 million photographs, vectors and 360-degree panoramic images sourced from a network of over 100,000 photographers and 650 picture agencies and archives. . The business has close to 100,000 customers in more than 150 countries, working across a range of sectors including publishing, design, advertising and broadcast.
Alamy may be the fifth largest company in the in the stock photo industry (after Getty Images, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, and iStock) and has been doing reasonably well in a very sick industry. Alamy’s latest reported sales figures are for 2018 and can be found on the
Companies House website. on October 17, 2019. This report was recorded on October 17, 2019 and shows that Alamy had gross annual sales of £22.7 million ($29,305,500 ).
CORRECTION - Please re-read yesterday's story on
Future Demand For Photography. I made a serious math error in the original story. The situation for photographers is much worse than earlier reported.
Unsplash’s statistics page currently reports
70,263,886 downloads per month. The
combined monthly downloads of Shutterstock, Getty and Alamy only total about
16,433,333 downloads, or about 24% of Unsplash's monthly totals.
A reader asked recently, “Is it true that Unsplash is now getting more downloads than Getty, Shutterstock and Alamy combined?” According to
Unsplash’s statistics page they currently have
70,263,886 downloads per month. Based on Shutterstock’s last
quarterly report they have about 15,433,333 downloads monthly. Their downloads per quarter haven’t changed much quarter-to-quarter over the last two years so I think this number is a pretty good average and not really growing.
A key tool for professional photographers for more than 50 years will no longer be available to future photographers as DynaLite Inc. files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy (all assets will be sold off to pay creditors).
Freepik Company, a platform of free and exclusive graphic content, has signed Rod Oliveira to a newly created position of Chief Marketing Officer in a move to strengthen an area of great strategic relevance for the brand.
It won’t be long until commercial image users, and possibly news outlets, will no longer need photos taken by human photographers. This will particularly be true for photos of people. Every image will be digitally created from existing photos and nothing will have any relevance to reality.
Photo District New, the preeminent publication for professional photographers in the U.S. has folded. See the sad story of its demise in
ProPhotoDaily. Individuals thinking of, or trying to establish, a career as a photographer should carefully consider whether this line of work has any long term future if the business is not healthy enough to support an industry publication for professionals. This certainly is another nail-in-the-coffin of the idea of photography as a career.
I just read a story on
Passive Income. The writer suggests that
stock photography is one way to earn passive income and says it “is income you earn from things you would normally do in your spare time, or when you’re not working at a salaried job.”
Active Income, on the other hand is the salary you get from the work you do by investing time and effort directly in return for money; if you don’t work, you don’t earn. Whether you are a teacher, a builder, a banker, a software developer, an athlete, an actor, or a doctor, you have to work to earn a living.” The time you spend working is tied to the income you receive.
In 2019 among the most successful creative industry events in New York were
footageMarketplace and
imageMarketplace. This year these two events have been combined and renamed
creativeMarketplace New York 2020. The event will be returning on April 1, 2020 to the Midtown Loft at 267 Fifth Avenue (29th St & 5th Av.) in New York City and will be open from 9:30am to 7:00pm.
Shutterstock says it is excited to announce a new
annual music subscription for only
$199 per-year or $16.60 per-month. This subscription gives the user the freedom to download as many tracks as needed, whenever they need them, for one low yearly price. Those interested may visit the
pricing page to start their subscription.
The
2020 CEPIC Congress, the largest networking hub for agencies worldwide will take place at the Gran Melia Victoria in Palma de Mallorca from 27 to 29 May 2020 with a welcome reception on May 26th. Registration is now open. For fees and other registration details check out
this link.
The
“Lean In” concept in business generally suggests the idea of moving forward on an idealized path. Chest out. Chin up. Figuring it out along the way. Watch out, world — here I come.
“Step Back” is more about taking the time to assess the overall business landscape and consider long term risks and potential, and the likelihood of achieving long term goals. After carefully assessing one makes a decision as to whether to aggressively Lean In on the path they have been headed, or make radical adjustment in direction for their long term good. It is time for everyone in the stock photography business to
“Step Back.”
Shutterstock has launched its ninth annual
Creative Trends Report, identifying global and local trends that will influence design aesthetics and visual culture in 2020.
A New York State appeals court overturned a lower court’s ruling and held that an insurer must defend McGraw-Hill Education Inc. in underlying copyright litigation in the case of McGraw-Hill Educ., Inc. v. Ill. Nat’l Ins. Co.
The leading trade association for moving-image licensors, 17-year-old
ACSIL (Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors) has joined forces with the Digital Media Licensing Association (
DMLA) as of January 1, 2020. The DMLA, which began 70 years ago as a picture agency association, now represents all media licensors, and by adding ACSIL, a long-standing and respected moving-image association, will significantly increase membership and reach.
A reader wrote, “Over the years you’ve published Shutterstock’s gross revenue number. It would be good to see the ratio of corporate earnings to photographer earnings after this weeks
1 billion horn blow.”
It is getting harder and harder for image creators to get higher royalties on their images in
iStock’s Signature collection. Royalties go up based on the total number of times images belonging to a particular creator are downloaded during the year. Download targets for Exclusive contributors have been around since 2017. At the beginning of the year the contributor starts with the ending royalty rate of the previous year. On January 1st iStock starts counting downloads for the year. Essential image downloads are counted as one while Signature Plus downloads are counted as 2. Some, but not all, downloads of Signature images through Gettyimages.com also count as 2. Others, probably mostly Premium Access sales, only count as 1.
Shutterstock Custom assignments seem to be working well for some contributors. Below you will answers to my questions from two of of the more successful Custom Assignment contributors, Adrianne Haskins and Jeremy Pawlowski. Haskins is based in Tenessee and Pawlowski in Portland Oregon. To see Pawlowski’s work check out this
link and for Haskins work go to
this site.
One of many reasons for the decline of stock photography as a profession is that it has become almost impossible for photographers to get a clear understanding of the various types of imagery, and the relative degree of demand, that users want and need. Once that was not the case, but now there is a total disconnect between image creators and image users.
An
iStock Exclusive photographer asked, “Given that Getty is ‘racing to the bottom’ and is about to eliminate Rights Managed from its collection, do you think our Exclusive contracts will be next?" I don’t think so. It seems to me that it will still be to
Getty’s advantage to keep the Exclusive segment of iStock.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that its contributor base has reached $1 billion in earnings paid. The company released its
Contributor Earnings Report, which breaks down the massive achievement shared among its global community of artists, photographers, videographers and musicians. The report showcases an overview of earnings by region, a snapshot of high-growth countries and features a selection of contributors who helped make the achievement possible.
Each year, my team at Adobe Stock spends hundreds of hours pouring over thousands of pages of research reports, global news, search data, fine art, and fashion imagery and more to bring you the coming year’s creative trends. This year, we’re doing something a little bit different. For 2020, we’re excited to reveal not just four Visual Trends, but accompanying Motion Trends and Design Trends, too.
Shutterstock, Inc. has launched its 2020 Color Trends report. By analyzing billions of pixel data from images downloaded, and then mapping each pixel to its closest named hex code, the report reveals which colors had the greatest growth between 2018 and 2019, as well as local favorites from around the world. Shutterstock’s 1.9 million customers include designers, marketers, creatives, and bloggers who are often working months in advance on campaigns and projects. Their download choices help to forecast trends in the year ahead.
According to Reuters, the website of communications watchdog
Roskomnadzor has said that one of
Shutterstock’s domains was blocked in Russia on November 13th by the country's Attorney General because the site contained "insulting state symbols."
Paul Roberts of the Seattle Times has recently interviewed Craig Peters, Getty Images CEO, and published an analysis of the company’s current situation entitled “
Its Crunch Time For Seattle Based Photo Giant Getty Images, And For Photographers” that everyone in the industry may want to read.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the
Death Of Rights Managed Licensing, but Alamy reports that it is alive and well at Alamy. They say, “There’s been lots of discussion in recent weeks about the future of Rights-Managed licensing. Alamy has no plans to discontinue offering RM images and will continue to offer photographers a choice to license their photos as Rights-Managed or Royalty-Free."
Adobe has announced a plan to
authenticate photos as way way of helping consumers determine if the images they see on the Internet are real or fake. How this will work hasn’t been fully spelled out, but is expected to be rolled out in “coming months” according to Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky (See the video of his presentation
here.
The Paris Council, the City of Paris has just granted
Photononstop Group, for a period of five years, the cultural promotion and commercial exploitation of the digital reproductions of two heritage photographic collections: Roger-Viollet and France-Soir.
Bridgeman Images announces that CEO, Victoria Bridgeman after twenty years with Bridgeman Images and the last eight as CEO has decided to step down at the end of the year and move on to new challenges. Dirk Hendrickx, currently Global Head of Sales and Marketing, has been appointed to succeed her at the start of 2020.
For over a decade image creators have been discouraged by Premium Access pricing. I believe PA was first instituted around 2006 as a way for Getty to get a guaranteed monthly payment from some of its largest Enterprise clients rather than the company be being subject to the erratic monthly image needs of some of these customers where they might purchase a huge number of images one month and little or nothing the next.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced the launch of an unlimited monthly subscription for
Shutterstock Music. The new plan is geared toward digital content creators, including YouTubers, podcast producers, and social media managers, offering a cost-efficient solution to licensing unlimited high-quality tracks at $149 per month.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that Jarrod Yahes is joining the Company as Chief Financial Officer, effective December 9th, 2019. In this role, Yahes, will lead Shutterstock’s Finance, Investor Relations, and Accounting functions. Jarrod will drive financial strategy and report to Jon Oringer, Shutterstock's Founder and CEO.
“Jarrod’s expertise in financial management and strategic growth, as well as his industry experience will be invaluable to our continued success as our company evolves,” said Oringer. “We are pleased to welcome Jarrod to our leadership team and look forward to his contributions to our business.”
A lot of the images being uploaded to major websites these days have little relevance to what the market needs. I decided to do searches on
Shutterstock for country names to try to get some idea of the number of images from each location relative to what the likely demand is for such images.
The
Everett Collection now represents the Photo Link Collection! A finely edited portfolio focusing on New York City celebrities during the 1970’s to 2000’s. Highlights include behind the scenes shots and life behind the velvet ropes inside Studio 54.
I was asked recently what I thought Shutterstock could do to grow revenue. My answer was not much. I don’t think it will be possible to grow the downloads very much. Shutterstock has focused for several years on growing the number of Enterprise customers. But, I don't think that is likely to work either. The one thing they could do is raise prices on at least some of the images they license. See my thoughts on why this is a good idea that they are not likely to adopt.
With the death of RM licensing on the horizon, photographers need to consider whether there is much, if any, value in owning a copyright. Photography has become a commodity like corn or soybeans. Read this story for what the industry can maintain a value for at least some of the professional images being produced.
Getty’s decision to kill RM may be an
opportunity for all those agencies and individuals who want to: (1) continue to license images for higher prices based on usage and (2) enforce their claims of copyright ownership. The key will be in providing a service that will help users, not just benefit image creators.
If you weren’t at the Adobe MAX 2019 conference in Los Angeles you might want to check out some of the videos of conference presentations. Some of the most exciting events were the 11 Sneaks –demos that showcased early-stage, cutting-edge R&D technology being developed in-house by Adobe employees. Adobe Max Sneaks feature AI photography, animation, and audio tools. These new product features may or may not make their way into the product roadmap, but underscore the innovation and creativity happening daily within Adobe’s four walls.
Getty is shutting down all Rights Managed licensing on
www.gettyimages.com. This may effectively be an end to the entire marketing strategy of pricing stock images based on how they are used. While there are still a number of small and mid-sized agencies that continue to price images based on usage, it seems highly unlikely that they will be able to continue to build their image collections or attract many customers in the future. Every stock photographer and stock agent should read
this explanation of Getty’s plans for “phased retirement of rights-managed creative images.”
Shutterstock has reported Q3 2019 revenue of
$159.1 million up 5% compared to Q3 2018 and down slightly from $161.7 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.40 per image, which was the same in Q3 2018. Total image and video downloads for Q3 were
46.3 million, up from 43.9 million a year earlier, and down from 46.6 million in Q2 2019. At the end of the quarter Shutterstock had over 297 million images and 16 million video clips, or
313 million pieces of content in its collection.
Depositphotos has launched a new series of
photo collections to battle stock photo cliches. The company’s content curators repurpose stock photos and compile collections on a weekly basis to highlight photos that are not typical stock photography.
It has been announced that the
2020 CEPIC Congress will be held on the Spanish island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean sea on May 27 through 29, 2020.
A 65-year-old photographer who has been selling his work as stock for many years and licensing his images as RM wrote recently asking my advice. He has a large collection of images and licenses a lot directly to clients, but over the years he has also made a small percentage of sales through stock agencies. See my advice.
The DMLA is publishing the initial results of our first Google Images Survey in anticipation of our 24th Annual DMLA Conference in LA. With our members representing over 80% of North American image and video licensing, and more than a third of our respondents C-level executives, the survey will provide the DMLA with data and member consensus to guide future engagement, advocacy and educational efforts.
PicRights Europe GmbH has expanded its enforcement network. To bolster their growing enforcement activities in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic, PicRights has added an experienced team in Vienna, Austria. As the newest enforcement partner, PicRights Austria will augment the long-established network in major markets in Europe, North America, India, Africa, South America and the Middle East, further cementing PicRights’ dedication to wide-ranging geographical coverage of key markets around the world for its clients.
The CASE Act, H.R. 2426, passed in the House of Representatives this week by an
overwhelmingly by a vote of 410-6. The bill still needs to pass through the Senate (and then be signed by the President) before it can be enacted into law.
Visual AI can do some incredible things. In 2019, using off-the-shelf AI and Machine Learning solutions from multiple vendors, media licensors can automatically tag massive image libraries, find landmarks or logos in images, and even get full-text captions that read like they were written by a person. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can pull text out of an image--even if it’s handwritten, or on some tiny visual element, like a road sign - and automatically translate it into 100+ languages.
At CEPIC’s annual conference in Paris this June, Google Images’ Product Lead, Francois Spies, presented new functionality in development and expressed Google’s desire to work more closely with organizations like CEPIC and DMLA. These were encouraging words, on the heels of last years’ announcement at the DMLA’s 23rd Annual Conference of Google’s adoption of long-fought-for IPTC metadata fields.
Shutterstock has released a
background removal tool as part Shutterstock Editor users can now easily remove the background from any image in the Shutterstock collection or their own images. (Shutterstock images must be purchased before they can be modified.)
Shutterstock’s ongoing efforts to make the creative life of its customers easier continues with the launch of
reverse image search for video. This new feature makes it faster than ever to find exactly the right video clip in Shutterstock’s footage library.
Shutterstock, Inc. has launched
Smart Brief, a new streamlined and guided experience to make it easier for photo users to quickly and efficiently improve the quality of the brief for a photo shoot. With this update, clients spend less time inputting briefs and more time leveraging collaboration tools to quickly obtain high-quality branded content and reduce the approval process time.
A reader recently pointed me to a comprehensive
index of global newspapers that may be of some use to readers. Links are provided to each publication. This index seems to be very thorough in its listing of publications in smaller countries, but when it comes to major market it seems to only list major national publication and few, if any, of the smaller local and regional publications.
The
24th Annual DMLA Conference will focus on “seizing the opportunity” as the content-streaming arms race generates more visual media production and visual content licensing - than ever imagined. The program will include 2 Keynotes, 6 full sessions and 15 roundtables delving into new technologies, sales and marketing strategies, hot legal topics, deep-dive educational opportunities and successful new business models with all-day networking and evening events sponsored by Google and PicRights.
House of Pictures, the Copenhagen based interior and lifestyle feature agency, will become a brand of
Image Professionals GmbH on October 1st, 2019. Pernille Schlosser, the founder and Managing Director will remain on board and in charge of the widely recognized boutique agency. House of Pictures, founded by Pernille Schlosser in 2000, is matching feature stories with high-end lifestyle publications around the world.
The Image Works CEO Mark Antman has announced that after thirty-six years of operation The Image Works will be closing in the near future. He added, "We have had a fantastic run, but it is time for me to close the business, retire and move on."
Alamy has told contributors that they no longer need them to supply copies of releases when the images are submitted. However, they advise that it is best if the contributor would indicate in the Alamy Image Manager under the optional information tab that a release is accessible. Then the customer can request to see the release if it is needed.
According to AdAge Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at WPP’s Groupm, weighed in with a blog post last week, saying “advertising growth is looking neutral to negative versus last year, with recent trends likely to continue.” Marketers, he stated, “need to be prepared for a downturn.” For more information see the
full story.
The 24th Annual
Digital Media Licensing Association Conference will convene at the Marriott Marina del Rey in Los Angeles on October 27 - 29. This is a must attend event for senior officials from organizations in the business of licensing rights to stock images. For the entire program schedule check out
this link.
A huge percentage of ads both in print and online use portraits of someone who is using or endorsing the product or service in the add.
Shutterstock has 134,636 headshots in its collection and
AdobeStock has 156,560. Many of these individual frames show 16 to 25 different headshots in the frame so the total variations is much greater.
Alamy has 107,506 women and 62,011 men headshots.
Getty has a total of 1,156,443 images with the keyword “headshot.”
Did you know that U.S. States can sometimes use your copyrighted photos for free? The case of
Allen v Cooper heading to the Supreme Court in November will test this right. Rick Gell, interim Executive Director of the
DMLA has interviewed the association’s Senior Legal Counsel Nancy Wolff of CDAS to try to understand how the state of North Carolina could claim this right and why the case has gotten all the way to the Supreme Court.
On September 10th the House Judiciary Committee unanimously passed by voice vote the Manager's Amendment to
H.R. 2426, the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019 (CASE Act). This legislation will provide U.S. creators with a viable means for defending their copyrighted works through the creation of a small claims tribunal within the U.S. Copyright Office.
In response to my story
RM Licensing No Longer Makes Sense Peter George Unger commented, “I have 9,200 images with Getty and every single one is RM. I am making on average $15,000 per year from them. Can you honestly tell me I can make more money than that on pathetic RF prices? for which they pay $0.25 cents per download. Which library would pay more then 15K on RF prices?
Libris by PhotoShelter and
Greenfly Inc. have announced a strategic partnership to empower effortless content sharing across social media. This relationship unites Libris’ digital asset management platform for visual storytelling with Greenfly’s new product, Greenfly Connect, which fully automates the last-mile content workflow for social media. With the power of Libris and Greenfly, brands can now tap into the networks of their influencers and exponentially boost their reach across social platforms.
For a long time, I’ve been trying to get some idea of the revenue AdobeStock generates annually. Adobe doesn’t share that information, but I’ve finally arrived at a strategy that may help. I’ve contacted a few of Adobe’s major contributors and asked them what their total royalty earnings were from Adobe in the last year and the total number of images they have in the collection.
Science Photo Library has announced a change in its distribution and future presence in the French market. As of September they launched
sciencephoto.fr to further strengthen their presence.
Effective September 1, 2019, StockFood will become
Image Professionals. The Munich-based media service provider
StockFood GmbH originally focused on food photography, but has continuously expanded its scope of business in recent years and is now emerging with a new company name. Image Professionals will bring together all of the company's specialized agencies and services. However, only the company is being renamed. StockFood, the food photo agency, will remain unaffected.
Many brands are finding that their Internet marketing is not working as well as it did a year or so ago. The brands pay Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other web hosting services huge amounts of money to target potential customers with pop-up ads that often don’t seem to generate much in additional sales. Brands like Airbnb, Away, Bumble, Callaway Golf, REI Co-op and Goose Island Beer Co. are developing custom, specialized magazines that focus on what their brand has to offer. If this trend grows it may offer new work for assignment photographers with specialized connections or skills.
It’s bad enough that social media users are grabbing photos they find on the Internet and using them without compensation or credit, but they are also using them in ways that totally mis-represents the story the image creator was trying to tell. Increasingly, not only is it impossible to believe anything you READ on the Internet, you can’t even believe anything you SEE on it either.
An editorial stock agent tells me that he is trying to hold the line, or increase, the prices he charges for images because his providers tell him that their costs are increasing. Meanwhile, a competitor who is offering dramatically lower prices in an attempt to win customers has entered the market. As a result, the agent's providers are seeing poorer sales. He asks for advice as to what he should do? I’ll give some answers, but I also want to invite my readers to chime in with any thoughts they might have, or strategies that have worked for them.
According to Leslie Hughes, Founder & CEO of
iSPY Visuals, Inc.45% of Creative Pros are using FREE (CC0) content. Similar percentages are using microstock. Leslie also operates
Visualsteam where she conducts regular buyer surveys in an effort get a better understanding of the developing and changing needs for photos and illustrations. Check out this link for more information about
Visualsteam’s 6th Annual Survey of Image Buyer.
Many U.S. photographers are hoping the CASE Act, a new law working its way through Congress, will help them protect their copyright and make it easier for them to go after infringers. The law will establish a Copyright Claims Board (CCB), a Small Claims court and eliminate the need to use the expensive Federal Court system to pursue infringers. Photography trade associations – ASMP, PPA, DMLA, NPPA, APA, NANPA – and other members of the
Copyright Alliance have been seeking this change for over a decade.
Storyblocks will be closing the Marketplace segment of its business on September 10th and moving back to a subscription only offering. Contributors who have outstanding payouts will receive those payments sometime after September 10th even if the amount owed has not met the minimum payout requirement.
Internet search technology has enabled professional photographers to discover more and more uses of their images. As a result, an increasing number of photographers are pursuing the users for compensation. Given how the system works customers who have legitimately licensed rights to use images are often required to do extra work to prove they did the right thing in the first place. This is not making these good stock agency customers happy. Some stock agencies fear that this extra hassle may drive some of their best paying customers to turn to more
FREE images rather than bother with paid sources.
The CASE Act which will establish a Small Claims system that targets copyright abuse is
working its way through Congress. The bill has finally been passed in the House and is awaiting action in the Senate. Photographers interested in understanding some of the downsides of this bill should read this FREE Story.
Cathy Aron will be retiring as Executive Director of DMLA in the fall and Rick Gell will be taking over her duties. Over the summer Rick will be acting as Interim Executive Director as Cathy assists in the transition one day a week.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2019 revenue of
$161.7 million up 3% compared to Q2 2018 and down from $163.3 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.44 per image, compared to $3.41 in Q2 2018.?? Total image and video downloads for Q2 were
46.6 million, up from 45.2 million a year earlier, and down from 47.2 million in Q1 2019.
StockFood has launched
StockFood Studios, an innovative production service for food photography. The Munich-based food experts, whose international brand is synonymous with professional food photography, are expanding their portfolio to include commissioned productions. The website www.stockfoodstudios.com offers this new service.
Forbes Magazine has a story entitled “
Move Over Stock Photos, It’s Time For User Generated Content.” There certainly is an increasing demand for User Generated Content (UGC) and the market is being flooded with it, but there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding how much it is likely to take over the stock photo market.
Photographers trying to license their images as
Rights Managed (RM) need to give some serious though about whether this strategy is still in their best interests. In theory, licensing based on usage should enable a photographer to occasionally get higher prices for certain uses, rather than giving away all future rights and allowing multiple re-uses for a low
Royalty Free (RF) license. The following are some reasons why this “theory” no longer works.
Free Images may not always be FREE. There are not only big legal risks for the users, but also potential time demands on users, creators and lawyers. Most users of Free images don’t recognize the risks they may be taking. One of the big questions for professional photographers is how to help those looking for free images to understand these risks.
Recently, I received a press release from
Freepik.com. The name is a misnomer because not all the pictures on the site are free. They do have about
1,750,000 free vectors, icons and photos, all created or wholly owned by Freepik. In addition, they have over
4,185,000 Premium photos and illustrations supplied by about 8,000 individual creators and distributors of microstock. A little under half of the pieces of content are photos. The rest are illustrations, vectors and icons.
The Internet is a great place for selling things if the finished product must be delivered by FedEx or UPS. But if you’re trying to sell is a digital version of what you’re showing,
then long range your business model doesn’t have much future. It’s too easy to “steal,” “appropriate” or whatever you want to call it.
Shutterstock, has announced its new footage offering—
Shutterstock Elements. Over 3,000 elements captured on cinema-grade cameras and lenses have been added to the site, including transitions, lens flares, VFX (visual effects), video kits, film overlays, HUD (head-up display) and UI (user interface) elements. Compatible with all major video editing programs, Elements also includes detailed tutorials on how to optimize effects.
In the last decade we have all watched the decline of stock photography as more and more photographers got into the game, the total revenue spent by buyers grew very little if at all and even the best photographers have seen significant declines in their annual income.
I suppose this benefited the buyers. Now they are able to get the images they need for much less than they had to pay before – and in most cases much less than their real costs of production.
In olden days when stock photographers were trying to produce images that might be used as covers or full page inside magazines it was advised that they turn the camera on its side and shoot verticals of as many situations as possible. But times have changed. Are verticals really selling today? Recently Robert Kneschke reported on his
web site that he had reviewed 100 of his best selling images and not a single vertical was among the group.
All the people who love to grab photos they find on the Internet and use them however they please are now mobilizing to stop the U.S. Congress from passing the CASE Act that would establish a small claims court system. These
millions of photo users believe they should not be restricted in any way from doing whatever they want with the property of others. Photographers need to
ACT NOW.
Getty Images is moving rapidly to eliminate RM images from its Creative collection. As of July 3rd, there were only
2,387,383 RM images representing about 8% of the total collection of
28,624,340 images. However, it gets worse. There are 54 independent distributors listed as having RM image collections on the site. But, if you search those collections individually you find that only 4 of them have any images for a total of 129,241 images. In most cases the searcher is told “zero results.” The vast majority of images still being licensed as RM are in the Getty wholly owned collections.
It is interesting to note that when we searched the 210 individual collections and recorded the numbers in each the total came to
28,591,367. However, if you go to the site and search for all images you are only shown
26,240,654 images. For those who haven’t tried this you can simply go to
gettyimages.com, enter any keywords and hit return. When the return come up with the “Filter” option on the left hand side of the screen remove the keyword, leave the search bar blank and click again. Now, you will be shown all the images for the “License Type” you have requested. Be sure the “License Type” is set on RF or RM. Then you can go to “Collections,” choose the one you want and see all the images in that collection.
A number of iStock contributors interact on the Facebook “private” group for iStock. In reviewing comments and complaints for the last couple years there seems to be general agreement that sales started to decline in late 2018 and the decline has continued into 2019. This is compared to what sales were in 2017 and early 2018.
One of the big questions about Enterprise sales at Shutterstock is “Why do big customers want an Enterprise deal?” On average Enterprise customers are paying more per quarter than E-commerce customers. What additional services do they get? In 2018 Enterprise customers generated about 40.9% of Shutterstock’s total revenue, or about
$254.8 million. The average Enterprise customer pays Shutterstock $6,370 per year, but they could be getting 750 images per month for $2,388 a year. Maybe they are using a lot of video at $63.16 per clip, but there must be other benefits justifying the paying of the much higher fees.
On the iStock contributor forum Brenda Bazylewski of iStock contributor relations recently reported the following. “We (iStock) were recently made aware of the Chinese website, “
Xiaba” which was offering iStock imagery for personal educational use only, free of charge. According to the terms of their license, the imagery could not be used for commercial or editorial purposes."
A reader asked, “Is it known how much money is lost when premier and enterprise customers are able to get high resolution images that they use for sketching, internal presentation or pitches at subscription prices and only pay for the ones they use in print?”? The answer if
NO. Nobody had any idea, or is tracking, of how many images are used in this way compared to how many are actually used in delivered products. But, we do offer some related data of the loss through subscriptions compared to licensing based on use.
When I got into photography one of the strengths of the profession was that what a viewer saw in a picture really happened. When a reporter wrote a story the reader often could not be sure that what was described was an accurate reflection of the truth. The photograph provided a level of truth. The viewer knew that what they were seeing really happened. The photograph may have been out of context with the general tenor of the overall event, but at least it was an accurate reflection of what was happening in the instant it was created.
Thinkstock is officially closed. The closing was first
announced in April 2018. All the imagery is now available on
iStock or
Getty Images. Thinkstock annual subscribers will be offered a product that is made up of the same content that is currently available on Thinkstock, including the same iStock Essentials imagery.
Shutterstock announced yesterday that Co-Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer Steven Berns will depart from his roles at Shutterstock to pursue other opportunities, effective immediately to pursue other opportunities. Mr. Berns' departure is not due to a dispute or any matter relating to the Company's accounting and financial policies and operations.
Robert Kneschke’s story on
Unsplash last week got me thinking about trademarks and logos. Professional photographers tell me that the inspectors for the major stock agencies – Getty, Shutterstock, AdobeStock and iStock – are increasingly rejecting photos with any identifying brand marks for fear of legal action by the brands.
A while ago, I tried here to understand the business model of
Pixabay, who want to make money from free pictures. A similar company, but with greater international notoriety, is
Unsplash. In 2013, as a simple Tumblr blog, this company took the stage where 10 free pictures were shared. There are currently over 1,000,000 free images online, which have received a total of over 1,006,650,155 free downloads. These and many other exciting figures can be found here on the
statistics page of Unsplash.
The Copyright Alliance needs all image creators to help push the CASE Act – the bill to create a copyright small claims court for creators and small business owners – through Congress. On May 1, the
Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act) of 2019 (H.R. 2426 and S. 1273) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.
Next week a two-day Creative Marketplace event will take place in New York at the Midtown Loft, 267 Fifth Avenue (29th St & 5th Av.) from 9:30 to 5:30 each day. This event is designed to give image and footage buyers an opportunity to meet with creators and organizations that license creative content. There will be free seminars aimed particularly at the buyer, but which will also offer useful information for the creators.
The Texas Appeals court has ruled that the state can infringe upon copyright without risking punishment under the state’s or federal government’s “takings” clause. More than two years ago, photographer Jim Olive discovered that his aerial photo of the Houston skyline (titled “The Cityscape”) was being used by the University of Houston, a public university, on its website to promote its C.T. Bauer College of Business without requesting permission or making payment.
Robert Harding, CEO of
Robert Harding Picture Library, recently sent a message to picture buyers asking the question “Is picture research dead?” Image creators need to carefully consider the implications of this message.
A reader asked about un-vetted contributions to microstock sites. She has discovered that her work is widely copied on the Internet and says she was unaware that microstock sites allow people to post images that are not their own. She asked if I could provide a list of microstock sites that don’t follow up to determine if the person submitting images or footage really created what they are submitting. Finally, who should she chase up if there is an infringement?
A reader asked, “In the article written by Martin Lisius (
Microstock-The Dark Side Of Image Licensing) he refers to non micro agencies as a possible answer to the low prices that photographers receive. When I search under the heading of macro stock on your site about the only name that comes up is Getty. Do I understand this correctly?”
In an opinion issued June 5th federal Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted only one part of Google’s motion for partial final judgment on the pleadings regarding the breach of contract and breach of implied covenant claims by
Dreamstime.com that relate to a Google Play agreement.
A few months ago, I evaluated which countries most
Shutterstock providers come from. Today, there should be some similar analysis of Adobe Stock's data, or Fotolia, because although the portfolios on both websites are identical, Adobe Stock will unfortunately see less information about it.
A few weeks ago, the publicly traded image agency Shutterstock had released its
second-quarter 2018 business figures. Among those figures, there was also the remarkable 204.2 million images Shutterstock currently offers. 41% of these were added in the last year alone.
On my Facebook page there was a lively discussion afterwards, regarding exactly where these many millions of pictures come from.
PicRights, a global leader in copyright enforcement, has added a new partner in Johannesburg, South Africa to monetize copyright infringements for the world’s leading news agencies, stock image agencies and independent photographers. No other copyright compliance service offers its clients as much geographical coverage of key markets around the world.
The photo news agency
MAXPPP has selected two partner companies to monitor, recover and prosecute the use of its content on the internet, the newspapers and the magazines. The goal of the partnership: to increase by at least 50% its revenues related to fraudulent uses.
Shutterstock is officially rebranding
Rex Features as
Shutterstock Editorial today. The company says: “Since 2015, we have been working toward the goal of expanding our editorial collection and service to customers around the world. Over the past four years, our talented Editorial team has built a robust offering, becoming a premier source of editorial images for the world’s media.
There are often two sides to an industry. The side the customer sees, and the "inside" that industry people see. This article is about the inside of the stock image industry and how Microstock has changed. It also offers photographers and videographers some ideas how to deal with the issues.
Shutterstock, has announced that its free design application,
Shutterstock Editor, has surpassed more than 5 million users. The tool helps users, including creatives, designers, and marketers, to speed up their design workflow with easy-to-use, powerful editing functionality and customizable templates.
Getty Images, and
APO Group, a leading media relations consultancy and press release distribution service, have announced a wide-reaching collaboration to promote integrated text, photo and video solutions to organizations operating across Africa and the Middle East.
Canva, the Australian Graphic Design site that claims to have 50 million premium photos available via subscription, detected a data breach on May 24th of the records of 139 million customers.
A stock agent asked if I had heard a rumor that Getty isn’t selling RM images anymore. The rumors are almost true. I did a
story back in March entitled the
"End of RM" where I reported that Getty Images personnel were telling some stock agency suppliers that in 3 to 5 years there will be no more RM licensing.
Topic Images in Korea has announced to its suppliers that will be launching its ‘Topic Collection’ on the PIXTA website in an effort to deliver better sales and service to their partner agencies and offer a broad range of quality contents to its customers. Topic was
acquired by the Japanese agency PIXTA in 2017.
As more and more consumer are turning to social media for information about the products and services they want to buy Ad agencies and brands are finding that they must up the quality of their offerings in order to get attention. According to Erik Radle, CEO of Dallas-based
Miller Ad Agency, “People are finding out that the content has to just sing. It has to just dazzle. We’re spending a lot of time
doing photo shoots because the days of stock photography being meaningful on social media are over. That just doesn’t cut it any more and will get you ignored.”
A few years ago EyeEm decided to guarantee its photographers a minimum compensation for each image licensed through the Getty website regardless of what they received from Getty. Over the years they have steadily lowered that minimum and with the last sales report they have finally dropped the idea of a guaranteed minimum royalty. This article explores what happened.
A reader wrote recently that he believes
Shutterstock’s efforts to add huge quantities of image to its collection, as I discussed in recent
article, is a “calculated plan” to eventually eliminate the need for photographers. He believes that by “feeding these images into their AI machines they will be able to learn exactly what their customers want.” Then, it is his contention, that Shutterstock will be able to “deliver custom made images (which Shutterstock would create) to clients.” He argues that ”this would just be machine work and there would no longer be a need for image makers or even computer graphic designers.”
For ten years between 2007 and .2017
Visual Connections operated a fall expo in New York where visual media users could meet and network with stock agencies, artist reps, production companies, clearance and other service providers. There were also seminars about the business of sourcing and using visual media. They closed down their operation in 2017. On Tuesday, June 25, 2019
imageMarketplace New York 2019 (a London based company) will launch a new event with similar goals for influencers in the world of visual content.
One of the big questions for
Shutterstock is whether they can continue to grow the Enterprise segment of their business and how important that is to the eventual success of the company. In 2016 and 2017 they touted the success of Enterprise, but over the last 12 months Enterprise growth has been slowing and sales overall seem to be flattening.
Shutterstock has announced the launch of its new self-serve API subscription plans. For the first time, developers, startups, and small and mid-sized businesses can build products and features that seamlessly integrate Shutterstock’s image collection and enable in-app image reselling, providing an additional revenue stream for customers when their end-users license and download images.
The CASE Act (Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement) was first introduced in 2017, but the bill expired without being passed at the end of the last Congress, as is the normal process for all bills not passed. On May 1, 2019 the bill was re-introduced in both the House and the Senate.
Selling-Stock has managed to gather more information about what has been happening at VCG. According to sources sometime after the Corbis acquisition VCG decided to copy Getty’s Premium Access strategy and launch a PA plan of its own. In addition to all the Getty and Corbis creative and editorial images, the iStock images are also available to the customers who purchase a PA plan.
On April 26, 2019, the Fourth Circuit Court overturned a Northern Virginia District Court decision that allowed Violent Hues Productions, LLC’s to use a cropped version of a photo to promote a Film and Music Festival without compensation to the creator. Violent Hues had made no effort to request permission or compensate photographer Russell Brammer for the use and claimed “Fair Use” in court. (See
July 2018 story.)
It is less than one month until the annual
CEPIC Congress convenes in Paris on June 5 thru 7, 2019. Each year this event is the single most important meeting of people from all over the world who are engaged in the picture licensing industry.
On May 9, 2019 Mark Milstein will be offering a seminar in New York on Time-based Metadata: The Key to Video Discoverability and Content Immortality. The presentation will be at B&H Photo. Click
here to register. You can also watch online.
ACSIL and
Thriving Archives have completed their fourth
Global Survey of Stock Footage Companies (AGS4) since 2007 and estimate worldwide stock footage revenue in 2018 at $570 million, more than double what it was in
2007. Data for the survey launched in July 2018 was collected from 84 of the estimated 415 footage licensing companies worldwide.
Will more images in an agency collection grow revenue? Is more choice always better?
Shutterstock is adding 1,608,350 new images a week to its collection. That’s 229,764 new images a day. The average customer reviews 500 or fewer returns before changing search parameters. So how do they make it possible for customers to review all those new images?
The stock photo market in China may be bigger, and more lucrative than many people think. Gaopin Images tells Selling Stock that their average gross sale to Chinese customers in 2018 was $35,
17% more than what Getty is earning worldwide and
44% more than the gross China sales Getty is reporting to its contributors.
I was asked recently to appraise the value of a collection of stock images that were being donated. Back in the 1990s and even the early 2000s this would have been a relatively easy task. I would look at the revenue the collection had generated in previous years, determine the rate of revenue decline year over year and assess, based on the type of imagery, the length of time they might continue to have commercial value.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2019 revenue of
$163.3 million up $6.7% compared to Q1 2018, (excluding Webdam which was sold in the first quarter of 2018). The revenue was almost flat with the $162.1 million generated in the previous quarter. During the conference call CFO Steven Berns pointed out that traditionally revenue for Q1 is very similar to revenue in Q4 of the previous year. Revenue per download averaged
$3.42 per image, compared to $3.40 in Q1 2018.
Shutterstock, has announced the renewal of its agreement with The Associated Press (AP) to distribute AP’s daily global photo output for license to customers based in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland.
On April 8, 2019 there was a roundtable discussion at the Copyright Office’s with regard to the immunity Internet Service Providers are entitled to under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if they comply with various provisions. The content creator community has been hoping that the U.S. might follow the lead of the
European Parliament and provide some additional protections for creators.
VCG is still offline in China and there is no clear indication when they may be able to resume operations. It appears that VCG’s standard prices have ranged from tens to thousands of yuan. Thus, they could be as low $5 to $10 for the use of an image. Such prices seem to fit with the gross sales prices Getty Images has been reporting, minus a reasonable share for the selling agency. We also know that in a very few cases customers have paid well over $600 to use an image. However, It is unclear what the usage conditions have been for the extremely low prices or anything in between. Maybe VCG’s standard price packages have been very similar to those of Shutterstock or Adobe Stock. We don’t know.
Photo World Magazine in China asked for my views on four issues related to the VCG copyright dispute. The following are my responses to the questions. I’ve decided to share these comments with my readers. In addition, at the bottom of the story there links to some other stories on Selling-Stock.com that provide additional information
As we
reported last week Visual China Group (VCG) in China was forced to close down itd website over the issue of offering the “Black Hole” photograph without giving “clear and visible” credit as required by the Creative Commons license.
Shutterstock, has announced the launch of its first Augmented Reality (AR) feature, available on the Shutterstock customer iOS application. The latest update to the iOS application includes a new
“View in Room” button that allows users to access their camera phone and virtually position any of Shutterstock’s 250 million images against the wall in a room of their choosing.
Brianna Wettlaufer, former Co-Founder and CEO of
Stocksy, has joined
Adobe Stock as Head of Content. A longtime creative industry veteran and innovative entrepreneur Brianna has held numerous leadership roles in the stock photo industry including Vice President of Development at iStock among others. Brianna resigned her position at Stocksy last August for personal reasons.
Adobe has released its latest 2019 Visual Trend report called
Brand Stand. The trend report explores consumers’ desire for companies that align themselves with important social issues and how brands like Nike and Gillette are driving this trend with high-impact creative that takes a stand.
Techcrunch reports that VCG grabbed the first black hole photo released by the European Southern Observatory and immediately made the image available for sale for either editorial and commercial use without any attribution to the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT), an array of radio telescopes that captured the black hole image.
More and more photographers are expressing frustration with Getty Images and saying they are pulling their images. Many are looking for another distributor that will charge higher prices and offer a better royalty share. I hate to defend Getty, but to be fair today’s low prices are not all their fault. If we go back to the early 2000s Getty tried to keep prices at reasonable levels, but once iStock and Shutterstock came on the scene, and got some traction, there was no way for Getty to hold out forever.
Envato, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, has solidified its place as one of the key players in the stock photography market with the acquisition of stock photo subscription service
Twenty20. The Los Angeles-based company that started out as
a way for people to print Instagram photos onto canvas, boasts more than 350,000 creative contributors to its library of more than 45 million authentic, crowd-sourced photos.