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Articles from October 2008
Jupiterimages announced that Photo.com will now sell images as singles and reported an 11% increase in StockXpert contributor royalties.
An insider from the now-defunct Digital Railroad contacted
Selling Stock to say that a number of media outlets have misreported what has transpired at the company and to offer a different viewpoint.
A number of stock companies are betting that the rising popularity of multimedia content will spur the growth of stock music and sound licensing. Though there has been some activity in this area, integrating audio into the broader stock business is proving to be a challenge.
The Picture Archive Council of America aims to become the Google of commercial stock imagery. PACA plans to launch a stock-image search engine with a simple interface that will enable customers to quickly identify collections with images that relate to any of more than 120,000 of the most used search terms.
Not all forecasts are dark: Publicis, one of the world's largest advertising and media services organizations, reported relatively strong third-quarter results, driven by digital media.
As Digital Railroad hurriedly shuts down, PhotoShelter is offering discounts and technical assistance with archive migration.
Digital Railroad has given a 24-hour shutdown notice. Photographers using the company's online archiving service are advised to backup needed information immediately.
Photographers Roger Ressmeyer, Richard Minden and 82 other named complainants have filed a copyright infringement suit against Getty Images in the Eastern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege that licensing their rights-managed images as part of Getty's Premium Access subscription product is a violation of existing contractual agreements.
Corbis predicts still-image sales will decline only slightly by 2012. However, this is no reason to be sanguine, as the same total will be divided differently among various industry segments. In addition, this analysis was completed during the summer, prior to the more recent economic disruption.
During a weekend seminar at PhotoPlus Expo in New York, Corbis has announced that it will adjust rights-managed photographers' royalty rates downward "to harmonize its royalties with industry norms." Company CEO Gary Shenk also told
Selling Stock that Corbis recorded a profit during the last quarter.
The U.K. agency has accepted images irrespective of a contributor’s professional status since its launch. It has now launched an online FTP uploader that makes contributing even easier.
Digimarc for Images ships in-box with Adobe Photoshop and now includes improved resizing capabilities, foreign-language support and expanded Web monitoring services.
Getty Images photographer Brent Stirton took home several honors from this year's Lucie Awards, including International Photographer of the Year.
Getty Images and Jupitermedia announced a stock-purchase agreement that transfers ownership of Jupiter's wholly owned subsidiary, online image-licensing business Jupiterimages Corp., to Getty Images. The aggregate price of the deal is $96 million in cash--somewhere between a third and a quarter of the numbers discussed when last year's deal between the two companies fell apart for undisclosed reasons.
Swiss agency sees need for additional low-cost content.
Seattle-based horticultural offering unites images and feature stories.
The Copyright Registry is a free online beta service, whose mission is to help creators claim, track and defend their copyright, while simultaneously helping users find the owners of creative works.
According to a survey of 175 chief marketing officers, budgets are shifting to interactive and digital marketing--at the expense of traditional spending.
As stock photographers face unprecedented competition in their own space, many are thinking of diversifying into other photography niches. However, earning a living as a photographer is becoming increasingly difficult in all segments of the industry.
InSight America, a documentary project of Magnum Photos, launched on the eve of the U.S. presidential election to chronicle what the photojournalism cooperative sees a critical moment in the country's history.
British editorial agency Rex Features announced a merger of its North American operations with the Los Angeles-based Berliner group of companies.
PhotoShelter has released Personal Archive 2.0. CEO Allen Murabayashi discusses new features and expresses support for Digital Railroad.
If it does not renegotiate terms, the Associated Press will face the largest client loss since its announcement of a new fee structure.
So says Digital Railroad shareholder and former vice president of marketing and sales Mark Ippolito on the heels of last Wednesday's announcement of the company's financial woes. On Wednesday, Digital Railroad notified its community that its recent attempts to obtain funding have not succeeded, and the company has initiated a cost-reduction process.
The troubled Florida company has announced that it has integrated the budget MediaMagnet offering into the SuperStock Web site. While the company says that the MediaMagnet brand continues to grow, its consolidation with a21 Group's flagship stock product suggests that the budget brand has failed to gain enough traction as a standalone product.
ImageSource.com boasts new look and technology.
When talking about microstock, most traditional stock photographers like to say, "You can never make money selling pictures for $1.00!" The data from
Selling Stock's recent survey and other available industry information tends to explode that myth.
Its founders describe IC Worldwide as "a union of Parisian and New York photographic thought."
In the tables included in Oct. 16 "Survey: Stock Income per Licensing Model," several columns were mislabeled due to formatting issues. The story was updated with correct data at 2:15PM EST.
In two separate cases, the Regional Court of Hamburg ruled this week that Google's creation and distribution of image thumbnails for the purposes of indexing online content violates copyright law.
Stock photography is licensed in several ways. Of 238 respondents to the recent
Selling Stock survey, 179 licensed some work as rights-managed, and 37 licensed under Getty Images' rights-ready model. Stock income reported was usually less than the respondents' total income, because many photographers earned some revenue from sources other than stock.
The first thing to consider when reviewing the results of the
Selling Stock income survey is the degree to which these figures represent the total community of individual stock-image producers.
Stock shooters who also do assignment work earn as much from it as from stock, but their average income from stock is much lower than the overall stock-revenue average. In addition, footage producers emerge as overall revenue winners.
The economic downturn is likely to hit traditional stock shooters hard. Advertising theory says that when sales go down, it is important to increase advertising spending in order to increase market share. Combined with the possibility of assignment budgets moving toward stock, some professional photographers hope that advertisers will buy more images. This is highly unlikely.
Selling Stock's self-employed photographer income survey accounts for close to $33 million in revenues generated by 238 respondents from 19 countries.
On Monday, the President of the United States of America signed several bills into law. Among them was S. 3325, Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP) Act of 2008, which amends civil and criminal IP laws, establishes a new executive-level coordinator position and authorizes Justice Department grants to assist in combating IP theft and infringement.
According to the Picture Archive Council of America, copyright "has been a somewhat overlooked point of emphasis in the training of employees throughout the industry." PACA hopes to help address this problem with its copyright education program, posthumously named after stock-industry veteran Jane Kinne.
Finnish picture agency All Over Press International has opened a Moscow office to serve local, mainly editorial clients.
Though the American presidential race has placed the country's economy in the global spotlight, the economic crisis is also global and will have a profound effect on the advertising revenues of developed markets.
The Image Works, an editorial stock agency located in the historic New York state town of Woodstock, is celebrating 25 years in business.
The Francis Frith Collection documents the history of Britain from 1860 to 1970.
Leisa Mercer and Vicki Schelstraete have established a production company in Toronto.
Denver-based Thought Equity Motion announced that its library has grown to over 250,000 clips, which the company says is twice the size of its nearest competitors. Though Equity also claims to have the industry's most advanced delivery platform for high-definition content: Nearly all of the digital footage files licensed by the company are delivered online.
In an email letter to its business partners, Amsterdam-based features and images agency The Cover Story has announced that it is moving its sales and operations office to Bangalore, India, as of Nov. 1. The letter acknowledges that some may see the move as dramatic but claims that the relocation offers new opportunities.
iStockphoto and Avery Dennison Office Products have announced a multi-year agreement to cross-promote each other's offerings.
TinEye, the first image-to-image search engine developed by Canadian technology company Idée, will soon release a beta mobile application for the Apple iPhone.
Winning cover sports image of Spitzer by Getty Images/Contour.
When Photolibrary acquired IndexStock in late 2006, it took on the obligation of paying contributors all they were owed by the previous owners. To date, Photolibrary has paid out $1.96 million to 632 individual photographers. (All pre-acquisition monies owed to third-party suppliers have also been paid.) One of Photolibrary's first moves was to pay all contributors the amounts owed for sales booked in the six months prior to acquisition.
Professional and student photojournalists are invited to apply for one of Getty Images' editorial grants by Nov. 15.
Web-res offering expands inventory.
The world's preeminent photojournalism competition is now inviting entries for the 2009 contest.
California agency launches residential-architecture line that includes project information.
There are a number of reasons to believe that a rapidly growing supply of images may not be as big a problem for the buyer as some industry insiders think. Large image collections are outpacing tightly edited rivals in revenue growth in all pricing categories, suggesting that collection size and pricing are not the only factors influencing buyer decisions.
Paris agency hires four new sales and content executives.
Marketplace buyers want to be able to identify exclusive images.
Hamburg-based advertising photographer AL Accardo shoots rights-managed series.
PicScout remains exclusive Getty supplier of image-tracking services.
The new rights-managed editorial collection includes Heritage Images, which unites content from Britain's top museums and libraries.
Florida distributor has added a rights-managed active-travel offering to its 12-million-image inventory.
Many believe the marketplace has an oversupply of images. This raises several concerns for image producers.
"We are having fun here," says Jeff Shultz, owner of Anchorage-based Alaska Stock Images, which snagged the cover of this month's issue of
Newsweek. Shultz is also having a great month as a photographer: in a career-defining milestone, one of his images will be printed on a U.S. postal stamp commemorating Alaska's 50th anniversary of statehood.
Jerry Greenberg has once again petitioned the Supreme Court in his long-running battle with the National Geographic Society, which reused his copyrighted images without compensation in a CD-ROM compilation.