Change View Options:
Articles from October 2016
The 30th annual
GDUSA Stock Visual Reader Survey, is now available. GDUSA says that stock visuals have become a vital creative resource for graphic designers, moving over the 30-year period from marginal to mainstream to essential.
After five years in the position of US Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante was fired last Friday. Pallante was informed of her change in roles by being locked out of her computer. Maria has been a huge advocate for the rights of Creators and instrumental in the industry’s efforts for modernizing the Copyright Office and the creation of a Small Claim’s Court for Creators. She has been seen as being fair and unbiased by all who know her.
In an effort to make it easier for customers to find the images they need, ImageBrief has pulled together into
72 collections of 11,352 of the best images its photographers have submitted in response to customer briefs. See the list of collections below.
The stock photography world is changing fast, and constantly throwing up new challenges.
robertharding has decided to take a pioneering approach to creating new and exciting ways of working that will enable a new generation of image buying clients to find and purchase the work of a new generation of photographers in the easiest way possible.
I just returned from the
2016 PhotoPlus Expo. For the stock photographer there wasn’t much reason to go. If your interested in seeing what’s new in the way of equipment, then the Expo in New York is the once-a-year place to be. The Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Epson, Olympus and Tamron exhibits at the trade show were as big as always. Canon’s space may have even be bigger. But, overall the trade show was the smallest ever.
Shutterstock, Inc. has expanded the functionality of its design application, Shutterstock Editor. Features including professionally designed templates and the ability to upload personalized visual content such as a logo or business image, save designs for editing later, and publish finished designs to social networks are now available from within the application.
Microstock sites used to surface new images for weeks or months after they were uploaded. Now, photographers are saying that this no longer seems to be happening. It would be nice if photographers had more information and a better understanding about how the search algorithms work. Here's a little about how I think these complex algorithms work.
Justin Black operates
Visionary Wild a company that organizes workshops and photo tours for passionate photographers who have attended workshops and seminars with experienced photographers and are looking for new opportunities to move their work to the next level of quality, depth, purpose and meaning. Justin shared this story that occurred on a recent scouting trip to
Svalbard aboard an expedition cruise ship.
There is a lot of talk about how Big Data will save the industry, but are the major stock image distributors using the data they collect effectively? Given the huge number of
images currently in major databases, it would seem that a very high percentage of them are never viewed by anyone. If the distributors are collecting data properly, they should know which images are reviewed by customers and which aren’t. If there are lots of images that are never reviewed by customers, is there any way to generate revenue from those images.
Overall sales for Pearson fell 7% in the first 9 months of 2016, due to further inventory corrections by retailers in North American Higher Education courseware in July and August. Pearson noted that trends improved in September and, so far, into October.
In the “
Goodbye Shutterstock” thread on
MicrostockGroup marthamarks said, “My older images still sell on Shutterstock, but newer ones die there.” Why would that be? One would expect newer images to sell better, particularly when agencies continue to ask for more and more images. This does not seem to be insolated complaint, but one common to many long time Shutterstock contributors.
As more and more amateurs supply images for marketing – particularly “candid, real life” images – there may be an increased risk of images without proper releases getting used. Some agencies – and maybe even customers -- are also becoming more lax in checking whether valid releases exist. While many agencies require that a release be submitted with all people images, not all do.
According to the Pew Research Center in the last year 39% of Americans read only print books. Another 26% didn’t read any books at all, but read other things. The question is where do the other 35% of book readers get their information. Remember, that not so long ago the 74% who wanted to read a book turned to one that was printed.
In a research project performed by Pfeiffer Consulting for Adobe Stock, Pfeiffer found that users who acquire video clips from Adobe Stock could realized up to a 6x productivity increase for their video workflow compared to using other conventional stock video sources.
Last month
Africa Media Online conducted a survey to gain an understanding of how picture buyers and picture researchers use Google to find images. Seventy-eight percent (78%) of respondents use Google to help them find images for licensing.
Fstoppers has reported on a
new survey being conducted in the UK to try gather information about the future potential of photography as a career.
In the chart below I’ve searched
Shutterstock,
iStock,
AdobeStock,
Alamy and
Getty Images for the number of images in popular subject categories. No customer would use these words alone in a search for images. Other words would certainly be needed to narrow the search for something more specific within each category. (Note: that some images have more than one of these keyword and will appear in multiple categories.)
For the last 5 years I have conducted a semi-annual analysis of the number of downloads and images in the collection of 432 of iStock’s leading contributors. There may be some newer contributors that are now among the top iStock earners, but I don’t think very many. It takes time to build a significant collection and begin to get volumes of sales. These 432 probably represent one-third of all iStock single image downloads since the company began.
Blend Images has announced exclusive representation of the
Built Images stock library. With over 25,000 property-released photographs of contemporary commercial and residential architecture, interior design and home lifestyle, the “Built” collection is one of the most comprehensive and diverse image resources of its kind available for use in advertising and graphic design. This unique collection represents work from more than fifty of the top architectural photographers from the United States and around the world.
How many of the images in stock photography collections are ever used? The stock photo distributors could figure this out, but for the most part I don’t think they pay attention to this figure -- or really care. Their interest is in unit sales, and average price. They don’t care if a few images sell hundreds of times, or every image in their collection sells once – as long as revenue continues to rise.
Stock photographers need a better understanding of image buyers – their frustrations and what could make their lives easier. Jon Anderson is CEO of
Foto Sushi a new stock agency. He is also a Creative Director who has worked on B2B and B2C projects both within an advertising agency and corporate marketing organizations for more than 14 years. In a recent Foto Sushi promotion sent to image buyers, he hit on some very important points that all image creators ought to consider.
Guarding intellectual property rights in China causes many headaches - but also opens fresh opportunities for lateral thinkers like Chu Yong, whose company’s biggest income stream comes from court cases against copyright thieves. He is making more money for his 400 image creators he represents from compensation for infringement, than many of them receive from selling their products to genuine buyers.