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Articles from November 2018
After 28 years of publishing Selling Stock, in 2019 I will begin to wind down my regular daily coverage of the stock photo industry. The site (
www.selling-stock.com ) with all its archives will continue to be available to readers, indefinitely.
The Mega Agency is adding 2.5 million iconic and historic entertainment images to its rapidly expanding archive. The media company, a leading provider of news, sports and entertainment content, will now represent and license the Phil Ramey photo archive to its global customer base.?
Koch Equity Development is expected to make a $500 million, non-controlling investment in Getty Images. Getty says the equity investment is expected to close by the end of this year.
Recently I was told by a stock agency that my
Photographer Income Survey Results were not relevant to Specialist Agencies because the results are “rather negative and don’t offer a possible positive call to action.” In the following series of stories I will outline a “Positive Call to Action” for stock agencies.
Once the data has been collected then it will be time to talk to Getty – as a group. For years they have shown they are unwilling to pay attention to suggestions from individual agencies. The more Specialist Agencies that participate in the analysis the better.
In May I
analyzed the sales of a few photographers who are major, direct suppliers to Getty. A major issue that all Specialist Agencies need to consider is whether the breakdown in the various price ranges in this analysis are representative of Getty’s total sales? Specialist agencies need to check their own figures against this baseline to determine if this is an accurate representation of Getty as a whole.
In July 2018 I did an
analysis of the more than 200 Getty Creative collections to determine how many images had been added to each collection in the almost two years between
August 2016 and June 2018. Overall there was a 37% increase in the number of images added, but there were wide variations in the sources of the growth.
Shutterstock has announced a partnership with rights and clearance agency,
Greenlight, a part of Branded Entertainment Network. Greenlight clears content with rights holders for use in commercial advertising and corporate campaigns. Greenlight also represents the rights for some of the biggest icons, including Albert Einstein, Steve McQueen, Whitney Houston, Sophia Loren, Thomas Edison, and more.
According to photographers
Masterfile has been unable to make any royalty payments to photographers since January 2018. The company
filed for bankruptcy in 2017. Payments to the bankruptcy lawyer are prioritized ahead of payments to photographers. It appears the company has not been generating enough revenue to cover fixed expenses and still pay royalties.
Shutterstock has announced a new content integration within Final Cut Pro X. The Shutterstock extension is the only stock footage extension to be integrated with the release of Final Cut Pro X and will enable seamless access to video, still image and music collections.
In late September 2018,
Google announced that it had been working with two photo industry consortiums, CEPIC and IPTC, to integrate some image ownership-related metadata into search results. Now Google images desktop view has a new “Image credits” link below the image. This information is collected from IPTC Creator, Credit and/or Copyright information if it exists.
Adobe has given photographers notice that on November 5, 2019, almost a year way, the
Fotolia website will close and all customers will need to use Adobe Stock from that time on to find the images they need.
We have closed the
Editorial Photographer Income Survey that was sent out at the end of August. There were 270 responses which is somewhat disappointing considering the tens of thousands of photographers producing stock images today.
In their reports to investors
Shutterstock has always emphasized their steadily growing
Revenue Per Download as well as their growth in the number of images offered to customers. But there is another figure that is extremely important to image creators. That is the
Revenue Per Image In The Collection (RPIIC). That has been steadily declining since Q2 2014.
Alamy.com and 360Cities.net have announced that the 360Cities’ collection of thousands of stunning, immersive 360° spherical images will now be available to Alamy customers through Alamy’s online worldwide marketplace. The 360Cities database will launch on Alamy.com on 5 November 2018 with an initial collection of approximately 150K images, to be supplemented with a regular stream of new content.
For the last four years the Australian Government has published an annual "Consumer Survey on online copyright infringement". The
103 page report focuses on the unlicensed use of Music, Video Games, Movies, TV, e-Books and PC software. Unfortunately, it does not deal the unlicensed use of photographs.
Storyblocks has analyzed a total of 60 million searches on
its site in 2018 to find the
50 most popular landmarks featured in creative works.
I’m regularly asked for my thoughts on the size of the worldwide market for stock photography in terms of gross revenue and the potential for market growth. I currently estimate the worldwide sale of stock imagery to be about $2.75 billion divided among four different product types - Microstock, Creative Stills, Editorial and Footage or Video. Further details of the breakdown are provided in this story.
There is very little likelihood that the overall market will grow if the stock photo business continues on its current course. In order to have growth at least four major strategy changes are needed. I see no likelihood that any of these will occur.
The European stock photography and video agency PantherMedia, based in Munich, has announced the introduction of a new 10 photo downloads subscription. All PantherMedia’s subscriptions now include access for up to 3 team members.
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About This Site
This stock photography news site focuses on the business side of photography with a special emphasis on stock photography. Our goal is to help photographers maximize their earnings based on the quality of their work and the commitment they are prepared to make to the trade. The information provided will be applicable to part-timers as well as full time professional photographers. We’ll leave it to others to teach photographers how to take better pictures.
Jim Pickerell launched his career as a photographer in 1963. In 1990 he began publishing a regular newsletter on stock photography. In 1995 the information was made available online as well as in print and was gradually expanded to a daily service.
Click here for Pickerell's full biography.
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