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Articles from April 2018
Wemark has announced on
VentureBeat.com that it is looking to replace existing agencies in the stock photography marketplace with a blockchain strategy that supports direct transactions between creators and customers and gives photographers control over the price of their photos.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2018 revenue of
$153 million up $22.8 million compared to $130.2 million in Q1 2017. On a constant currency basis revenue grew about 12.8% compared to the first quarter of 2017. The revenue was also up $1.8 million from Q4 2017. Revenue per download averaged $3.40 per image, an 16.8% increase over Q1 2017.
A few months ago in an interview promoting his new book
The Good Fight: America’s Ongoing Struggle for Justice, Rick Smolan was asked “How has technology disrupted photography.” Rick has been an editorial photographer since the 1980s, shot for Time, Life and National Geographic and may be best known for his “Day in the Life Of” series of books. The first
six minutes of the interview is worth a listen.
It’s about a month before the
2018 CEPIC Congress, the premier annual meeting of commercial still and moving image suppliers, will take place from 30 May to 1 June at the Maritim proArte hotel in Berlin. Currently 250 delegates from 150 companies and 29 countries are scheduled to attend.
Does anyone know. who owns the copyright to image
607387712 of Marilyn Monroe on Gettyimages.com. Evidently Getty doesn’t. It seems that Getty has the rights to license the image for “Standard Editorial Rights,” but that does not include commercial use rights or print cover rights. Evidently it also doesn’t include the right to license a use for wall décor because Getty will not license the image for that purpose.
SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, has acquired
Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary Oath. Flickr was founded in 2004 and sold to Yahoo in 2005. Yahoo, in turn, was acquired by Verizon in 2016 for
$4.83 billion. Verizon combined Flickr with AOL to create a new subsidiary called Oath.
As more and more photographers with experience at putting together high production value shoots are leaving the stock photo business major brands are beginning to have trouble finding the images they need in stock photo files. There are plenty of cheap images and plenty of candid, “real life” images, available as stock photos, but often they don’t fit the concepts brands have in mind.
If you’re looking for information about all things related to photography, and are afraid you might have missed something important, you might want to check out Jain Lemos’ new
Photo Ten Five website.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s stock photo agencies began placing more and more copies of the images they represented with distributors around the world. Initially, this resulted in significant increases in revenue for the image creators and the primary agencies. The Internet and agency consolidation has changed all that, particularly for the image creator. Now, in many cases the distributor system has simply become a way to siphon off a bigger portion of the gross fee paid by the customer to middlemen before the image creator gets his share.
Image Source has announced a new strategic partnership with high end brand, Luxy Images to deliver a bespoke (customized) image service direct to clients in Europe at
www.imagesource.com.
SilverHub Media Group, which has become a vibrant new player in the editorial and assignments space since its launch in 2016, today announces that it has combined its editorial and assignment brand, SilverHub, with
Wonderhatch, a freshly launched photographic and film assignment business.
Blend Image, at one time the leading stock photo production company in North America, has announced to its image creators that it is “winding down” operations, “trying to negotiate deals that might provide members with the option to move their content without having to resubmit it,” and making plans to otherwise return content by October 2018.
Some
Masterfile contributors report that the
BIA restructuring of the company last year hasn’t solved Masterfile’s financial problems. Once again the company is falling behind on paying current royalties on new sales. I asked Steve Pigeon, CEO of Masterfile, for clarification and an explanation of the problems. The following are his answers.
Over a billion searches are conducted annually on Gettyimages.com. Getty often provides information on a few search terms that are being used more frequently this year than in the previous year. Recently, they provided the following list and the percentage increase in 2017 compared to 2016.
Getty Images has announced that it will be retiring Thinkstock.com in mid-2019 and taking steps to transition Thinkstock customers over to Getty Images and iStock. Getty says this move will make way for a newer and overall improved experience for Thinkstock customers on Getty Images and iStock.
The biggest problem for stock photographers today is not what to shoot, but how to get their photos near the top of the search return order. There are way too many images with the same keywords in all the major image collections. If your photo appears at the 4,746th spot in the search return, there is not much chance that any customer will ever see it -- let alone buy it. In fact, it has been determined that very few customers will look at more that 500 thumbnails before doing a different search or going somewhere else.
The major stock agencies seem to have reached a revenue plateau. It is time to consider a major change in marketing strategy. There is a strategy that should be relatively easy to implement which could result in higher, overall revenue from licensing the same number of images.
A visible watermark on your photos distracts from the impact a non-watermarked photo might have and may discourage people from using it. However, the real problem arises when the photo is actually licensed to a customer. Customers are only interested in using un-watermarked photos on their websites. When someone else sees the photo, and decides they would like to use it, they can easily copy and paste it to their own site.
Imatag offers photographers a better way to protect their images.
Dreamstime has filed a sweeping lawsuit against Google in California federal court alleging anticompetitive and discriminatory antitrust law violations as well as on-going breaches of contract, in order to use its monopoly position in online search to benefit its business partners –
Shutterstock, and of late
Getty Images – while leaving other stock photo sellers out in the cold.