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Articles from April 2019
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.
Rawpixel is an agency in the microstock arena that everyone in the stock photo business should be aware of. The company is headquartered in the UK, but its creative hub in Bangkok, Thailand. The company is the leading contributor to Shutterstock with over 1,000,000 pieces of content in the collection.
Will Quantum Dots make the next generation of camera technology so much better that it will dramatically separate the quality of the work of professional photographers from those using smartphones and give the professional a new leg up? A story on
thephoblographer.com points out that the Quantum Dot technology is much more efficient than the CMOS technology used today.
Some photographers attending the Intel press and analyst event on April 2, 2019 interpreted the following notice to all entrants as a move to grab the copyright of any photos the photographer might take.
Fstoppers has an
interesting story on the impact CGI may have on commercial photography and photographers in the not too distant future. Earlier this week I wrote about the
declining need for professional photographers in the future. Rather than buying camera equipment and spending time and effort learning how to take pictures anyone interested in the visual arts as a profession might be better advised to find a comfortable chair, sit down at their computer and learn CGI rather than being a photographer.
Young people (those in their 20s and 30s) interested in a career as a photographer should think hard about that decision. Yes, there will always be a demand for photographs, but will those who want photographs be willing to pay enough to make it a business for image creators?
With its “Copyright in the Digital Single Market”
directive the European Parliament took a giant step last week toward empowering creatives and news publisher to negotiate with the Internet giants for a share of the revenue received as a result of their distribution of creative content they do not own. The new copyright rules also contain safeguards on freedom of expression.