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Articles from May 2014
Most agencies are constantly trying to add new images to their collections, but a huge percentage of the images they already have are never licensed. Photographers are constantly encouraged to produce more and better pictures. If they cut back on production sales often decline. Since there is no way to be sure what customers will want in the future, agencies hope that if they keep adding new images they will eventually stumble onto something a future customer will want to buy.
The
CEPIC Congress in Berlin will start in about a week. Many of the attendees will be focused on finding other agents to represent and market their collections. For the most part that means that smaller libraries will be trying to get their small collection included in the massive collection of larger distributor (LD). Maybe it should be the other way around.
Image Source, has launched an uplifting email marketing campaign designed to inspire creative professionals at the start of the working week. Subscribers will be treated to an email with a motivational, thought provoking message from specially selected experts in the creative industry every Monday, straight to their inbox.
More than that 500 participants from more than 250 agencies and 33 countries will attend the CEPIC Congress in Berlin from June 5th through June 7th 2014. If you are not planning to attend check out what you will be missing.
DisabilityImages.com, a leading stock source for high quality stock images of real people with real disabilities, has agreed to represent selected imagery from
Design Pics. DisabilityImages serves a select group of customers with narrowly focused and specific needs. The company has developed a strong reputation in this niche, and has a thorough understanding of the needs of customers within this community.
The annual general meeting of the German Association of Professional Image Suppliers (
BVPA) has voted with a strong majority (only one dissenting vote) against supporting the
CEPIC projects CIF and RDI. The panel came to the conclusion that the expected benefits of the projects, as presented at the meeting, do not outweigh the expected expense and risks.
The European News Agency Alliance (
EANA) has joined the global coalition that supports a formal antitrust complaint against Google’s that has been filed with at the EU Commission. The complaint deals with the
unlicensed use of third party pictures and was filed by
CEPIC on 8 November 2013 on behalf of thousands of photographers and picture agencies.
TT News Agency, NTB, Scanpix Denmark and Scanpix Baltics have announced the formation of the
Scandinavian Photo Alliance. The core of the new alliance is the former Scanpix group. The SPA expects to work on pan-Scandinavian initiatives spanning both editorial and commercial areas.
Blend Images and
Danita Delimont Stock Photography have recently joined the
IMGembed community. IMGembed went live in March 2013 and currently has millions of images in its collection. Previously, we have reported on
Getty’s embedding strategy and PressFoto’s
ImageRent. IMGembed offers another approach to the pay-per-view strategy for monetizing images.
I just returned from my first HOW Design Live conference, this year in Boston. HOW Design Live is billed as “the biggest annual gathering of creative professionals, anywhere.” This year over 3,300 professional buyers of photography from all over the U.S. and Canada made their way to Boston for the five-day event. The following are a few takeaways and insights I gained from the conference.
Did you know Amazon invented the process for photographing people against white backgrounds? The U.S. Patent and Trademark office recently awarded them a patent for this invention. If you’re trying to sell photos shot against a white background Amazon may want a piece of anything you earn!
Recently a subscriber asked, “how much newly produced professional content is licensed each year compared to content that is licensed more than a year after it was first made available for purchase?” Great question! As far as I know no agency collects such data, but it could be of tremendous value in helping agencies better understand what their customer's needs and in directing photographers as to what to shoot.
iStock has named May 14, 2014 “100% Royalty Day.” As part of it’s efforts to celebrate Small Business Week in the United States iStock will pay all exclusive contributors 100% of all revenue collected on May 14, 2014 through cash and credit card file downloads.
Time Warner will spin-off Time Inc. on May 23, 2014. Shareholders of record at 5:00 p.m. on that date will receive one share of Time Inc. common stock for every eight shares of Time Warner common stock. For more details about the new company check out the SEC's
Preliminary Information Statement of Time, Inc.
Shutterstock has reported $72.8 million in revenue and total downloads of 29.7 million for Q1 2014. About 28% of the revenue was paid out to contributors in royalties. At the end of the quarter the company has 407 employees worldwide and over 55,000 active contributors.
In 2013 there were 145,713 ad pages in the magazines measured by the trade organization
Publishers Information Bureau. It is worth noting that in 2000 this organization reported 286,932 ad pages – almost double the 2013 numbers -- for the magazines it tracks.
A subscriber just pointed out that at the bottom of the search return page on
www.gettyimages.com they are now encouraging customers to go to
iStock. He did a search for travel and at the bottom of the first page after the customer has looked at only 100 thumbnails she is encouraged in big bold letters to:
During Time Warner’s Q1 2014 earnings call Howard Averill, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Time Warner said advertising revenue was down 7% and subscriptions were flat.
Microstock image contributors are removing images from Fotolia in a boycott of Fotolia’s
Dollar Photo Club (DPC) subscription service. So far more than 400,000 images have been removed from Fotolia since April 25, 2014.
According to Variety Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation recently told attendees at the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills that “Movies are not a growth business.” Within 17 days after a movie is released in theaters it will be available on TV and smartphones at much lower prices. This is bad news for theater owners.
British photographer Tessa Bunney has been chosen
Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year 2014 in the international photography competition. She received an award of £5,000.00 (approximately $8,000.00). The first prize in the StockFood-sponsored category “Food off the Press” for the best recently-published food photograph went to Caroline Martin for her still life “Roasted Pigeons.”.
The Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (
ACSIL), a trade association serving the interests of the world’s leading archival footage and stock licensors, has announced its newly elected Co-Presidents: Max Segal and Clara Fon-Sing.
It’s No Longer About The Image. It’s About The Data That Can Be Mined Using Images. The value of images is declining. The value of data that can be mined by tracking image use is increasing.