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Articles from May 2015
Microsoft recently published an article about the advancements they are making in developing technology that can automatically caption pictures. (See
here.) However, from the point of finding images on the Internet there is one big flaw in where they are headed.
In most cases there will be a huge number of choices that can reasonably have the same caption.
Many traditional suppliers of stock image (those that have been in business 15, 20 years or more) need to give some thought to what the image producing crowd wants. They need to consider possible ways of adjusting their business model in order to meet some of the needs of these part-time image creators. And they need to recognize how these photographers may change the entire stock photography licensing business.
Microsoft say that worldwide there are about 400 new powerpoint presentations being prepared each second. That works out to about 12.6 billion presentations a year. A significant percentage of them use multiple images. Some are the creator’s personal images. But the vast majority are grabbed from the Internet via Google, Bing, Flickr or somewhere else. If users paid even $1.00 for each image used in such presentations the annual gross revenue might be more than 5 times the revenue generated worldwide by the stock photo industry.
SumAll provides social media tools that may help users make more effective use of social media. Among the information offered is data from 300,000+ business users compiled in an infographic that shows the ideal image size for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Each of these sites has specific dimensions that you need to adhere to if you want your images to look their best.
As the stock photo industry has changed and revenue for many stock images providers has declined many traditional providers have been forced to cut back on staff, and in particular editors. This is also true of many photo users who previously had time to review portfolios, encourage new talent and support new photographers as they improved their skills. Now, most of the editors and picture buyers that are left have trouble keeping up with the images that fly across their desks, let alone find time to seek out the best images and encourage new talent. So who does the editing?
Masterfile Corporation (“MFC”) - a global licensor of premium stock images - has sold 100% of the shares of its European operations to Mediapro Mediamarketing GmbH of Vienna, Austria. The transaction which closed on April 30th includes Masterfile companies in France, Germany, Italy and the UK (collectively “Masterfile Europe”).
Posting images on Social Media sites can be a dangerous thing. What rights are you giving away? Can someone else use your image without your knowledge? Can they earn revenue from your image without sharing any of it with you? If someone else mis-uses your image are you legally liable?
PicHit.Me, Microsoft and
Shutterstock have teamed up to offer over $10,000 worth of prizes and Microsoft hardware to photographers who participate in the My World contest. Any photographer, amateur or professional, can enter and may interpret the theme of the competition any way they like. As a result PicHit will undoubtedly get images on every conceivable subject
Pond5 has announced a partnership with the 48 Hour Film Project, the largest and most dynamic timed film competition in the world.
As the official stock media sponsor for all 135 cities participating in the competition, Pond5 is offering 100 hand-picked audio tracks to contestants for free. All participants will also receive $25 in Pond5 credit.
Are we about to experience another major shift in the photography market similar to the shift from RM to RF and the dramatic changes brought about by Microstock? At the
CEPIC Congress in Warsaw on Friday June 5th at 10:00am I will be moderating a
panel discussion on Crowdsourcing and how it is likely to impact the stock photography business in the near future.
Be sure to read Paul Melcher’s story in his
Kaptur Magazine about where image recognition software is headed.
Stockmile promotes itself as offering “FREE images” and says it has become an excellent source of photography, vector graphics, illustrations, clipart, handpicked bundles, and more for personal and business use.
LookLagoon has launched a new website that features professional, high quality images of nature, wildlife, and landscapes. Individual photos are available under royalty-free licenses at prices that range from $3 to $10 depending on the file size of the photo purchased.
If the blogs are any indication more and more Shutterstock contributors seem to be complaining about declining revenue. While individual royalties may not have been as high as some would have liked, for several years they were at least going up steadily month to month to month, or compared to the same month a year earlier. Within the last year or so an increasing number of contributors are complaining about revenue stagnation or decline.
Getty Images, in collaboration with Instagram, has announced a call for entries for a new grant to support photographers using Instagram to document stories from underrepresented communities around the world. The three winners will each receive $10,000.
The launch of Windows 10 later this year could dramatically change the way people find pictures. On April 29th during the annual Microstock Build Developers Conference in San Francisco Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella described how Microsoft intends to (1) Build the Intelligent Cloud, (2) Reinvent productivity and business process and (3) Create more personal computing.
Shutterstock has reported $97.5 million in revenue for Q1 2015, a 34% increase over Q1 2015. There were 33.4 downloads for the quarter. About 28% percent of revenue for the quarter was paid out to contributors in royalties. The average price per download was $2.87 up from $2.68 in the previous quarter and a 17% increase compared to Q1 2015. There were 51.6 million images in the collection as of March 31, 2015 plus 2.6 million video clips. At the end of the quarter the company had 542 employees worldwide.?
In March,
Shutterstock began testing a new collection called
Premier Selects that is only available to Enterprise customers. For more about how it works check out
https://premier.shutterstock.com.
Maria Pallante the current Register of Copyrights and Director of the United States Copyright Office testified before the House Judiciary Committee on April 29th and offered a number of ideas for modernization of the copyright office. You can access the entire testimony
here.
Dreamstime has announced the release of
Stock Photos by Dreamstime, a new mobile phone app geared toward customers interested in purchasing and downloading images directly onto their smartphones and tablets. With the new mobile app, the Dreamstime team will be able to offer its popular, high quality digital images to an even greater range of on-the-go customers.
Shutterstock has provided a list of the 10 most popular cameras used by their contributors in 2014. (See
Chart.) They obtained this information by extracting the EXIF data from the photos uploaded.