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Articles from May 2016
Stocksy has reported another year of impressive growth with gross sales of
$7,928,745 million in 2015. That is up 126% from $3.5 million in 2014. The great news for image creators is that Stocksy paid out
$4,323,735 in royalties. That’s 55% of gross revenue collected. In addition, because the company is a Co-Op, they were able to pay out an additional $200,000 in dividends to members who sold images during the year.
Since October 2013
Getty Images has been collecting money from Pinterest for images in its collection that have been pinned on Pinterest. The transactions appear on photographer sales reports as $0.03 gross sale and a photographer royalty of
$0.01. Indications are that this is a one-time payment no matter how long the image stays on Pinterest.
Shutterstock has notificed its Offset contributors that it has decided to make Offset content available to its Enterprise clients (over 24,000 of them) at a price point between $50 and $100. The current Offset price for a 72dpi web use image is $250.
Most photographers use two different figures to track revenue trends – revenue
Per-Image-Licensed and revenue
Per-Image-In-Collection. It’s easy for a photographer to figure his own per-image-licensed figure, but it is very difficult to determine how that might stack up with all photographers because the specifics of the number of images are usually not available even when you know (or have some idea of) the gross revenue collected during the period.
In a Photo District New interview entitled
“Too Big To Sue” Getty Images General Counsel Yoko Miyashita and VP and General Counsel Lisa Willmer explain why Getty Images is not suing Google Inc. in the US for copyright infringement. This is a must read for everyone engaged in the image licensing business.
Dissolve has announced it will add over 50,000 premium rights-managed (RM) commercial photographs to its site at
dissolve.com. The photos will be live on the site on June 1.
In order to safeguard its users,
500px Marketplace has modified its submission requirements by asking for extra details to confirm the identity of its contributors. As of May 16, 2016 contributors must confirm their contact information and provide a copy of their government ID before any new images they submit to Marketplace can be sold.
If you’ve got quality digital image files that have been sitting around for a while and earning little or no money, there may be a way to get some cash for them.
GraphicStock, owned by
VideoBlocks, is paying a small one-time fee for non-exclusive rights to image collections. For this one-time fee they receive the right to license the images to customers non-exclusively, in perpetuity. No additional royalty will be paid to the creator for such sales.
Microsoft has teamed up with
Shutterstock to add integration within PowerPoint in order to offer access to the vast collection of images for use in presentations.
In a
previous story we talked about five aspects of the image licensing business where serious modification to standard practices are needed, if the industry is move ahead and grow revenue. In that story I dealt with three of the five: (1) Pricing Floor For Certain Imagery, (2) Simplified Pricing and (3) Better Actionable Data For Contributors That Relates To What’s Selling. In this story we’ll examine the issues of (4) Curation and, (5) a Central Database For Small Collections.
If there is going to be a business of producing and licensing rights to stock photos five or ten years from now, the industry needs a serious re-design. There are at least five areas that need serious modification if the industry is to include anything other than User Generated Content (UGC), or if there is to be revenue growth.
The “Best In Show Festival 2016” of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs will open at 12:00 noon Saturday, May 14, at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre in West Palm Beach, FL.
The annual
FOCAL International Awards Ceremony will be held on May 26, 2016 and the day before on May 25th the
footageMarketplace will be held at 195 Piccadilly (home of BAFTA) in London. At this event footage and music content buyers can meet with 35 of the world’s premier footage/production music libraries.
Aurora Photos has announced that
Tim Davis has joined the growing Aurora sales team as an Account Executive. Tim had spent the last 15 years with Corbis, most recently as a Sales Associate and Account Executive.
PantherMedia is happy to announce that the royalty free images of the renowned Parisian Agency
PhotoAlto are now available via PantherMedia. This addition gives extra flair to PantherMedia’s Premium Collection. PhotoAlto's images distinguish themselves with a special touch of fashion and style that can only originate from Paris. Creatives all around the world hold PhotoAlto in high regard due to its strong technical quality paired with a specific, individual take on subjects and themes of any type. While the main focus of the collection is on people photography, there is also a strong emphasis on food, travel and other subjects.
Dreamstime has enhanced the already prolific stock media catalog of 43 million images and is now accepting submissions to build a library of royalty-free audio clips. In the first 24 hours after opening the site for submissions Dreamstime received more than 10,000 sound clips. The new audio section will eventually contain thousands of high quality professionally produced sound effects and music files, not currently found anywhere else in the industry. The royalty-free audio clips are grouped into four categories which include instrumental, style, theme, and sound effects, with many sub-categories available for further refining, ensuring users can quickly find the exact sounds or music their projects require.
Everyone says there is increasing demand for photos. And there certainly is for photos that can be had for $1.00 or FREE. But is there increasing demand from those customers who used to buy photos for use in advertising and major marketing campaigns? The following are some statistics. Unfortunately, this story may raise more questions than provide answers, but the questions are worth considering.
The major sources of stock and archival footage will exhibit at the
ACSIL FOOTAGE EXPO 2016 which is being held at the historic Prince George Ballroom at 15 East 27th Street, New York City on June 9, 2016.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2016 revenue of $116.7 million up $19.1 million compared to Q1 2015. The growth is due mainly to new customers and increased activity by enterprise clients. Royalties paid to contributors during the quarter were about 29% of total revenue, or approximately $33.8 million. Currently, there are over 100,000 contributors meaning that the average contributor earned $338 during the quarter.
Paul Melcher disagrees with much of my pessimism about the future of the stock photo industry. I have the greatest respect for Paul and his opinions. He is founding director of
Melcher Systems and has been working in the stock photo space for more than 20 years. He has a thorough understanding of our industry. He has done much more in depth research of the tech side of the industry than I have, and has much better contacts and networking in that space. For these reasons, it is important for my readers to carefully consider what he has to say.
Corbis contributors have received the following information relating to the release from their contracts from Corbis & Unity Glory/VCG, the Chinese company that purchased Corbis.