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Articles from May 2019
Canva, the Australian Graphic Design site that claims to have 50 million premium photos available via subscription, detected a data breach on May 24th of the records of 139 million customers.
A stock agent asked if I had heard a rumor that Getty isn’t selling RM images anymore. The rumors are almost true. I did a
story back in March entitled the
"End of RM" where I reported that Getty Images personnel were telling some stock agency suppliers that in 3 to 5 years there will be no more RM licensing.
Topic Images in Korea has announced to its suppliers that will be launching its ‘Topic Collection’ on the PIXTA website in an effort to deliver better sales and service to their partner agencies and offer a broad range of quality contents to its customers. Topic was
acquired by the Japanese agency PIXTA in 2017.
As more and more consumer are turning to social media for information about the products and services they want to buy Ad agencies and brands are finding that they must up the quality of their offerings in order to get attention. According to Erik Radle, CEO of Dallas-based
Miller Ad Agency, “People are finding out that the content has to just sing. It has to just dazzle. We’re spending a lot of time
doing photo shoots because the days of stock photography being meaningful on social media are over. That just doesn’t cut it any more and will get you ignored.”
A few years ago EyeEm decided to guarantee its photographers a minimum compensation for each image licensed through the Getty website regardless of what they received from Getty. Over the years they have steadily lowered that minimum and with the last sales report they have finally dropped the idea of a guaranteed minimum royalty. This article explores what happened.
A reader wrote recently that he believes
Shutterstock’s efforts to add huge quantities of image to its collection, as I discussed in recent
article, is a “calculated plan” to eventually eliminate the need for photographers. He believes that by “feeding these images into their AI machines they will be able to learn exactly what their customers want.” Then, it is his contention, that Shutterstock will be able to “deliver custom made images (which Shutterstock would create) to clients.” He argues that ”this would just be machine work and there would no longer be a need for image makers or even computer graphic designers.”
For ten years between 2007 and .2017
Visual Connections operated a fall expo in New York where visual media users could meet and network with stock agencies, artist reps, production companies, clearance and other service providers. There were also seminars about the business of sourcing and using visual media. They closed down their operation in 2017. On Tuesday, June 25, 2019
imageMarketplace New York 2019 (a London based company) will launch a new event with similar goals for influencers in the world of visual content.
One of the big questions for
Shutterstock is whether they can continue to grow the Enterprise segment of their business and how important that is to the eventual success of the company. In 2016 and 2017 they touted the success of Enterprise, but over the last 12 months Enterprise growth has been slowing and sales overall seem to be flattening.
Shutterstock has announced the launch of its new self-serve API subscription plans. For the first time, developers, startups, and small and mid-sized businesses can build products and features that seamlessly integrate Shutterstock’s image collection and enable in-app image reselling, providing an additional revenue stream for customers when their end-users license and download images.
The CASE Act (Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement) was first introduced in 2017, but the bill expired without being passed at the end of the last Congress, as is the normal process for all bills not passed. On May 1, 2019 the bill was re-introduced in both the House and the Senate.
Selling-Stock has managed to gather more information about what has been happening at VCG. According to sources sometime after the Corbis acquisition VCG decided to copy Getty’s Premium Access strategy and launch a PA plan of its own. In addition to all the Getty and Corbis creative and editorial images, the iStock images are also available to the customers who purchase a PA plan.
On April 26, 2019, the Fourth Circuit Court overturned a Northern Virginia District Court decision that allowed Violent Hues Productions, LLC’s to use a cropped version of a photo to promote a Film and Music Festival without compensation to the creator. Violent Hues had made no effort to request permission or compensate photographer Russell Brammer for the use and claimed “Fair Use” in court. (See
July 2018 story.)
It is less than one month until the annual
CEPIC Congress convenes in Paris on June 5 thru 7, 2019. Each year this event is the single most important meeting of people from all over the world who are engaged in the picture licensing industry.
On May 9, 2019 Mark Milstein will be offering a seminar in New York on Time-based Metadata: The Key to Video Discoverability and Content Immortality. The presentation will be at B&H Photo. Click
here to register. You can also watch online.
ACSIL and
Thriving Archives have completed their fourth
Global Survey of Stock Footage Companies (AGS4) since 2007 and estimate worldwide stock footage revenue in 2018 at $570 million, more than double what it was in
2007. Data for the survey launched in July 2018 was collected from 84 of the estimated 415 footage licensing companies worldwide.
Will more images in an agency collection grow revenue? Is more choice always better?
Shutterstock is adding 1,608,350 new images a week to its collection. That’s 229,764 new images a day. The average customer reviews 500 or fewer returns before changing search parameters. So how do they make it possible for customers to review all those new images?
The stock photo market in China may be bigger, and more lucrative than many people think. Gaopin Images tells Selling Stock that their average gross sale to Chinese customers in 2018 was $35,
17% more than what Getty is earning worldwide and
44% more than the gross China sales Getty is reporting to its contributors.