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Articles from August 2015
Creative Market allows you to place your photos in front of over 1 million members. You set your own prices and earn 70% of every sale. The arrangement is non-exclusive so you can simultaneously market the same images through any other outlet you want. There is no approval process. Everything you submit is uploaded.
Image users on the
MicrostockGroup website report that Shutterstock has “dropped the price of single On Demand sales from 2 for $29 to $9.99 for each image.”
Previously,
500PX had priced the images in its Marketplace at flat rates of $50 for web resolution, $250 for print resolution, and $750 for products for resale. Now they have introduced a second tier for images their editors deem of lower quality. The flat rate prices for images in this tier, called Core, are $35 for web resolution, $150 for print resolution, and $300 for products for resale. The prices for the first Prime tier will remain the same.
Every year millions of images are photocopied and used by commercial organizations around the world without any direct compensation to the image creator. Often this is because there is no practical way to track such usages, or because the creator cannot be easily identified. Nevertheless, commercial organizations recognize that they have an obligation, and a liability, to compensate creators for such uses.
Shutterstock has released a
new infographic with information about how demand for certain subject matter is changing compared to a year ago. They have also included sample image in each category to give photographers a sense of what customers want.
ZUMA Press Inc. (
www.zumapress.com), a leading visual media provider for the editorial community, has announced that it is now representing images from Fairfax Syndication (
www.fairfaxsyndication.com), the most comprehensive range of Australian content from a portfolio of over 300 publications and websites.
Over 4 days (October 21-24) attendees to this year’s
PDN PhotoPlus International Conference + Expo at the Javits Center in New York City will have their choice of more than
100 seminars that include Photo Walks and Master Classes featuring the latest techniques and trends for photographers, filmmakers and digital imaging specialists.
Workbook, the leading marketing resource for commercial photographers and illustrators, will be the Principal Sponsor of this year’s
Visual Connections Image Expo 2015 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York on October 28.
TechDirt reports that photographer Art Dragulis took a photo of
Swain’s Lock along the C&O canal in Maryland and uploaded it to Flickr. Roughly four years later, he discovered Kappa Map Group was using his photo for the cover of its Montgomery County, Maryland atlas. He sued for copyright infringement. And he LOST.
When Rights Mananged images are represented by multiple distributors it is possible for agencies that had nothing to do with an initial license to collect a fee for secondary uses. Consider this situation.
According to
Bloomberg (July 30th) Getty Images Inc.’s bonds and loans rallied as a report to creditors showed improving profit after several quarters of sinking earnings.
Shutterstock has won the most images race with
Alamy. Shutterstock now has more than 60 million royalty-free images in its collection in addition to 3 million video and music clips for a total of over 63 million pieces of content.
Alan J. Goldstein, a professional photographer located in Silver Spring, MD has commenced a legal action against Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc. ("MRIS"), located in Rockville, MD, for violations of the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The legal action is Case # 8:15-cv-2400 (TDC) (D. Md.).
For new readers, or those who may have missed some of what I have written over the last few months, the following are a list of stories worth looking at to get a sense of where the industry is headed.
The new Adobe Digital Publishing Solution (DPS), the next generation in its groundbreaking Digital Publishing Suite, pioneers new ways for brands to deliver high-impact content to mobile apps and is likely to result in more images appearing in apps. It will also become increasingly difficult for image creators to know if their images are being used in apps, or not.
Is Shutterstock in Serious Trouble? On August 5th the SSTK stock price closed at $50.75. On August 6th the company announced its
second quarter results and missed the projected revenue for the quarter by 1.5%. On August 7th the stock closed at $33.65, a 34% decline in 2 days.
NO! The company is not in trouble. Rather, financial analysts that closely watch Shutterstock are finally waking up to the realities of the stock photo business.
Today,
Shutterstock reported $104.4 million in revenue for Q2 2015, a 30% increase over Q2 2014. However, they missed their projected revenue estimate by $960,000. Investors were disappointed and the stock that had been trading at $50.75 per share the day before dropped 32.20% to $34.41 before the market closed. The average price per download during the quarter was $2.85 down from $2.87 in the previous quarter, and compared to $2.52 in Q2 2014. There were 35.9 million downloads in the quarter and they paid out about 28% of gross revenue in royalties to contributors.
In the subscription environment customers pay for -- and the image creators receive a royalty for -- many images that are never used in any type of deliverable product. Nobody knows how many. Adobe Stock has changed all that. Now Adobe gives users
free use to any images considered during the users design and creative processes. Users only pay for the images that actually end up in a deliverable product. As a result, creators may begin to see a significant decline in the number of images licensed.
If you’re a videographer and have been discouraged by low prices and low royalties for your work it’s time to check out
Videoblocks. In April at the National Association of Broadcasters conference the company added a new feature when they launched the Marketplace section of their site. Customers must have an annual subscription in order to access Marketplace. When they choose any of the Marketplace clips they pay an additional $49 if it is HD or $199 for 4K.
Responding to an increasing demand for reliable insights on the stock photography market three top stock photography industry experts, Lee Torrens, Paul Melcher and Amos Struck, have officially launched
Stock Photo Insight, a consulting service providing calls with all three experts simultaneously.