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Articles from September 2012
Shutterstock Inc has announced that it plans to sell 4.5 million shares in its initial public offering at between $13 and $15 each. This block of shares would represent about 14% of its total shares outstanding.
iStockphoto has introduced a new
Shopping Cart Checkout option that allows customers to pay for just the images they need without having to purchase credits.
Dreamstime now offers almost 15 million downloadable images to a user base of 5.1 million. With over 100,000 new users joining each month, Dreamstime now has the fastest-growing user base in the industry and is one of the web's most popular sites. The company's rapid growth is fueled by a unique, community-focused business model that crowdsources creativity.
Yuri Arcurs, probably the world’s most prolific stock photographer, has written a
blog post outlining how the demand for stock imagery has changed and identified a few subjects to shoot and ones to avoid given the oversupply and declining demand.
Last weeks
announcement that PACA, ASMP and CCC are considering some type of arrangement that would compensate image creators for the unauthorized web usage of their images on sites like Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, etc. needs careful examination by all photographers and distributors before anything is formalized.
More than 1,000 designers responded to
Graphic Design USA (GDUSA) annual survey designed to determine how stock imagery is being used. The survey indicates that use of stock imagery has grown nearly three times in 25 years since the first survey, starting at 39 percent in 1986 and reaching 98 percent in 2012. The survey also shows that 31 percent of designers are in a full-blown love affair, using stock images over 100 times a year, which is up 11 percent from last year.
The cost of producing images certainly hasn’t declined in the last 8 years. If anything it has increased. But, it is interesting to take a look at what’s been happening to the return-per-image on file based on Getty Images figures.
The Picture Archive Council of America (
PACA), American Society of Media Photographers (
ASMP) and the Copyright Clearance Center (
CCC) are jointly exploring the development of a new, global, collective licensing model for unlicensed web usages. PACA expects this model to have a transformative impact on the industry for all licensors of visual media.
Last month we wrote about
Scoopshot a site where any photographer can submit cell phone pictures for editorial use. The company has been in business for about 18 months and has over 130,000 contributors from 165 different countries. Now Scoopshot has added an option that allows editors to identify and give assignments to a select group of photographers that produce professional quality work.
Last week we wrote about the new Getty Images initiative
Post-Usage-Billing Service (PUBS). On Thursday Craig Peters, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Getty spoke at the Luminance event in New York and shared some additional insights. He spoke of the dilemma the photo industry faces in protecting copyright and how Getty’s new initiative can solve at least part of the problem.
The Luminance 2012 event held in New York this past week was the first-of-its-kind event designed to explore the intersection of business, technology, culture and photography. Given how the Internet and digital technology is impacting and changing how images are created, distributed and used, those who hope to earn revenue from their images must constantly examine new trends and innovation and be prepared to adjust their business strategies.
As a way of motivating and educating graphic artists, for the past 10 months Fotolia has showcased the work of a single artist each month. Each artist was given a specific theme and was required to use some images from the Fotolia collection in the work. The themes included: business, family, travel, food, lifestyle, street art, mobile, money, drinks and abstract.
Alan Capel, Head of Content at
Alamy explains that the price for printing 3 million copies of a textbook was much higher than we
reported earlier this week.
On November 5, 2012 Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images will receive an award for Global Leadership in Innovation and Collaboration (GLIC) at Suffolk University in Boston. The award will be presented by the Center for Innovation and Change Leadership (CICL) and in an acceptance speech Jonathan will describe the innovative practices that Getty Images has employed that are transforming the digital media industry.
PicScout has announced the launch of the ImageIRC Post-Usage-Billing Service designed to assure photographers and content licensors that their work will be properly acknowledged on social media platforms which embrace the ImageIRC Post Usage Billing solution.
Photographer Jacques Jangoux reports that Alamy has licensed two of his images - A3N0PR (2 boys in a canoe in the Amazon region) and A3AB62 (waterfall of Jari River, tributary of the Amazon) – for just
$25.00 each for textbook use. Of course the photographer will only receive 60% of these figures.
When you discover that a large educational publisher has made extensive use one of your images beyond the rights they licensed is it wise to try to collect for the unauthorized use? In a recent discussion on the Stockphoto@yahoogroups.com forum it was pointed out that publishers often “blacklist” suppliers who try to collect for unauthorized use. Thus, it was argued that it may be better to accept a loss on one sale in hopes that in the years ahead you’ll make it up through additional sales to that same publisher.
The PDN PhotoPlus International Conference + Expo is scheduled for October 24-27, 2012 . The 4-day event begins on Wednesday, October 24 with WPPI University, a one-day series of seminars designed to sharpen the creative and business skills of photographers.
The PhotoPlus Conference that runs from Thursday through Saturday offers more than
90 educational seminars and hands-on labs for attendees to hone their skills, learn new techniques, and participate in discussions. For registration information check
here.
In March 2011 we published
a brief story about how Noam Galai’s picture of his screaming face had been used extensively all over the world without his permission. The image has gained a reputation as the “Stolen Scream.” But, was it really stolen or did the photographer effectively allow the uses.
Education Companies have recently settled copyright and trademark claims against several textbook distributors. However, these same companies have no remorse about knowingly, intentionally and systematically infringing the copyrights of image creators who have supplied images for use in many of the books they publish.
iStock has made it official. They are encouraging contributors to shoot with cell phones and accepting those images into the general collection. The next generation of stock photography – from RM to RF to Microstock to Cell Phones -- is upon us. See iStock’s
Creative Brief.