iStock has done a deal with
Joomag that allowed Joomag users to purchase as few, or as many, images a month as they would like to use for $2.99 each. Joomag provides a graphic design service to over “500,000 businesses across all sectors” that allows customers to create digital newsletters, magazines, catalogs, brochures, ebooks and more and deliver these products either online or in printed form.
The Joomag Crater™ Editor is designed to make it easy for the smallest business or individual user to cost effectively produce professionally looking websites and printed materials.
It is unclear whether Joomag customers get access to all iStock photos including those in the Signature collection, or just the Essentials collection. There seems to be no limit on the number of photos a customer must purchase to get this $2.99 price.
If a customer were to go directly to iStock to purchase a single photo from the Signature collection the price would be $33. The price for an Essentials photo would be $11. To get photos for $2.99 each a customer would need to use 100 Signature photos a month or 21 Essentials photos a month.
It seems that when it comes to pricing Getty Images has decided to treat all Joomag users as one single customer rather than the hundreds of different unique customers they really are.
Joomag offers features that are similar to some of the design features offered via Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Adobe also offers images for $2.99, but each individual customer must purchase a $29.99 subscription and 10 images in a month in order to get them for an average price of $2.99. Customers that use fewer than 10 images must still pay the $29.99. There seems to be no such requirement with the iStock deal.
Joomag says that this union propels the company to the forefront of interactive digital publishing, introducing a premium collection of stock photography to its flagship Crater™ Editor (which has already integrated with Getty Images).
It appears that Getty has done a Premium Access deal with Joomag that provides any of Joomag’s individual customers with access to any of the images in the Getty Images collection for the same low price (or something near to it) as users of iStock images are paying.
Joomag says that “a streamlined procurement process means publishers simply find a photo that works best for their content and license it. Images can then be used within seconds, obviating any redirects and keeping the action within the Crater™ Editor. Businesses can also preview images prior to licensing them.”
The collaboration prompts users to express their creativity in new, imaginative ways; a breadth of popular categories including sports, technology, landscape, business, and travel ensures that publishers have access to whatever they need, whenever they need it.
"We do all the legwork," says Ruben Vardanyan, CEO of Joomag. "That's why this integration rocks. It gives businesses the opportunity to focus on the visual aspect of their publications, which is absolutely necessary for engaging readers these days, while we handle everything else. We've centralized the experience and made it easy on purpose."