Agencies/Distributors
Shutterstock says it is excited to announce a new
annual music subscription for only
$199 per-year or $16.60 per-month. This subscription gives the user the freedom to download as many tracks as needed, whenever they need them, for one low yearly price. Those interested may visit the
pricing page to start their subscription.
The
2020 CEPIC Congress, the largest networking hub for agencies worldwide will take place at the Gran Melia Victoria in Palma de Mallorca from 27 to 29 May 2020 with a welcome reception on May 26th. Registration is now open. For fees and other registration details check out
this link.
Shutterstock has launched its ninth annual
Creative Trends Report, identifying global and local trends that will influence design aesthetics and visual culture in 2020.
A reader wrote, “Over the years you’ve published Shutterstock’s gross revenue number. It would be good to see the ratio of corporate earnings to photographer earnings after this weeks
1 billion horn blow.”
An
iStock Exclusive photographer asked, “Given that Getty is ‘racing to the bottom’ and is about to eliminate Rights Managed from its collection, do you think our Exclusive contracts will be next?" I don’t think so. It seems to me that it will still be to
Getty’s advantage to keep the Exclusive segment of iStock.
Each year, my team at Adobe Stock spends hundreds of hours pouring over thousands of pages of research reports, global news, search data, fine art, and fashion imagery and more to bring you the coming year’s creative trends. This year, we’re doing something a little bit different. For 2020, we’re excited to reveal not just four Visual Trends, but accompanying Motion Trends and Design Trends, too.
According to Reuters, the website of communications watchdog
Roskomnadzor has said that one of
Shutterstock’s domains was blocked in Russia on November 13th by the country's Attorney General because the site contained "insulting state symbols."
Paul Roberts of the Seattle Times has recently interviewed Craig Peters, Getty Images CEO, and published an analysis of the company’s current situation entitled “
Its Crunch Time For Seattle Based Photo Giant Getty Images, And For Photographers” that everyone in the industry may want to read.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the
Death Of Rights Managed Licensing, but Alamy reports that it is alive and well at Alamy. They say, “There’s been lots of discussion in recent weeks about the future of Rights-Managed licensing. Alamy has no plans to discontinue offering RM images and will continue to offer photographers a choice to license their photos as Rights-Managed or Royalty-Free."
Adobe has announced a plan to
authenticate photos as way way of helping consumers determine if the images they see on the Internet are real or fake. How this will work hasn’t been fully spelled out, but is expected to be rolled out in “coming months” according to Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky (See the video of his presentation
here.
The Paris Council, the City of Paris has just granted
Photononstop Group, for a period of five years, the cultural promotion and commercial exploitation of the digital reproductions of two heritage photographic collections: Roger-Viollet and France-Soir.
Bridgeman Images announces that CEO, Victoria Bridgeman after twenty years with Bridgeman Images and the last eight as CEO has decided to step down at the end of the year and move on to new challenges. Dirk Hendrickx, currently Global Head of Sales and Marketing, has been appointed to succeed her at the start of 2020.
For over a decade image creators have been discouraged by Premium Access pricing. I believe PA was first instituted around 2006 as a way for Getty to get a guaranteed monthly payment from some of its largest Enterprise clients rather than the company be being subject to the erratic monthly image needs of some of these customers where they might purchase a huge number of images one month and little or nothing the next.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced the launch of an unlimited monthly subscription for
Shutterstock Music. The new plan is geared toward digital content creators, including YouTubers, podcast producers, and social media managers, offering a cost-efficient solution to licensing unlimited high-quality tracks at $149 per month.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that Jarrod Yahes is joining the Company as Chief Financial Officer, effective December 9th, 2019. In this role, Yahes, will lead Shutterstock’s Finance, Investor Relations, and Accounting functions. Jarrod will drive financial strategy and report to Jon Oringer, Shutterstock's Founder and CEO.
“Jarrod’s expertise in financial management and strategic growth, as well as his industry experience will be invaluable to our continued success as our company evolves,” said Oringer. “We are pleased to welcome Jarrod to our leadership team and look forward to his contributions to our business.”
The
Everett Collection now represents the Photo Link Collection! A finely edited portfolio focusing on New York City celebrities during the 1970’s to 2000’s. Highlights include behind the scenes shots and life behind the velvet ropes inside Studio 54.
I was asked recently what I thought Shutterstock could do to grow revenue. My answer was not much. I don’t think it will be possible to grow the downloads very much. Shutterstock has focused for several years on growing the number of Enterprise customers. But, I don't think that is likely to work either. The one thing they could do is raise prices on at least some of the images they license. See my thoughts on why this is a good idea that they are not likely to adopt.
Getty’s decision to kill RM may be an
opportunity for all those agencies and individuals who want to: (1) continue to license images for higher prices based on usage and (2) enforce their claims of copyright ownership. The key will be in providing a service that will help users, not just benefit image creators.
Getty is shutting down all Rights Managed licensing on
www.gettyimages.com. This may effectively be an end to the entire marketing strategy of pricing stock images based on how they are used. While there are still a number of small and mid-sized agencies that continue to price images based on usage, it seems highly unlikely that they will be able to continue to build their image collections or attract many customers in the future. Every stock photographer and stock agent should read
this explanation of Getty’s plans for “phased retirement of rights-managed creative images.”
Shutterstock has reported Q3 2019 revenue of
$159.1 million up 5% compared to Q3 2018 and down slightly from $161.7 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.40 per image, which was the same in Q3 2018. Total image and video downloads for Q3 were
46.3 million, up from 43.9 million a year earlier, and down from 46.6 million in Q2 2019. At the end of the quarter Shutterstock had over 297 million images and 16 million video clips, or
313 million pieces of content in its collection.
Depositphotos has launched a new series of
photo collections to battle stock photo cliches. The company’s content curators repurpose stock photos and compile collections on a weekly basis to highlight photos that are not typical stock photography.
Shutterstock has released a
background removal tool as part Shutterstock Editor users can now easily remove the background from any image in the Shutterstock collection or their own images. (Shutterstock images must be purchased before they can be modified.)
Shutterstock’s ongoing efforts to make the creative life of its customers easier continues with the launch of
reverse image search for video. This new feature makes it faster than ever to find exactly the right video clip in Shutterstock’s footage library.
Shutterstock, Inc. has launched
Smart Brief, a new streamlined and guided experience to make it easier for photo users to quickly and efficiently improve the quality of the brief for a photo shoot. With this update, clients spend less time inputting briefs and more time leveraging collaboration tools to quickly obtain high-quality branded content and reduce the approval process time.
House of Pictures, the Copenhagen based interior and lifestyle feature agency, will become a brand of
Image Professionals GmbH on October 1st, 2019. Pernille Schlosser, the founder and Managing Director will remain on board and in charge of the widely recognized boutique agency. House of Pictures, founded by Pernille Schlosser in 2000, is matching feature stories with high-end lifestyle publications around the world.