Agencies/Distributors
The Image Works CEO Mark Antman has announced that after thirty-six years of operation The Image Works will be closing in the near future. He added, "We have had a fantastic run, but it is time for me to close the business, retire and move on."
For a long time, I’ve been trying to get some idea of the revenue AdobeStock generates annually. Adobe doesn’t share that information, but I’ve finally arrived at a strategy that may help. I’ve contacted a few of Adobe’s major contributors and asked them what their total royalty earnings were from Adobe in the last year and the total number of images they have in the collection.
Science Photo Library has announced a change in its distribution and future presence in the French market. As of September they launched
sciencephoto.fr to further strengthen their presence.
Effective September 1, 2019, StockFood will become
Image Professionals. The Munich-based media service provider
StockFood GmbH originally focused on food photography, but has continuously expanded its scope of business in recent years and is now emerging with a new company name. Image Professionals will bring together all of the company's specialized agencies and services. However, only the company is being renamed. StockFood, the food photo agency, will remain unaffected.
An editorial stock agent tells me that he is trying to hold the line, or increase, the prices he charges for images because his providers tell him that their costs are increasing. Meanwhile, a competitor who is offering dramatically lower prices in an attempt to win customers has entered the market. As a result, the agent's providers are seeing poorer sales. He asks for advice as to what he should do? I’ll give some answers, but I also want to invite my readers to chime in with any thoughts they might have, or strategies that have worked for them.
Storyblocks will be closing the Marketplace segment of its business on September 10th and moving back to a subscription only offering. Contributors who have outstanding payouts will receive those payments sometime after September 10th even if the amount owed has not met the minimum payout requirement.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2019 revenue of
$161.7 million up 3% compared to Q2 2018 and down from $163.3 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.44 per image, compared to $3.41 in Q2 2018.?? Total image and video downloads for Q2 were
46.6 million, up from 45.2 million a year earlier, and down from 47.2 million in Q1 2019.
StockFood has launched
StockFood Studios, an innovative production service for food photography. The Munich-based food experts, whose international brand is synonymous with professional food photography, are expanding their portfolio to include commissioned productions. The website www.stockfoodstudios.com offers this new service.
Forbes Magazine has a story entitled “
Move Over Stock Photos, It’s Time For User Generated Content.” There certainly is an increasing demand for User Generated Content (UGC) and the market is being flooded with it, but there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding how much it is likely to take over the stock photo market.
Photographers trying to license their images as
Rights Managed (RM) need to give some serious though about whether this strategy is still in their best interests. In theory, licensing based on usage should enable a photographer to occasionally get higher prices for certain uses, rather than giving away all future rights and allowing multiple re-uses for a low
Royalty Free (RF) license. The following are some reasons why this “theory” no longer works.
Recently, I received a press release from
Freepik.com. The name is a misnomer because not all the pictures on the site are free. They do have about
1,750,000 free vectors, icons and photos, all created or wholly owned by Freepik. In addition, they have over
4,185,000 Premium photos and illustrations supplied by about 8,000 individual creators and distributors of microstock. A little under half of the pieces of content are photos. The rest are illustrations, vectors and icons.
The Internet is a great place for selling things if the finished product must be delivered by FedEx or UPS. But if you’re trying to sell is a digital version of what you’re showing,
then long range your business model doesn’t have much future. It’s too easy to “steal,” “appropriate” or whatever you want to call it.
Shutterstock, has announced its new footage offering—
Shutterstock Elements. Over 3,000 elements captured on cinema-grade cameras and lenses have been added to the site, including transitions, lens flares, VFX (visual effects), video kits, film overlays, HUD (head-up display) and UI (user interface) elements. Compatible with all major video editing programs, Elements also includes detailed tutorials on how to optimize effects.
In the last decade we have all watched the decline of stock photography as more and more photographers got into the game, the total revenue spent by buyers grew very little if at all and even the best photographers have seen significant declines in their annual income.
I suppose this benefited the buyers. Now they are able to get the images they need for much less than they had to pay before – and in most cases much less than their real costs of production.
Getty Images is moving rapidly to eliminate RM images from its Creative collection. As of July 3rd, there were only
2,387,383 RM images representing about 8% of the total collection of
28,624,340 images. However, it gets worse. There are 54 independent distributors listed as having RM image collections on the site. But, if you search those collections individually you find that only 4 of them have any images for a total of 129,241 images. In most cases the searcher is told “zero results.” The vast majority of images still being licensed as RM are in the Getty wholly owned collections.
It is interesting to note that when we searched the 210 individual collections and recorded the numbers in each the total came to
28,591,367. However, if you go to the site and search for all images you are only shown
26,240,654 images. For those who haven’t tried this you can simply go to
gettyimages.com, enter any keywords and hit return. When the return come up with the “Filter” option on the left hand side of the screen remove the keyword, leave the search bar blank and click again. Now, you will be shown all the images for the “License Type” you have requested. Be sure the “License Type” is set on RF or RM. Then you can go to “Collections,” choose the one you want and see all the images in that collection.
A number of iStock contributors interact on the Facebook “private” group for iStock. In reviewing comments and complaints for the last couple years there seems to be general agreement that sales started to decline in late 2018 and the decline has continued into 2019. This is compared to what sales were in 2017 and early 2018.
One of the big questions about Enterprise sales at Shutterstock is “Why do big customers want an Enterprise deal?” On average Enterprise customers are paying more per quarter than E-commerce customers. What additional services do they get? In 2018 Enterprise customers generated about 40.9% of Shutterstock’s total revenue, or about
$254.8 million. The average Enterprise customer pays Shutterstock $6,370 per year, but they could be getting 750 images per month for $2,388 a year. Maybe they are using a lot of video at $63.16 per clip, but there must be other benefits justifying the paying of the much higher fees.
On the iStock contributor forum Brenda Bazylewski of iStock contributor relations recently reported the following. “We (iStock) were recently made aware of the Chinese website, “
Xiaba” which was offering iStock imagery for personal educational use only, free of charge. According to the terms of their license, the imagery could not be used for commercial or editorial purposes."
Shutterstock announced yesterday that Co-Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer Steven Berns will depart from his roles at Shutterstock to pursue other opportunities, effective immediately to pursue other opportunities. Mr. Berns' departure is not due to a dispute or any matter relating to the Company's accounting and financial policies and operations.
Robert Kneschke’s story on
Unsplash last week got me thinking about trademarks and logos. Professional photographers tell me that the inspectors for the major stock agencies – Getty, Shutterstock, AdobeStock and iStock – are increasingly rejecting photos with any identifying brand marks for fear of legal action by the brands.
A while ago, I tried here to understand the business model of
Pixabay, who want to make money from free pictures. A similar company, but with greater international notoriety, is
Unsplash. In 2013, as a simple Tumblr blog, this company took the stage where 10 free pictures were shared. There are currently over 1,000,000 free images online, which have received a total of over 1,006,650,155 free downloads. These and many other exciting figures can be found here on the
statistics page of Unsplash.
Robert Harding, CEO of
Robert Harding Picture Library, recently sent a message to picture buyers asking the question “Is picture research dead?” Image creators need to carefully consider the implications of this message.
In an opinion issued June 5th federal Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted only one part of Google’s motion for partial final judgment on the pleadings regarding the breach of contract and breach of implied covenant claims by
Dreamstime.com that relate to a Google Play agreement.
A few months ago, I evaluated which countries most
Shutterstock providers come from. Today, there should be some similar analysis of Adobe Stock's data, or Fotolia, because although the portfolios on both websites are identical, Adobe Stock will unfortunately see less information about it.