Agencies/Distributors
A few weeks ago, the publicly traded image agency Shutterstock had released its
second-quarter 2018 business figures. Among those figures, there was also the remarkable 204.2 million images Shutterstock currently offers. 41% of these were added in the last year alone.
On my Facebook page there was a lively discussion afterwards, regarding exactly where these many millions of pictures come from.
PicRights, a global leader in copyright enforcement, has added a new partner in Johannesburg, South Africa to monetize copyright infringements for the world’s leading news agencies, stock image agencies and independent photographers. No other copyright compliance service offers its clients as much geographical coverage of key markets around the world.
Shutterstock is officially rebranding
Rex Features as
Shutterstock Editorial today. The company says: “Since 2015, we have been working toward the goal of expanding our editorial collection and service to customers around the world. Over the past four years, our talented Editorial team has built a robust offering, becoming a premier source of editorial images for the world’s media.
There are often two sides to an industry. The side the customer sees, and the "inside" that industry people see. This article is about the inside of the stock image industry and how Microstock has changed. It also offers photographers and videographers some ideas how to deal with the issues.
Shutterstock, has announced that its free design application,
Shutterstock Editor, has surpassed more than 5 million users. The tool helps users, including creatives, designers, and marketers, to speed up their design workflow with easy-to-use, powerful editing functionality and customizable templates.
Getty Images, and
APO Group, a leading media relations consultancy and press release distribution service, have announced a wide-reaching collaboration to promote integrated text, photo and video solutions to organizations operating across Africa and the Middle East.
A stock agent asked if I had heard a rumor that Getty isn’t selling RM images anymore. The rumors are almost true. I did a
story back in March entitled the
"End of RM" where I reported that Getty Images personnel were telling some stock agency suppliers that in 3 to 5 years there will be no more RM licensing.
Topic Images in Korea has announced to its suppliers that will be launching its ‘Topic Collection’ on the PIXTA website in an effort to deliver better sales and service to their partner agencies and offer a broad range of quality contents to its customers. Topic was
acquired by the Japanese agency PIXTA in 2017.
A few years ago EyeEm decided to guarantee its photographers a minimum compensation for each image licensed through the Getty website regardless of what they received from Getty. Over the years they have steadily lowered that minimum and with the last sales report they have finally dropped the idea of a guaranteed minimum royalty. This article explores what happened.
A reader wrote recently that he believes
Shutterstock’s efforts to add huge quantities of image to its collection, as I discussed in recent
article, is a “calculated plan” to eventually eliminate the need for photographers. He believes that by “feeding these images into their AI machines they will be able to learn exactly what their customers want.” Then, it is his contention, that Shutterstock will be able to “deliver custom made images (which Shutterstock would create) to clients.” He argues that ”this would just be machine work and there would no longer be a need for image makers or even computer graphic designers.”
One of the big questions for
Shutterstock is whether they can continue to grow the Enterprise segment of their business and how important that is to the eventual success of the company. In 2016 and 2017 they touted the success of Enterprise, but over the last 12 months Enterprise growth has been slowing and sales overall seem to be flattening.
Shutterstock has announced the launch of its new self-serve API subscription plans. For the first time, developers, startups, and small and mid-sized businesses can build products and features that seamlessly integrate Shutterstock’s image collection and enable in-app image reselling, providing an additional revenue stream for customers when their end-users license and download images.
Selling-Stock has managed to gather more information about what has been happening at VCG. According to sources sometime after the Corbis acquisition VCG decided to copy Getty’s Premium Access strategy and launch a PA plan of its own. In addition to all the Getty and Corbis creative and editorial images, the iStock images are also available to the customers who purchase a PA plan.
Will more images in an agency collection grow revenue? Is more choice always better?
Shutterstock is adding 1,608,350 new images a week to its collection. That’s 229,764 new images a day. The average customer reviews 500 or fewer returns before changing search parameters. So how do they make it possible for customers to review all those new images?
The stock photo market in China may be bigger, and more lucrative than many people think. Gaopin Images tells Selling Stock that their average gross sale to Chinese customers in 2018 was $35,
17% more than what Getty is earning worldwide and
44% more than the gross China sales Getty is reporting to its contributors.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2019 revenue of
$163.3 million up $6.7% compared to Q1 2018, (excluding Webdam which was sold in the first quarter of 2018). The revenue was almost flat with the $162.1 million generated in the previous quarter. During the conference call CFO Steven Berns pointed out that traditionally revenue for Q1 is very similar to revenue in Q4 of the previous year. Revenue per download averaged
$3.42 per image, compared to $3.40 in Q1 2018.
Shutterstock, has announced the renewal of its agreement with The Associated Press (AP) to distribute AP’s daily global photo output for license to customers based in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland.
VCG is still offline in China and there is no clear indication when they may be able to resume operations. It appears that VCG’s standard prices have ranged from tens to thousands of yuan. Thus, they could be as low $5 to $10 for the use of an image. Such prices seem to fit with the gross sales prices Getty Images has been reporting, minus a reasonable share for the selling agency. We also know that in a very few cases customers have paid well over $600 to use an image. However, It is unclear what the usage conditions have been for the extremely low prices or anything in between. Maybe VCG’s standard price packages have been very similar to those of Shutterstock or Adobe Stock. We don’t know.
Photo World Magazine in China asked for my views on four issues related to the VCG copyright dispute. The following are my responses to the questions. I’ve decided to share these comments with my readers. In addition, at the bottom of the story there links to some other stories on Selling-Stock.com that provide additional information
As we
reported last week Visual China Group (VCG) in China was forced to close down itd website over the issue of offering the “Black Hole” photograph without giving “clear and visible” credit as required by the Creative Commons license.
Shutterstock, has announced the launch of its first Augmented Reality (AR) feature, available on the Shutterstock customer iOS application. The latest update to the iOS application includes a new
“View in Room” button that allows users to access their camera phone and virtually position any of Shutterstock’s 250 million images against the wall in a room of their choosing.
Brianna Wettlaufer, former Co-Founder and CEO of
Stocksy, has joined
Adobe Stock as Head of Content. A longtime creative industry veteran and innovative entrepreneur Brianna has held numerous leadership roles in the stock photo industry including Vice President of Development at iStock among others. Brianna resigned her position at Stocksy last August for personal reasons.
Adobe has released its latest 2019 Visual Trend report called
Brand Stand. The trend report explores consumers’ desire for companies that align themselves with important social issues and how brands like Nike and Gillette are driving this trend with high-impact creative that takes a stand.
Techcrunch reports that VCG grabbed the first black hole photo released by the European Southern Observatory and immediately made the image available for sale for either editorial and commercial use without any attribution to the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT), an array of radio telescopes that captured the black hole image.
More and more photographers are expressing frustration with Getty Images and saying they are pulling their images. Many are looking for another distributor that will charge higher prices and offer a better royalty share. I hate to defend Getty, but to be fair today’s low prices are not all their fault. If we go back to the early 2000s Getty tried to keep prices at reasonable levels, but once iStock and Shutterstock came on the scene, and got some traction, there was no way for Getty to hold out forever.