Agencies/Distributors
Big changes at Getty are on the way. Getty has supplied its contributors with the following information about a Unification project that will create common platforms for both iStock and Getty Images contributors. While many specifics have been provided there are still a number of questions about how this may impact current contributors and industry competitors. I will comment in a later article. In the meantime, I will be very interested in comments or questions anyone in the industry might have.
The stock photography world is changing fast, and constantly throwing up new challenges.
robertharding has decided to take a pioneering approach to creating new and exciting ways of working that will enable a new generation of image buying clients to find and purchase the work of a new generation of photographers in the easiest way possible.
Shutterstock, Inc. has expanded the functionality of its design application, Shutterstock Editor. Features including professionally designed templates and the ability to upload personalized visual content such as a logo or business image, save designs for editing later, and publish finished designs to social networks are now available from within the application.
There is a lot of talk about how Big Data will save the industry, but are the major stock image distributors using the data they collect effectively? Given the huge number of
images currently in major databases, it would seem that a very high percentage of them are never viewed by anyone. If the distributors are collecting data properly, they should know which images are reviewed by customers and which aren’t. If there are lots of images that are never reviewed by customers, is there any way to generate revenue from those images.
In the “
Goodbye Shutterstock” thread on
MicrostockGroup marthamarks said, “My older images still sell on Shutterstock, but newer ones die there.” Why would that be? One would expect newer images to sell better, particularly when agencies continue to ask for more and more images. This does not seem to be insolated complaint, but one common to many long time Shutterstock contributors.
In a research project performed by Pfeiffer Consulting for Adobe Stock, Pfeiffer found that users who acquire video clips from Adobe Stock could realized up to a 6x productivity increase for their video workflow compared to using other conventional stock video sources.
In the chart below I’ve searched
Shutterstock,
iStock,
AdobeStock,
Alamy and
Getty Images for the number of images in popular subject categories. No customer would use these words alone in a search for images. Other words would certainly be needed to narrow the search for something more specific within each category. (Note: that some images have more than one of these keyword and will appear in multiple categories.)
For the last 5 years I have conducted a semi-annual analysis of the number of downloads and images in the collection of 432 of iStock’s leading contributors. There may be some newer contributors that are now among the top iStock earners, but I don’t think very many. It takes time to build a significant collection and begin to get volumes of sales. These 432 probably represent one-third of all iStock single image downloads since the company began.
Blend Images has announced exclusive representation of the
Built Images stock library. With over 25,000 property-released photographs of contemporary commercial and residential architecture, interior design and home lifestyle, the “Built” collection is one of the most comprehensive and diverse image resources of its kind available for use in advertising and graphic design. This unique collection represents work from more than fifty of the top architectural photographers from the United States and around the world.
Stock photographers need a better understanding of image buyers – their frustrations and what could make their lives easier. Jon Anderson is CEO of
Foto Sushi a new stock agency. He is also a Creative Director who has worked on B2B and B2C projects both within an advertising agency and corporate marketing organizations for more than 14 years. In a recent Foto Sushi promotion sent to image buyers, he hit on some very important points that all image creators ought to consider.
Guarding intellectual property rights in China causes many headaches - but also opens fresh opportunities for lateral thinkers like Chu Yong, whose company’s biggest income stream comes from court cases against copyright thieves. He is making more money for his 400 image creators he represents from compensation for infringement, than many of them receive from selling their products to genuine buyers.
Getty Images is asking image creators to add their names to an
open letter to U.S. Senators. The letter asks the Senators to say NO to Google’s anti-competitive Image Scraping practices that harm visual artists and other independent creators.
Getty announced on April 27th that it would file a complaint against Google with the European Commission concerning Google’s anti-competitive business practices. On May 20th, to the chagrin of CEPIC, they announced they
would not pursue a copyright case against Google in U.S. courts
Photographers are discovering that
Getty is being paid fees by
Pinterest for images it doesn’t represent.
Getty Images has launched an
Adobe Photoshop plugin that allows user to find images in the Getty collection and then edit watermarked images in Photoshop. If any image found and manipulated in this manner is later purchased, the edits will be applied to the licensed content.
An increasingly competitive marketplace has led Yahoo-owned
Flickr Marketplace to bow out of the stock photography market. After Getty Images
terminated its agreement with Flickr in March 2014 that had enabled Getty to add almost 900,000 images from Flickr photographers to the Getty Images collection, Flickr decided it would set up its own Flickr Marketplace to market the images from its photographer community.
A new stock photo source called
Foto Sushi, LLC has launched a custom library of unique portrait photography suitable for any project. This small collection of what many photographers will classify as very simple images is interesting because it was created by Jon Anderson, a seasoned Art Director and Creative Director, who believes he has identified an unfulfilled need of his colleagues – image buyers.
After years of development
PicturEngine is about ready to begin promoting its search engine to customers. It has more than 500,000,000 keyword searchable images from 64 stock photo agencies and hundreds—soon to be thousands—of individual photographers.
Shutterstock has published a
infographic on The Top Trends Shaping The Future Of Imagery. Photographers looking to produce the kind of imagery customers want to buy may want to make note of these trends outlined by Keren Sachs, Director of Content Development at Shutterstock and Offset.
The Mega Agency is partnering with the News and Entertainment division of Australia’s premier photo agency, Snapper Media, the two companies announced today, September 12th, 2016. The Snapper News and Entertainment division will operate under Mega’s name and both partners are confident the new venture will become an even more formidable player in the Australasian markets.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that its vast collection of 100 million high-quality photos and illustrations is now accessible within Adobe Photoshop® software through its new custom built plugin. With more than 100,000 new images added every day, the Shutterstock plugin boasts the largest collection of photos and illustrations that can be licensed directly within the Creative Cloud desktop application.
Shutterstock, Inc. has acquired of over 700,000 images from two prominent photo collections: The Art Archive and The Kobal Collection. Both collections, previously held by UK-based The Picture Desk, are now available to Shutterstock Premier customers globally.
Yesterday, I talked about why the business of licensing rights to stock photos - as currently structured - is
Designed To Fail unless some major changes are made. Two of the changes needed are:
(1) make finding the right image for a project much easier for the buyer, and
(2) improving supplier efficiency.
The basic operating structure of how most stock photo agencies acquire and market images has not changed in 15 to 25 years. Image creator produce and submit their work to an agency. The agency may reject some of it, but most will go into an online collection that customer can review. When a customer finds something she wants to use she pays a fee and the image creator receives a percentage. The agency’s job is to manage the material, make customers aware that the collection exists, license use of the image for whatever they can get and collect money.
StockFood GmbH, one of Germany’s leading photo agencies, and
Science Photo Library (SPL), the world’s leading source of science and medicine content, have announced a strategic partnership aimed to deliver SPL’s collection of scientific imagery to the German market.