Agencies/Distributors
Corbis and Visual China Group (“VCG”; Shenzhen Stock Exchange:000681.SZ) today jointly announced that Unity Glory International Ltd. (“Unity Glory”), an affiliate of VCG owned by VCG’s major shareholders, has acquired the assets and brands of Corbis’ Images division, one of the world’s leading image archives and content licensing businesses. VCG is China’s leading visual communications and new media company and among the largest businesses in the image industry worldwide. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Recently, I found a list on Pond5 of popular keywords customers use to find videos. Earlier this month I published a similar
list that Videoblocks had sent to its contributors a few months ago. I decided to search
Pond5,
Videoblocks and
Shutterstock for each of these words and record the number of returns. You’ll find the results in the chart below.
Pond5 is in the process of creating a collection of video clips that can be offered through low priced subscriptions. Contributors have the option of nominating their low-selling files for inclusion in the collection and will receive a minimum monthly royalties of $0.50 per item for every clip in the collection, regardless of downloads and usage.
Corbis is changing. It is spinning off the right clearance aspect of its business known as
Greenlight and renaming it
Corbis Entertainment. It is our understanding that the rest of the company including Creative and Editorial licensing will be sold off and to some degree dismantled. It is unclear to whom these operations will be sold or exactly how the dismantling will occur, but more information is expected to be forthcoming later this week.
Landov Media, a small, but well respected Editorial agency closed its doors last week. It’s website
http://www.landov.com/ says it is no longer available and thanks the company’s “many loyal clients for your business and support through the years.”
Most image creators believe that adding images to online searchable databases will grow downloads and sales. This is particularly true, when one assumes that the new images being added are better than the ones produced earlier because the image creator has improved through experience and has a better understanding of what customers want. However, an examination of the sales by iStock’s leading contributors indicates that adding images is often counter productive in terms of increasing downloads. In fact, contributors who add very few, or remove, images often show the greatest download-per-image in the collection.
Previously, I have supplied an analysis (
here) and (
here) of iStock’s downloads in 2015 and the number of images 430 of their leading contributors have in the collection. While 430 is only a small percentage of iStock’s more than 100,000 contributors this small group has somewhere between 55,070,000 and 58,554.000 downloads since the company’s founding in 2002. I believe this represents about one-third of iStock’s total downloads.
An increasing number of iStock’s most productive contributors have been dramatically reducing their production of new images in the last two years.
Where is iStock headed? In 2015 single image downloads were DOWN significantly compared to 2014, and 2014 was down compared to 2013. The company
introduced subscriptions in April 2014 and that has had a major impact on the decline in single image sales.
Panoramastock has recently been listed on a small cap tech stock exchange called the NEEQ (National Equities Exchange and Quotations). The exchange is also called the New Third Board Stock. The company’s stock code is 834877.
In early January
Videblocks will begin making clips from Discovery Channel’s,
Discovery Access library available through Videoblocks
Marketplace. Videoblocks launched Marketplace in April 2015, had
374,000 clips by August and now has over 880,000. The Discovery material will quickly push them over one million clips.
Ever since Getty Images invented Premium Access (PA) licensing image creators have been upset that their images were being licensed to some users for ridiculously low prices. Often images licensed in this manner are ones that have been extremely costly to produce. For at least one contributor Rights Managed PA sales now represent 66% of total sales at an average price of $12.00 and over half the sales are for $4.35 or less.
Depositphotos, a New York-based stock photo platform with Ukranian origins, has announces a $5 million funding round led by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) via the EBRD Venture Capital Investment Program. Previously TMT Investments had invested $3 million in Depositphotos in 201. In this round EBRD contributed $4 million and TMT $1million. The transaction should be completed before the end of the year.
Sources tell me that Corbis representatives will be meeting with Visual China Group (VCG) next week in Beijing to discuss the Visual China’s possible acquisition of all, or part, of Corbis.
Six REX employees were laid off by Shutterstock earlier this week. One had been with the company for 34 years. I asked Shutterstock for an explanation.
Shutterstock has launched a new editing tool in open beta.
Shutterstock Editor is a simple, fast and free way to edit photos.
What should we expect next from Adobe? The following is pure speculation. I have no inside information that the following is part of Adobe’s plan, but it seems logical to me that they will move in this direction in the near future. If they do it could benefit many image creators and possibly negatively affect some.
In its race to grow its image collection, Shutterstock has made it easier for new contributor to get accepted. New contributors used to have to submit 10 images for quality review. Seven of those 10 had to be accepted before the contributor was allowed to submit more images. Now, if only one is deemed acceptable the contributor can begin submitting more images. Here’s the way Shutterstock explains the change.
Shutterstock has provided investors with some very interesting information about their Enterprise pricing strategy and how it differs from their normal E-commerce pricing. You can find the “E-commerce vs. Enterprise Case Study” by going go to this link (
http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362&p=irol-presentations). Then open the pdf under “Investor Presentation” that was uploaded on 11/18/15. The chart explaining the Case Study is on page 25 of this 37 page pdf.
Adobe has announced that it has added over 1 million HD video files from the Fotolia collection to the Adobe Stock offering. These can be searched, downloaded and licensed directly on an a la carte basis within Adobe Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC or from
stock.adobe.com for use with any CC desktop app. The video clips are also available to enterprise customers on a subscription basis.
Many stock agencies are consolidating and downsizing, but not
Tandem Stock. Founded in 2010, they have been growing at an average rate of 45% per year. Specializing in Outdoor photography, they currently have a tightly edited collection of 115,000 images from 930 contributors. They have discovered that the needs of their clients are extremely specific and they specialize in supplying images that cater to those needs.
According to
Bloomberg, Getty Images has found a way to raise a net $90 Million in an effort to revive its “Midstock” business.
For decades Masterfile has been a leading provider of stock imagery to advertising, design and corporate communications. The company represents the work of many of the worlds leading image producers. Its collection is well edited and its website offers very efficient search. Currently, more than 70% of the company’s revenue comes from sales in North America and more than 80% comes from the advertising, design and corporate communications segments of the market that presumably need the highest quality work and have the budgets to pay for it.
Bloomberg
has reported that Corbis will be cutting about 15% of its staff. The information came from an internal memo sent to employees by CEO Gary Shenk, and obtained by Bloomberg.
Today,
Shutterstock reported $107.3 million in revenue for Q3 2015, a 28% increase over Q3 2014 and up nearly $3 million from the previous quarter. The increase was primarily due to a 22% increase in the number of paid downloads compared to a year earlier.