Agencies/Distributors
Thanks to
Adobe Stock gross microstock revenue will start to decline. Let me explain why. I estimate that about $143 million of
Shutterstock’s 2014 revenue came from subscription and that there were about 114 million subscription downloads. It all those customers were to switch to Adobe Stock they could probably get all the images they need for $43 million or less
and save $100 million annually. Check out the numbers.
Matt Munson, CEO of Twenty20, recently made the case for why User Generated Content (UGC) will be
The Death Of Stock Photos. He argued that “stock photos do not depict reality” and that “brands that use them risk coming off as generic and out-of-touch” with consumers.
Adobe has launched
[St] Adobe Stock as part of its Adobe Creative Cloud subscription offering. Creative Cloud customers are now able to launch Adobe Stock directly within CC desktop software such as Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop or After Effects, and add watermarked or licensed images to their Creative Cloud Libraries. This will allow them to access and work with images across multiple desktop tools.
Photocrowd is a relatively new social media site (launched in September 2013) that is designed to encourage photographers to shoot more pictures, work on assignments, participate in contests, build cool portfolios and socialize with each other.
Should traditional agencies be making more of an effort to source images from cell phone users? Sixteen months ago
Alamy introduced its
Stockimo app and started accepting images into its collection that are taken with cell phones. To date about 350,000 images have been submitted and about 170,000 accepted.
Microsoft say that worldwide there are about 400 new powerpoint presentations being prepared each second. That works out to about 12.6 billion presentations a year. A significant percentage of them use multiple images. Some are the creator’s personal images. But the vast majority are grabbed from the Internet via Google, Bing, Flickr or somewhere else. If users paid even $1.00 for each image used in such presentations the annual gross revenue might be more than 5 times the revenue generated worldwide by the stock photo industry.
Masterfile Corporation (“MFC”) - a global licensor of premium stock images - has sold 100% of the shares of its European operations to Mediapro Mediamarketing GmbH of Vienna, Austria. The transaction which closed on April 30th includes Masterfile companies in France, Germany, Italy and the UK (collectively “Masterfile Europe”).
PicHit.Me, Microsoft and
Shutterstock have teamed up to offer over $10,000 worth of prizes and Microsoft hardware to photographers who participate in the My World contest. Any photographer, amateur or professional, can enter and may interpret the theme of the competition any way they like. As a result PicHit will undoubtedly get images on every conceivable subject
Pond5 has announced a partnership with the 48 Hour Film Project, the largest and most dynamic timed film competition in the world.
As the official stock media sponsor for all 135 cities participating in the competition, Pond5 is offering 100 hand-picked audio tracks to contestants for free. All participants will also receive $25 in Pond5 credit.
Stockmile promotes itself as offering “FREE images” and says it has become an excellent source of photography, vector graphics, illustrations, clipart, handpicked bundles, and more for personal and business use.
LookLagoon has launched a new website that features professional, high quality images of nature, wildlife, and landscapes. Individual photos are available under royalty-free licenses at prices that range from $3 to $10 depending on the file size of the photo purchased.
If the blogs are any indication more and more Shutterstock contributors seem to be complaining about declining revenue. While individual royalties may not have been as high as some would have liked, for several years they were at least going up steadily month to month to month, or compared to the same month a year earlier. Within the last year or so an increasing number of contributors are complaining about revenue stagnation or decline.
The launch of Windows 10 later this year could dramatically change the way people find pictures. On April 29th during the annual Microstock Build Developers Conference in San Francisco Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella described how Microsoft intends to (1) Build the Intelligent Cloud, (2) Reinvent productivity and business process and (3) Create more personal computing.
Shutterstock has reported $97.5 million in revenue for Q1 2015, a 34% increase over Q1 2015. There were 33.4 downloads for the quarter. About 28% percent of revenue for the quarter was paid out to contributors in royalties. The average price per download was $2.87 up from $2.68 in the previous quarter and a 17% increase compared to Q1 2015. There were 51.6 million images in the collection as of March 31, 2015 plus 2.6 million video clips. At the end of the quarter the company had 542 employees worldwide.?
In March,
Shutterstock began testing a new collection called
Premier Selects that is only available to Enterprise customers. For more about how it works check out
https://premier.shutterstock.com.
Dreamstime has announced the release of
Stock Photos by Dreamstime, a new mobile phone app geared toward customers interested in purchasing and downloading images directly onto their smartphones and tablets. With the new mobile app, the Dreamstime team will be able to offer its popular, high quality digital images to an even greater range of on-the-go customers.
Pond5, has unveiled auto-tagging technology that they claim is the first of its kind in the stock media industry. Built with artificial intelligence, this pioneering feature automatically generates keywords for each photo and video uploaded to the Pond5 platform.
Want to know more about the people who are producing images that are licensed at microstock and subscription prices?
Shutterstock Panorama is worth a look.
EyeEm has raised $18 million in new venture capital and currently has a community of 13 million photographers across 150 countries.
Pond5, unveiled two new types of video content today—
Backlots and
Backlots+. Provided by partner
CT Image, these digital backlots allow editors to flawlessly simulate background scenery from 25 of the world’s major cities in their video productions.
If you’re thinking about submitting images to Shutterstock you might want to check out the next ShutterTalk Live streaming workshop, “
Preparing Your First Photo Submission,” on Thursday, April 9 at 11am EST.
Shutterstock continues to make it easier customers to get the images they need via their subscription products. Until last week customers that purchased a subscription were limited to 25 downloads a day and a maximum of 750 per month for customers in the U.S. and Canada.
In August 2014
EyeEm announced that it would be introducing a “Market” aspect to its social media site. Market has finally been launched. EyeEm was established in 2011 and currently has over 13 million users who post photos taken with their cell phones and comment on each other’s work. It is unclear how many images are on the site.
Global crowd-sourced media platform and live-streaming company,
Newzulu, and mobile photo and video crowdsourcing service
Scoopshot, have partnered to collect and market citizen generated content and offer untapped revenue opportunities to brands and publishers around the world.
In mid-February Alamy published changes in its standard contract that were due to go into effect April 1st (45 days later). A number of photographers, particularly in the UK, had issues with certain clauses and a lively discussion ensued on the
EPUK website.