Agencies/Distributors
Adobe’s
acquisition of Fotolia is expected to close in February (second half of Adobe’s fiscal Q1 2015). Assuming everything goes well the next question on the minds of everyone in the stock photo industry is what will Adobe do with Fotolia and how will that affect the rest of the players.
CueSongs, the one-stop music licensing hub for online and digital media, is delighted to announce Christina Vaughan is taking up the position of CEO from the 1st of February. Christina will remain as Chairman of
Image Source but will relinquish day to day operations of the business to Anthony Harris, who becomes Image Source’s CEO.
Image creators always want a higher royalty. How’s
100% of what the customer pays? At Videoblocks Marketplace that’s what contributor will receive when their HD and 4K video clips are used. Too good to be true? Read on.
Based on the searches they have been getting in the last few months Shutterstock has just released a new infographic on
2015 Creative Trends in the demand for still images, illustration and video clips. One of the interesting trends for photographers is that searches for “top view” have increased 66% in the past year.
Pond5 has announced today the launch of the Pond5
Public Domain Project, ( the first library of free public domain content designed specifically for media makers. The initial collection includes 10,000 video clips, 65,000 photos, thousands of sound recordings, and hundreds of 3D models.
Dreamstime has been selected as a “beta provider of stock photos for Google display ads.” According to the explanation on the
company’s online forum contributors will be paid roughly $2 per image selected during the “beta” license period which is 12 months.
Yesterday, Shutterstock paid $33 million in cash to acquire London-based
Rex Features.
In the technology section of its website
Crain’s New York Business says, “The purchase of Rex puts Shutterstock in direct competition with Getty Images for a share of the editorial stock photography market, and ends long-held speculation that Shutterstock was looking to knock off its London rival.”
Shutterstock has announced that it is expanding its editorial and music services businesses with the acquisition of two companies --
Rex Features and
PremiumBeat.
Will Adobe offer a tool that makes it possible for its Illustrator and InDesign customers to discover if the images they find on microstock sites (particularly Shutterstock or iStock) are also available at Fotolia where they can be purchased for much less?
When Adobe takes over
Fotolia will
Shutterstock and
iStock be forced to lower their Image On Demand (IOD) prices? Basically, since
Getty lowered iStock prices last September non-exclusives images on iStock and Shutterstock images are priced about the same – roughly $10 per image for any file size. However, Fotolia images are priced 25% to 60% lower than Shutterstock on a yearly basis, and 60% to 75% lower if the customer purchases a Fotolia image pack on a monthly basis.
After last week, readers probably feel they have more information about iStock than they ever wanted to know. But an analysis of where contributors who produce microstock images live provides some additional insights into the future of stock photography. I promise this will be the last analysis of iStock data until July.
Most stock contributors want to believe that if they continue to produce more and better images more of their work will be downloaded (purchased by customers), and they will make more money. That’s not the way it seems to have worked at iStock in the last two years.
Since 2009 I have been tracking sales of some of iStock’s leading contributors and beginning in 2012 I have tracked 430 of them on a semi-annual basis. While 430 is only a small percentage of iStock’s total contributors which may number over 100,000 at the end of 2014 this small group had a combined total of over 54,982,100 image downloads in their careers with iStock. I believe this is about one-third of total iStock downloads since the company’s founding in 2002. Thus, the combined experience of this group is significant.
Getty’s simplification and dramatic
lowering of iStock prices in September in an effort to better complete with Shutterstock doesn’t seem to be working. The number of images downloaded in the last half of 2014 for 431 of iStock’s top producers was down about 34% compared to the first half of 2014.
It seems likely that we will see some major shifts in the stock photography business as the three major players – Getty Images, Shutterstock and Adobe/Fotolia – jockey for position in a market that is experiencing very little, if any growth. At the end of 2014
Getty’s total revenue will be somewhere around $870 million, but $260 of that will be editorial. Shutterstocks will be about
$328 million and I estimate Fotolia’s at somewhere in the range of $110 million.
Panoramic Images has been awarded $403,500 in a copyright infringement case against educational publisher John Wiley & Sons. The publisher was found to have used 6 images outside the scope of the license agreement. The case was heard before a jury in the Federal District Court the Northern District of Illinois.
Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") changed the rating outlook of
Getty Images, Inc. to negative from stable due to continuing declines in Midstock revenue. Moody's also revised its forecast indicating very high leverage over the next 12 months with reduced free cash flow. Moody's affirmed the B3 Corporate Family Rating, B3-PD Probability of Default Rating.
Margi Sheard of the Greatstock (
www.greatstock.co.za) agency in South Africa recently published a story that raised an important issue about the world’s perception of Africa and the African people. The news media’s focus on tragedy and problems often provides an inaccurate picture of the real Africa, but it raises the issue of whether there is any way for photographers to do more to show the world the real Africa of the 21st century.
Adobe has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held
Fotolia for approximately $800 million in cash. Fotolia will be integrated into
Adobe Creative Cloud, providing current and future Creative Cloud members with the ability to access and purchase over 34 million images and videos.
There are widespread rumors that, in an effort to get out from under some of its crushing debt,
Getty hopes to sell its Editorial Division early in 2015. It has been reported that Q3 2014 sales for this segment of their business was about $65 million up 21% year-on-year. Editorial represents about 30% of the company’s gross revenue.
Alamy has added new features to its successful mobile app Stockimo that was
launched last February. To date more than 180,000 images have been submitted through the app and 99,000 have been accepted for marketing. These images can be found among the almost 53 million images on Alamy.com using the keyword “Stockimo.”
The crowdsourcing site
FOAP has raised a fresh $2.3 million in funding from some interesting names like CNN Worldwide President, Jeff Zucker; CEO and Co-Founder of VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk; Upshot Chairman and Protagonist LLC Partner, Jordan Rednor; and CEO of Delivery Hero, Niklas Ostberg, among others. The company raised another
$1.5 million in August. Total funding now stands at roughly $5 million but they’re not quite ready to call this a Series A yet.
iStock contributors have been advised that on January 15, 2014, the accounting operations of Getty Images and iStock will be combined into one unified system. Since Getty acquired iStock in February 2006 the two brands have been operated as separate businesses with separate accounting departments.
On Monday I mentioned several
search innovations that Shutterstock is testing at
Shutterstock/Labs. Most of these ideas were developed during company wide hackathons.
Scoopshot is the latest to jump on the embed bandwagon. When users find an image they want to use they have the option of paying the listed price for a download or “Use For Free.” Get more information about how it works.