Agencies/Distributors
Reuters reports that Getty Images claimed in a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York on Thursday that a new Microsoft product that allows website publishers to embed digital photographs on their sites is a “massive infringement” of copyrighted images.
Getty Images has pulled together from its many collections a group of images that they call
Getty Images Prestige. They say it is a “carefully curated selection of the world's most powerful imagery. Prestige images are distinguished by their unique aesthetic approach, exceptional craftsmanship and uncompromising quality - all available for use exclusively.”
On September 13th
iStock will “throw-in-the-towel” and adopt the
Shutterstock licensing strategy that all images should be equal in price regardless of the quality of the image or the cost of production. They will discontinue their practice of pricing based on file size delivered, and of having multi-tier price categories.
Be sure to read Getty Images CEO,
Jonathan Klein’s comments in James Estrin’s interview that appeared in the New York Times August 27th. Among the key takeaways are:
Over the years Flickr has built a very popular photo site that has attracted over 6 billion images from image creators. Many of these images (probably a very small percentage of the total) are excellent, marketable images. So good, in fact, that since 2008 Getty Images has added almost 900,000 of them to its Creative Stills collections.
Stocktrek Images has a specialized image collection that is in high demand for wall and poster art. Their subjects include: Healthcare and Biomedical Science, Armed Forces, Military Aviation, Space, Weather, Astronomy and Dinosaur Art
Shutterstock has reported $80.2 million in revenue and total downloads of 31.5 million for Q2 2014. About 28 percent of the revenue was paid out to contributors in royalties. At the end of the quarter the company had 478 employees worldwide.
Dreamstime has opened an office in San Francisco at 180 Sansome Street will provide the company with an expanded presence in Silicon Valley. This connection to the area's top-tier technology talent will prove invaluable as the firm continues to offer innovate tools for its users such as the Dreamstime Companion App and WordPress plugin.
Flickr has announced to its community of image creators that it will be offering a licensing option, but it has failed to explain when it will happen or exactly how it will work.
Can usage fees continue to drop? Most videographers think that
Shutterstock’s prices for video clips at $19 for web use, $49 for an SD file, $79 for HD and $299 for 4K are about as low as prices could go. Any lower and videographers would no longer go to the trouble of creating new clips.
Last week we published a story about
AudioBlocks a new platform licensing royalty-free music by subscription. Today, I want to examine the parent company,
VideoBlocks, that was launched in 2010 and licenses royalty-free video clips by subscription.
Singer-songwriter Adele has received a 5-figure settlement from Corbis Images UK for the taking and distributing photos of her 1-year-old son, Angelo. In a suit she claimed that children of celebrities are not public property and are entitled to privacy.
James West, CEO of
Alamy, has just posted his latest answers to contributor questions at
Ask James Take 3. Highlights of the 10 minute video include the fact that sales of iPhone photos acquired through its Stockimo app are selling “slightly better” per 1,000 photos than sales of the rest of the Alamy collection. He gave no indication as to how many of the 1 million images per month are iPhone produced images.
Pond5, the world’s leading online marketplace for video footage and stock media, announced today that it has raised $61 million in equity financing from Accel Partners and Stripes Group. The funding is the first institutional investment for the company and will be used to fuel global growth, hiring, and product development.
Dreamstime has released
Dreamstime Companion, a new iPhone and Android free mobile app that enables photographers to upload their own images directly from their smartphones. The uploaded images can be purchased by Dreamstime's more than eight million users, the largest designer database in the stock photography industry. More than 2,500 new photographers join Dreamstime every month, and the site now has more than 15 million monthly unique visitors.
LightRocket.com has announced a major value boost by offering its members up to five times more default cloud storage (100GB for premium accounts) and expanded 100GB storage units, providing members with pay-as-you-go flexibility.
According to
Techcrunch.com Getty Images is overhauling its iOS App on gettyimages.com and iStock to make it easier for customers using mobile devices to source and purchase images. Also included in the Getty Images app will be Getty’s new
Embed function, () unveiled last March that allows user looking for stock imagery for non-commercial use to download images at no cost so long as the image is hosted on the Getty servers and not pasted to the users own website or blog.
After 10 years in operation, and with more than 800,000 images, the German microstock agency
Digitalstock.de has decided to cease operations and provide customers and photographers with an exclusive offer to continue buying and selling photos online at
PantherMedia.net.
Many RM photographers still believe that microstock images are of much lower quality than RM and that customers who want images of the highest quality will continue to go to RM sites for the images they need. Unfortunately, they are only kidding themselves. (Note the difference in number of downloads in this
story.)
Alamy has launched another “Ask James”, where customers, contributors and journalists can ask CEO James West any questions they have about Alamy, Stockimo, or the industry in general.
Get Your Questions In. Questions must be submitted via email to:
nfxwnzrf@nynzl.pbz no later that Thursday July 10th.
For most of the
431 top iStock contributors adding more images to their portfolios does not seen to have had a significant impact on the growth in their number of downloads. In fact, those who grew their collections by the smallest percentage, or not at all, seemed to experience continued growth in sales. Seems counter intuitive.
Yesterday I provided a list of the
431 of the top iStock contributors in the order of the total number of image downloads they have had in their careers. In the coming week I will explore some other ways to look at the available data. It is important to recognize that not all the people on this list are photographers. I have separated them into three groups – Illustrators (I), people with a mix of illustration and photography in their collections (PI) and photographers.
On average, there has been a continued decline in the number of downloads for 431 of iStock’s leading contributors during the first half of 2014. I have been tracking the activity for these contributors for more than 2 year, and about half of them since 2009. Since these individuals joined iStock their images have been downloaded a combined total of at least of 54,291,100 times and a possible maximum of 56,658,200. (
See for how I arrived at these numbers.)
Since early in 2009 I have been tracking downloads of 192 of iStockphoto’s most productive contributors. At that time istockcharts, a service of multimedia.de provided a daily listing of the total downloads of most of iStock’s contributors. This list could be indexed by downloads so it was easy to determine which contributors had the most iStock downloads in their careers.
Fresh, brash and outspoken. With their uninhibited photographic style and unbridled joy of experimentation, food bloggers have conquered a huge fan community on the internet. No wonder even the traditional media are rolling out the red carpet for the new stars. Food bloggers get their own columns, produce cookbook best-sellers and operate cooking shows for an audience of millions. The most interesting among them are now at the center of a new blog where the food image agency
StockFood once again lives up to its reputation as a trendsetter.