Agencies/Distributors
Fotolia has decided that in order to attract more customers to their microstock offering they need to lower prices for professional users. They have created a members-only Dollar Photo Club and are promoting it to readers of Graphic Design USA (
GDUSA).
In celebration of the one-year anniversary of
Stocky United, Brianna Wettlaufer has been appointed CEO of the company. Wettlaufer, who was co-founder and former VP at iStockphoto, (which was acquired by Getty images for $50 million in 2006) brings over 10 years of leadership and innovation to her role.
StockFood has released a new collection of food images that points to a new trend in food photography, and to a certain extent in stock photography as a whole. They call their collection “
Perfectly Imperfect” which describes the spirit of spontaneity that is increasingly in demand in every type of photography.
In all the excitement about 35 million FREE images it is worth looking back at some of things that have been happening at Getty Images in the last three months. After watching revenue decline for the fifth straight quarter, and many of its top producers cut back on production or stop supplying new images altogether, Getty evidently decided that their turn-around strategy wasn’t working and they needed to make some radical changes.
Carlyle Group should be trying to sell Getty’s Midstock division (iStock, Thinkstock and Photos.com) to Shutterstock before the value of that segment of Getty’s business collapses. Carlyle should recognize by now that Getty Images has been a bad investment. It is the time to cut losses.
The German microstock agency PantherMedia (
http://www.panthermedia.net), a German microstock agency with 28 million images in its collection, has relaunched its new website with the most comprehensive update in 10 years. Besides the clear new design, the website offers new products, new licences and additional features.
Photographers, illustrators, Getty’s Image Partners (stock agencies), and trade associations representing Getty photographers should be asking Getty to supply creators with a limited amount of the data collected when Getty embeds creator's images on a web site for
FREE.
Getty Images has announced to its Flickr contributors that it has provided notice to terminate its existing agreement with
Flickr. The original 5-year agreement went into effect in July 2008. Getty has been unable to come to a new agreement at this time. Getty says they continue to be open to working with Yahoo!/Flickr.
See the
previous story. It looks like a high percentage of the RM and RF images in the Creative Stock Images of the www.gettyimages.com
cannot be accessed using the
Embed Tool. This may not be the slam dunk Getty is hoping for.
Getty Images has made it possible for anyone to easily embed and share its imagery – at no cost – for non-commercial use on websites, blogs and social media channels through a new embed
tool. Free Pictures For Anyone Who Blogs.
Shutterstock has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire
WebDAM, a leading provider of web-based digital asset management software.
Fotolia has announced that it will award a prize of $5,000 USD for the best selling image in 2014 that was uploaded to its new Instant Collection for iPhones. In addition, every image accepted in the Instant Collection before the end of April, will instantly earn $1. Now everyone has a chance to sell smartphone images, regardless of technical ability or expensive equipment. Contest details here:
http://us.fotolia.com/instantcontest.
iStock has announced that in April it will launch a subscription product based on the
Thinkstock subscription product. The low priced Thinkstock product has been the fastest growing part Getty Images’ business.
Over 9,000
iStock photographers have received notices that they were overpaid for sales made through the Partner Program (PP). Getty plans to reclaim the overpayments by deducting the amount from the future royalty payments owed the contributors over the next six months. It is unclear exactly how much the total overpayment was, but based on what some photographers are being told will be deducted from their accounts it could have been millions of dollars.
Earlier this week I wrote about the
average price per image licensed at Getty. This article will examine some of the publicly available and widely reported numbers related to the number of images licensed.
On March 10, 1014 Getty Images plans to close down
Photos.com and move virtually all the content and operations to
Thinkstock. Thinkstock currently offers more than 14 million images. Added to Photo.com’s 5.5 million image that will put Thinkstock in the 20 million image range.
Shutterstock has reported a record 28 million downloads and $68 million in revenue for Q4 2013. The company’s revenue for all of 2013 was $235.5 million, up from $169.6 in 2012. About 28% of the revenue was paid out to contributors in royalties.
Alamy has jumped into the mobile photography business with
Stockimo, a new iPhone app that lets photographers upload pictures taken from their iPhone. Stockimo is open to anyone. Alamy contributors who were with the company before the Stockimo launch will receive a 50% royalty. Contributors who are new to Alamy and just submitting iPhone photos will receive a 20% royalty.
Getty Images’ photojournalists Brent Stirton, Sara Lewkowicz, Chris McGrath, Ezra Shaw, Al Bello and Quinn Rooney have been awarded top honors at
World Press Photo, the world’s largest and most prestigious annual press photography contest.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook executive and author of Lean In, has worked with Getty Images to try to identify 2,500 images that portray woman in more empowering ways than many of the stock images of old-fashioned stereotypes found in today’s advertisements and media. Photographers may want to review the "leanincollection" for shoot ideas.
International Business Times reports that in January alone Getty filed five lawsuits for the unauthorized use of single images. While Getty has been aggressively pursuing infringers with “settlement demand letters” for some time, lawsuits are unusual because the monies involved usually don’t justify the expense of going to court.
The biggest challenge for a photographer hoping to license rights to stock images is how to get the images seen by potential buyers. It would seem that the first step might be to get the images accepted by a good agency. But given the number of images on all subject matter in most agency collections that doesn’t necessarily mean customers will ever see them.
More and more stock agencies that license RM and Traditional RF rights are becoming aggregators of images rather than direct sellers of images. This is not a new phenomenon, but as more and more customers tend to go to a few large databases to find the images they need it is having a major impact on the income of many photographers.
PHOTOSHOT, one of the leading international photo libraries representing 5,500 contributors worldwide and representing over 15 million images, today announced that it had completed the purchase of The
Data Archive/Construction Photography, a digital asset management software developer and a specialist photography and licensing company.
Getty Images has announced to its contributors that as part of its initiative to streamline and simplify its collections structure and improve customer experience it will be retiring Jupiterimages.com and Punchstock.com over the course of February and March.