Agencies/Distributors
Vital Imagery Ltd., a leader in the online graphics subscription services, announced today that it has acquired Clipart.com and AnimationFactory.com from
Getty Images. These pioneering websites offer royalty-free clipart, 3D images and animations, photos, photo objects, Microsoft PowerPoint templates, fonts, as well as video backgrounds, e-mail and web page backgrounds for use in commercial and personal projects.
Shutterstock has published an infographic that outlines some
Global Design Trends 2014
based on its more than 350 million all-time downloads and over 100 million of them in 2013.
Alamy has announced that it will add vector graphics to offering as part of its strategy to provide a full service to image buyers. The company is launching with a collection of 500,000 vectors from leading suppliers including YAY media AS, Matthew Britton and Pavel Konovalov.
n it’s
latest trend briefing, the Image Source blog, IMSO, delivers an analysis of popular stories covered during 2013 – from the Cult of Maersk on the rise of Industrial imagery to features on Richard Avedon’s work in Jeans Advertising – the research reveals five developing trends in photography: Mythography; Post-Cowboy Capitalism; Neo Geo Plus; Tonka Tech; and The Double Take.
I was recently asked to name the 5 biggest companies in the stock photo industry and the percentage of total industry turnover they represent. The surprising thing is how the names of the top 5 have changed in the last few years and the implications for the long term future of the industry.
For the past two years I have been tracking semi-annually the total downloads and images in the collection of 420 of iStock’s top earning contributors. As of the end of 2013 these contributors had a total of at least 50,777,000 total career downloads and 1,794,494 images in the iStock collection. Two-hundred-three of these contributors (48%) have uploaded
fewer than 100 new images to their collections in the last two years.
Based on the downloads of 420 of iStock’s most productive contributors who have a combined total of at least 50,777,000 downloads the number of downloads in 2013 were down about
12% compared to 2012. This group of contributors have approximately one-third* of all iStock downloads since the company’s founding,
After reading my story on
Lightrocket and the comments, Yvan Cohen, co-founder of Lightrocket provided some feedback and clarification.
Patents are granted for original ideas. Unilock has a
U.S. patent that describes in broad terms a system for licensing the use of images online. The company is claiming that stock agencies are infringing their patent when they license image use through online sites.
There is a growing demand for narrowly focused image collections that provide high quality, tightly edited and in depth coverage of their particular niche.
DisabilityImages is a good example of one such collection.
Over time royalty rates have declined. Usage fees have dropped dramatically in the last few years. And the huge oversupply of images is making it less likely that any images will ever be licensed. Faced with these facts many photographers have pulled back on new production of stock images, if not dropped out of the stock photo business entirely. Now,
Lightrocket offers a marketing option that may make some of those businesses sustainable.
Footage.net’s Zap Email Service enables creative professionals to instantly send their footage requests to over 50 top footage houses via a single email. Footage companies participating on the service receive a daily stream of new footage requests.
Getty Images has announced that as of January 1st 2014, they are dropping the placement fee for RM Photographer’s Choice. This means that there are no longer any fees associated with Photographer’s Choice RM and RF!
Pond5’s stock footage collection now exceeds 2 million clips. In addition the Redcode RAW (R3D) -- the native format for the popular RED series of ultra-HD cameras -- is now supported on the platform (
http://www.pond5.com/r3d).
Stocksy has announced that it has become the world's first stock photo website built around responsive web design principals. This step has made Stocksy the only stock photo site that can provide the same optimized research and buying experience across any smartphone, tablet or desktop device.
Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") has reported that
Fotolia’s revenues for the fiscal year ending December 2012 totaled
$87 million. Moody’s expects revenues to increase in the “low to mid-single digit percentage range over the next 12 months.”
It’s time to take another look at
PeopleImages.com that Yuri Arcurs Productions launched 17 months ago. Yuri has long been the world’s most successful microstock photographer, and until June 2013 his work was represented on virtually all the world’s microstock distributors.
Getty Images has supplied selected investors with its third quarter revenue figures. Indications are that revenue continues to decline. For the year ending June 30, 2013 revenue was $897 million. For the 4 quarters ending September 30, 2013 indications are that the revenue is less than the $897 million, but we have been unable to determine exactly how much it has declined.
As of December 1, 2013
Universal Images Group Limited (UIG) has opened a new Content Management facility for Asia based in Tokyo, Japan.
A jury has awarded photographer Daniel Morel $1.2 million in damages in his case against
Agence France-Presse (AFP) and
Getty Images for the unauthorized distribution of his images of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. At the time Morel received no payment from the agencies for almost 1,000 uses of his images.
Corbis has released a series of eight research reports entitled
“Trends In Sight” that explain and illustrate with Corbis images What’s New and What’s Next in photography.
Design Pics Inc. has announced the acquisition of AgStock Images, a California based photo agency specializing in agricultural photography. Founded in 1996 by Ed Young,
AgstockImages.com is a comprehensive library of worldwide agricultural photography, representing over 115 leading agriculture, produce, livestock, entomology, botany and plant pathology photographers, including photographers who are also professors and researchers across the United States, Canada, Europe and South America.
This story contains a list of the 99 Shutterstock contributors with the largest portfolios. All have more than 17,000 images on Shutterstock and the leading contributor, Africa Studio, has 346,683. Combined these 99 contributors have 4,433,257 or almost 14% of all the images on Shutterstock.There is a hot link to each contributor’s collection.
Hundreds of thousands of images in major stock distributor collections are never viewed by any customer. If customers can’t see them they certainly can’t buy them. Tens of thousands of images are being added to stock photo databases every day. A very high percentage of them will quickly fall into an abyss never to be seen again. Is there a solution to this problem?
Shutterstock has reported a record 25.4 million downloads and $56.8 million in revenue in Q3 2013. The Shutterstock collection has grown to more than 30 million still images and over 1.3 million video clips. Revenue per download grew 4% year-over-year to $2.35. The growth in revenue per download was driven primarily by a growing portion of revenue that is derived from video footage downloads.