Agencies/Distributors
Many traditional RF and RM agencies and production companies are adding images to the
Offset collection. I’ve found images from Blend, Aurora, Tetra, National Geographic, Westend61, fStop, Johner, Gallery Stock, Cavan Images and Radius Images in the few searches I’ve conducted.
Shutterstock has done a deal with Facebook that will give businesses that advertise on Facebook
FREE access to the Shutterstock library that now totals more than 28 million images. Each time a Facebook advertiser licenses a Shutterstock image the Shutterstock artist will earn a royalty – presumably the $0.25 to $0.40 subscription rate.
Getty Images has made a number of strategic decisions in the past few years that have resulted in declines in both its “Creative” (RM and RF) and microstock lines of business. These decisions have also aided Shutterstock in its rise to a commanding position in the market with its subscription licensing model. I want to emphasize that when I talk about declines I am not referring to Getty’s other lines of business - Editorial, Footage, Other or B2B music – which as far as I can tell are still growing.
Getty Images has watched the rise of Shutterstock – to the company’s chagrin – and is trying to build Thinkstock to a position where it can take market share away from Shutterstock. Read this story to see why I think Getty is unlikely to be successful and why their fortunes are likely to further decline.
Getty Images has made the OJO Images available on
iStockphoto. The images are now “exclusively” available on the Getty Images network of sites and select partners. The full collection boasts nearly 31,000 premium files, which will grow to nearly 45,000 by the end of October.
Swedish mobile photography startup
Foap has secured $1.5 million in funding that will go towards further growing the company. The company will be taking its first steps into the American market by opening an office in New York in September.
Shutterstock has reported a record 24.3 million downloads and $56.8 million in revenue in Q2 2013. Revenue per download grew 5% year-over-year to $2.33. This was driven by a continued shift toward on demand, direct sales and footage downloads, all of which carry a higher effective price-per-download. The Shutterstock collection has grown to more than 28 million images and over 1 million video clips.
Recently, in testimony on the importance of copyright before the House Intellectual Property Subcommittee John Lapham, Senior Vice President, General Counsel of Getty Images, provided some
useful statistics about Getty’s operation.
Footage.net has compiled a collection of stock footage clips that number more than 3 million and includes collections from Getty Images, FootageBank, Framepool, CNN ImageSource and Shutterstock.
The
Image Source team responsible for tracking trends in the premium stock photography industry is in the process of publishing a series of briefings following their recent research conducted to determine near-future patterns in the use of conceptual imagery. Intended to help premium stock photographers produce the imagery demanded by image buyers, their research will be published as a series of articles on the Image Source
photographer resource blog over the next couple of months.
Yuri Arcurs has written a
long post entitled “
Microstock sees its first major setback in 6 years and here’s why.” In it he explains (1) why he is pulling his images out of all microstock agencies except iStockphoto and his own Peopleimages.com, (2) why he decided to go exclusive with Getty, (3) why mobile, crowd sourced photography is “a serious threat to stock photography” and (4) why he has invested $1.4 million in Scoopshot. This article is a must read for everyone in the industry.
A few months ago I reported how Getty Images’
Rights Managed prices vary when an image is being used in different countries. Now, I've expanded that research to cover a number of additional countries and additional types of uses. The results are interesting and show how confusing RM pricing can be.
In the last 18 months I have been tracking the collection sizes of 421 of
iStock’s leading contributors. These creators have had combined total downloads of 49,141,000 out of an estimated 150 million for iStock since its founding. Thus, they are very representative of iStock’s total collection and sales.
iStockphoto has announced today that
1/2 of its imagery is now 1/2 of its former price. Prices for non-exclusive images used to be: 1, 4, 7, 10, 12, 15, 18 credits based on file size. Now those prices have dropped to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 credits with the price for the largest file size being only 39% of what was formerly charged.
Backed by Yuri Arcurs,
Scoopshot is launching a new service for crowdsourcing photography on-demand in minutes after the customer makes a request. Scoopshot gives photo buyers the ability to instantaneously place assignments in front of the company’s global network of 280,000+ mobile photographers.
Over the weekend, Seeking Alpha (SA) published an article aimed at the investment community entitled, “
Shutterstock Valuation Makes Me Shudder.” The points made in this article are well worth considering, not only for investors, but for anyone interested in earning a living in the business of stock photography.
Since early in 2009 I have been
tracking downloads of 192 of iStockphoto’s most productive contributors. All of them have more than 48,000 downloads and 130 of them have more than 100,000. There are others with high numbers of downloads that I have not tracked for as long a period, and I’m sure there are a few I have not identified. Nevertheless, I believe this group is very representative.
James West (Alamy CEO) and Mike Fischer (Alamy Chairman) have invested in a smartphone video start up called
Manything, an innovative new video recording service that uses smartphones and tablets as remote video cameras.
Shutterstock’s
Offset brand that was announced in April is moving forward. Currently the site has more than 27,000 images with more images and artists added every day. Customers are already licensing images, but Offset is currently in an invite-only beta. If you would like to take a look at what’s on the site go to
http://www.offset.com/ and request access.
Alamy has launched an initiative called “Ask James” where contributors pose questions on Facebook, Flickr or the Alamy blog about Alamy operations or the stock photo business in general. Once the questions are in CEO James West sits down infront of a webcam and records as many answers as he has time for in 10 minutes segments.
The stock photography business has its first billionaire. Bloomberg news reported that last week Jonathan Oringer, the founder of
Shutterstock Inc. (SSTK) became a billionaire. Oringer owns 18.5 million shares of Shutterstock, or 55 percent of the outstanding shares. Last week shares of the company reached a record high of $56.44. Today, shares are trading at around $56 per share which makes Oringer’s holding worth in excess of one billion dollars.
Here’s the second in our continuing series of things I’ve found on the web that might be of interest to readers. Rather than my trying to summarize each article it is better for readers to just check out the link. The first article deals with using discarded cell phones in the Philippines to replace costly textbooks. Next National Geographic gives cell phone users guidance and on how to produce great pictures. There is a great photographer’s review of Stocksy and finally brief biographies and pictures taken by 10 of the world’s most famous art photographers.
Yesterday we talked about the search by image feature on the
CIR. Today, we discovered that Getty has added a search by image feature to
Thinkstock. Go to the Thinkstock web site and look for the “search by image” button under the search box.
Two Vancouver art directors faced with using stock photography because their clients don’t want to pay for assignments have launched a blog called
Getty Critics which pokes light-hearted fun at some of the stock photos that can be found at
www.gettyimages.com.
Getty has announced that it will be retiring The Agency Collection (TAC)
on iStockphoto in the next few weeks and creating a new collection
called Signature+. The company says the main driver for this move is to
simplify their offer to customers. It is unclear how this will
“simplify” the offer.