Agencies/Distributors
Last week we wrote about the new Getty Images initiative
Post-Usage-Billing Service (PUBS). On Thursday Craig Peters, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Getty spoke at the Luminance event in New York and shared some additional insights. He spoke of the dilemma the photo industry faces in protecting copyright and how Getty’s new initiative can solve at least part of the problem.
As a way of motivating and educating graphic artists, for the past 10 months Fotolia has showcased the work of a single artist each month. Each artist was given a specific theme and was required to use some images from the Fotolia collection in the work. The themes included: business, family, travel, food, lifestyle, street art, mobile, money, drinks and abstract.
Alan Capel, Head of Content at
Alamy explains that the price for printing 3 million copies of a textbook was much higher than we
reported earlier this week.
On November 5, 2012 Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images will receive an award for Global Leadership in Innovation and Collaboration (GLIC) at Suffolk University in Boston. The award will be presented by the Center for Innovation and Change Leadership (CICL) and in an acceptance speech Jonathan will describe the innovative practices that Getty Images has employed that are transforming the digital media industry.
Photographer Jacques Jangoux reports that Alamy has licensed two of his images - A3N0PR (2 boys in a canoe in the Amazon region) and A3AB62 (waterfall of Jari River, tributary of the Amazon) – for just
$25.00 each for textbook use. Of course the photographer will only receive 60% of these figures.
iStock has made it official. They are encouraging contributors to shoot with cell phones and accepting those images into the general collection. The next generation of stock photography – from RM to RF to Microstock to Cell Phones -- is upon us. See iStock’s
Creative Brief.
Pocketstock has created a new pricing strategy call Bidder that enables each customer to establish the price he or she is willing to pay for a royalty free image.
Can today’s music photographers hope to shoot images that are as striking as those of the pop stars from the 50s to the 90s? Or will developments like tighter restrictions for concert photographers, and artists wanting greater image control, mean that today’s music stars will leave a legacy of bland, boring images for future generations? While creating the Pop and Rock
showcase from the Alamy collection, I was struck by how the images of the latest bands didn’t quite have the resonance and iconic status of the documentary coverage of bands and pop stars of earlier eras who often enthralled audiences with their antics, charisma, rampant exhibitionism and on-stage posturing. Photographers helped create those legends.
Citizen Stock has launched a royalty-free collection of over 10,000 images of real people and their emotions. Created by assignment photographers Sherrie Nickol and David Katzenstein, a husband and wife team, Citizen Stock (
www.citizenstock.com) is one of the first stock photo agencies devoted solely to portraiture of “real people.” The models aren’t professional models, but children, moms, dads, grandparents, skateboarders, lawyers, teachers, musicians, chefs, artists, office workers, clothing designers, and small business owners, to name a few.
On its
Google Drive cloud storage service Google has added a feature that will allow its customers to use
Thinkstock photos for FREE. They are currently asking their customers to suggest photos that they would like to see included in this gallery of free photos.
The Carlyle Group (
NASDAQ: CG) and Getty Images management announced today they have formed a partnership to acquire Getty Images, Inc., from Hellman & Friedman for $3.3 billion. Carlyle will acquire slightly over 50% of the company. Getty Images Co-Founder and Chairman Mark Getty and the Getty family will roll substantially all of their ownership interests into the transaction. CEO and co-founder Jonathan Klein will also invest equity in the company.
We recently reported on
Foap.com, a Swedish site where photographers can sell pictures they take using their cellphones. Now the developers of the Finnish company
Scoopshot, which offers a similar service, tell us that their best selling photographers, Arto Mäkelä, has earned more than $19,000 from pictures he ha taken on his Android smartphone and uploaded to the free-to-download Scoopshot app.
Water Rights Images has retained Visual Steam to build and manage a team of experienced licensing professionals on an ongoing basis.
Photononstop Group, based in Paris, announces the purchase of 100% of the shares in
Biosphoto, France’s leading stock agency specialized in Nature, Garden and Environment Photography. The Biosphoto collection contains 2.5 million photos and 20,000 videos. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
For some years we’ve seen a decline in rights managed and traditional royalty free prices. If you look at the price calculators of major distributors it might appear that prices haven’t declined all that much. The problem is that nobody pays those prices.
SuperStock has announced that Alan Bailey will assume the role of CEO and departing CEO, Lanny Ziering will take over the position of Chairman of RGB Ventures, the parent company of SuperStock. Mr. Ziering will focus on acquisitions, strategic alliances, and emerging technologies as the company focuses on expansion.
ZPartners have launched
www.stock3dphotos.com and is inviting still photographers to contribute. The site also provides
photographer guidelines for producing 3D photos.
StockPhotosforFree.com has launched an initial archive of 100,000 free images mostly comprised of still frames pulled from HD videos that are available on
VideoBlocks.com.
On the
MicrostockGroup blog there has been a debate as to whether it is better to try to license images through
Alamy rather than on microstock sites given that the license fees and royalty percentages are so much higher.
Pond5 and Adobe have teamed up to develop a one-of-a-kind plug-in that gives video editors seamless access to the largest collection of over 1.1 million royalty-free stock videos, including 330,000 royalty-free music tracks and sound effects, all exclusively within Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.
The stock photo industry seems to be going through another round of acquisitions and consolidations as owners of small, niche agencies find it difficult to compete in today’s market where there is a glut of supply, relatively flat demand and declining prices. Many agency owners are looking for ways to retire or move onto something else. I regularly get request asking “What is my company worth?”
Fotolia has moved to expand its service in Latin American and Australia just two months after private equity firm
KKR took a 50% stake in the company.
On July 12, 2012, the dapd media holding AG, via its French subsidiary Sipa News, took over the French service of Associated Press (AP). After Sipa Press and Diora News, this is the third company dapd has taken over in France. This takeover makes dapd the largest agency partner of AP worldwide. The parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price.
The summer heat in Washington has got me thinking about air conditioning. That brought to mind a story I did back in 2006 about air conditioning photos and microstock. It all started when a customer asked for a stock picture of an
air conditioning repairman working on a home system to use in a small yellow pages ad.
Thousands of images from the National Geographic Stock: Vintage Collection are now available at
The Granger Collection. The rare historical catalogue, part of the National Geographic Image Collection, documents the world and its inhabitants, including indigenous people, their cultures, the environment, and the natural world from the 1880s through the 1970s.