Agencies/Distributors
Robert Harding World Imagery
www.robertharding.com, a travel and global imagery specialist agency has acquired
Specialist Stock. Specialist Stock is a comprehensive collection of environmental and nature themed still photos and footage that is regularly licensed to international broadcasters, publications and the education sector.
Shutterstock has announced a yearlong partnership with
TED, the non-profit dedicated to ideas worth spreading. This partnership is designed to encourage more dynamic, visual presentations from the world's most inspired thinkers. As part of this partnership, Shutterstock is providing complimentary subscriptions to speakers at TED2012 and TEDGlobal2012. Contributors whose images are downloaded as part of these subscriptions will receive their normal royalties.
Getty Images, Inc. has announced the release of
Connect by Getty Images, an innovative new content distribution service. This powerful and flexible API is designed to give Web publishers built-in access within their publishing tools to Getty’s images, as well as the search metadata associated with them.
The Granger Collection, a historical image library, has launched a mobile version of its website,
www.granger.com, that will make it fast and easy for picture professionals to search 25,000 years of world history from the palm of their hand.
ZUMA Press, the California-based news agency is now supplying
Alamy's live news feed with images from its global network of 3,000 photojournalists. Owned and run by renowned photojournalist Scott Mc Kiernan, ZUMA has also made its back catalogue available online through Alamy’s
VII has announced that two of its member received top awards in two of the 9 categories in the 2012 World Press Photo Contest. Stephanie Sinclair, received a First Prize for Conterporary Issues stories and Donald Weber a First Price for Portaits.
Corbis Images has launched
OnDemand: Entertainment, a flexible entertainment subscription service. The entertainment subscriptions provide customers with exclusive access to the industry’s most comprehensive collection of breaking entertainment and iconic celebrity imagery. The service will be available to customers worldwide searching for compelling creative content to showcase their celebrity and entertainment related news.
Since September 2011 photography and illustration students have submitted more than 3,000 images to
Alamy,
the world's largest online stock photography agency. For the next two
years these contributors will receive 100% of all money collected for
the licensing of their images.
This article provides a selection of stories that will help the reader
better understand microstock photography and the state of the market for
images at microstock prices at the beginning of 2012. Some of the
stories in this list were written as much as two years ago, but provide
background on the subject.
iStockphoto has announced a new app that lets anyone create fast, fun
and free e-cards for use on Facebook. Customer surveys have revealed
that e-cards have become more acceptable and often preferred to
traditional cards.
Crestock has launched a collection of celebrity photos at microstock prices at
http://www.crestock.com/celebrities/. The collection contains real time coverage of popular stars from coast to coast supplied by top entertainment photographers, supplemented with an archive of past celebrity events – all from ImageCollect/Los Angeles.
Corbis Images (
www.corbisimages.com) and The Associated Press (
www.ap.org) are rolling out a monthlong social media photo showcase called “Perceptions.” The showcase on Facebook seeks commentary from people who view selected images from the cross-distribution collaboration between the two companies announced in January.
Shutterstock (
www.shutterstock.com) has delivered more than 200 million licensed image downloads to its customers since its founding in 2004. This number far exceeds that of any other company licensing rights to stock photography. The company’s closest competitor in the microstock arena is iStockphoto. According to the latest figures from
istockcharts.multimedia.de iStock has licensed 116,134,740+ downloads. (The + probably represents a few thousands above this number.)
Arius3D Corp. and Masterfile Corporation have agreed to extend to March
31, 2012 the closing of the previously announced proposed acquisition by
Arius3D of all of the issued and outstanding securities of Masterfile
.
Imagestate Media Ltd and Imagestate Media Partners Ltd has ceased
trading through its website and as of February 1, 2012 has entered
Administration. The assets of the above companies have been acquired by a
new investor. The ongoing business of Imagestate will be managed by
Impact Photos. Heritage Images will operate separately.
Recently, a stock agent suggested that the industry needs to establish a
floor price for Rights Managed (RM) images to stop the continued decline in license fees. He is frustrated because his overseas distributors seem to be making an increasing volume of sales at prices that are “close to microstock pricing.”
Cordón Press (
www.cordonpress.com), Spain’s number one editorial agency, has just
announced the acquisition of Latinstock Spain (
www.latinstock.es) for an undisclosed amount.
Fotolia has added 3128 fine art
images from the deviantArt (dA) collection to its offering. (
Click here to see the images.) The images are available exclusively at Fotolia.com.
After reading my story on “
Who Controls The Price” Terri Petrie of Greenhighlander.co.uk asked, “How could a stock agency allow for more creator control of prices?”
Corbis Images (
www.corbisimages.com) and The Associated Press (
www.ap.org) have launched their Media offering that provides customers with more than 10 million images covering a range of breaking news, sports and entertainment, archival and creative images.
Our semi-annual analysis of iStockphoto sales has once again produced interesting results. As of January 2, 1012
istockcharts was tracking the sales of 38,163 of the more than 100,000 iStock contributors. More than 90% of the images in the iStock collection belong to this group of contributor. Combined these contributors have had a minimum of 114,875,519+ downloads since each started working with iStock. During 2011 alone a minimum of 18,615,558+ images (and probably about 21.5 million) were licensed for use.
The Authors Coalition of America, LLC, has identified a number of
American authors who may be due royalty payments from non-U.S. sources. These royalties have been received to compensate authors for the foreign reprographic use of U.S. copyrighted materials.
The microstock community
Dreamstime has announced that it saw consistent strong growth throughout 2011. Since 2007, Dreamstime’s customer base has grown from 350,000 to the more than 4.2 million customers. With this rapid growth, Dreamstime has positioned itself as a supplier of high quality digital images to the second largest community of registered stock image users. (It is believed that Shutterstock has the largest community of image users.)
Design Pics Inc., has acquired of
First Light Associated Photographers Ltd., a Canadian based photo agency. The agency was originally founded in 1984 by Pierre Guevremont, Ron Watts and Brian Milne. First Light has been based in Toronto. Design Pics is located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
In 2011
Pond5’s collection grew to over 900,000 and is expected to reach 1 million by early 2012. Currently this is largest collection of video clips on the web. In addition, the site offers 7.6 million still photos, 677,000 illustrations, and one of the deepest audio collections in the world, with more than 200,000 sound effects and 100,000 music tracks. Pond5 also has a small collection of customizable After Effects templates.