Agencies/Distributors
StockFood, the world’s leading food image agency, introduces
living4media: a new picture agency specializing in home and living. The concept behind
www.living4media.com is to unite the most outstanding images produced by internationally renowned photographers and well-known niche agencies under one roof.
With the addition of over 32,000 images from Omni Photo Agency and 18,000 images from the British Library picture archives
Universal Imaging Group’s (UIG) educational image database has grown to nearly 3 million still images and 100,000 film clips. Both of these organizations will be continually adding additional images of art, history, culture and anthropology to the collection.
The owners of VII Photo Agency have announced the revised roster of photographers represented by the agency. They include: Lynsey
Addario, Jocelyn Bain Hogg, Stefano De Luigi, Venetia Dearden, Jessica
Dimmock, Adam Ferguson, Ashley Gilbertson, Ron Haviv, Davide Monteleone,
Seamus Murphy, Maciek Nabrdalik, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Tomas van
Houtryve and Donald Weber and VII's veterans Marcus Bleasdale, Ed Kashi, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Joachim
Ladefoged, Christopher Morris, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair and
John Stanmeyer.
SuperStock, a leading stock photography agency specializing in
Contemporary, Travel, Fine Art, and Vintage imagery, has launched
SuperFusion, a new collection of value-priced royalty-free images
gathered from around the world. The collection features images from top
professional photographers including microstock stars Yuri Arcurs, Ron
Chapple, and Andres Rodriguez.
Corbis Images (
www.corbisimages.com), has highlighted nine of its signature collections and described some of what went into the thinking when creating the collection. The imagery in these collections ranges from commercial images, to unforgettable moments in history to natural wonders and iconic celebrities.
If you haven’t visited the Corbis web site for a while it may be time to
take another look. In 2010 Corbis decided that it was time to update
the search technology they had been using since 1995. The
project involved a series of architectural changes with two primary aims
– improving performance (speed of delivery) and relevancy of the
search results delivered. This story discusses some of the changes and modifications.
Spaces Images is a niche agency founded by people and lifestyle Jonathan Ross about a year ago. However, there are no people in the pictures this agency represents. In tracking 13 years of sales he and his wife and business partner Amy noticed that
many of their best selling images did not include people. They then set out to build
SpacesImages.com a collection that contains property released images of
locations where man lives, works and plays, but without any people in
the images. Most of the have strong graphic and design elements.
The Image Works (
theimageworks.com) editorial stock photography agency has announced the addition to its archive of imagery from the Spanish based Iberfoto picture library. The library consists of over 1.2 million photographs, artistic works and prints, focusing on Hispanic Culture from Spain and Latin America.
While fees charged customers for stock photo use have been steadily
declining, there is another issue that should be of equal concern to
image creators. That is the percentage they receive of the gross fee the
end user pays. This can be complicated and not the number many
photographers think it is.
In an effort to engage with the next generation of picture professionals,
Alamy and
Dreamstime have launched separate initiatives to benefit students.
Fotolia has released a major update to their website which offers improved navigation and usability. This story explains some of the changes.
Corbis Images has made an undisclosed investment in
Demotix following the media distribution partnership between the two companies
announced in March.
The Associated Press and
Corbis Images have announced a comprehensive cross-distribution partnership that provides customers access to more than 10 million images covering an unparalleled range of breaking news, sports and entertainment, archival and creative images.
Masterfile has upgraded its website with a suite of timesaving tools for creative professionals. "The new
Masterfile.com is a game changer. It makes the task of sifting through millions of images an enjoyable, rewarding and ultimately creative experience," says Steve Pigeon, President.
Arius3D Corp plans to buy
Masterfile Corp. for $21.4 million, in a bid to expand into the traditional 2D market. Under the deal's terms, full consideration will be paid in cash, unless Masterfile opts to receive $12 million of the purchase price in stock. The Masterfile portion of the business will continue to operate under its current brand name and under the direction of Steve Pigeon, founder and president.
AudioMicro, Inc., which operates a network of digital content licensing marketplaces, has announced that
ImageCollect.com, its celebrity picture marketplace launched just five months ago has more than 1,500,000 mostly “red carpet” images available for download. The company expects to have more than 4 million images on its site before the end of the year. The collection includes archival imagery from companies like Globe Photos and current content being supplied by top entertainment photographers.
The picturemaxx image search engine is unique in its approach to
providing an image search experience that benefits customers –
particularly editorial - as well as agencies trying to license images.
The company is headquartered in Munich with offices in New York, London,
Berlin and Vienna. Virtually all German speaking media customers (97%)
use picturemaxx as their primary source for finding content. This story explores the advantages and disadvantages of this system for both the customer and the image creator.
iStockphoto COO Kelly Thompson will be moving from Calgary to Manhattan in September to become Senior Vice President, Product Development for Getty Images. He will lead a team of Getty Images and iStock Product Managers as they evolve the packaging and positioning of iStockphoto.com, Thinkstock.com, Photos.com and Clipart.com.
Editor's Note: James West, CEO of Alamy, provided a detailed explanation of the company's Alamy Permium Account strategy on the Alamy blog. For more information about this read
our story published last week and contributor comments on the
Alamy blog.
It’s time to institute a new pricing model. In the ‘80s the only pricing
model was Rights Managed (RM), but the term itself wasn’t even invented
until the ‘90s. Back then every price was based on usage and there was
no other option. In the early ‘90s Royalty Free (RF) was introduced. In
the early 2000s microstock came into existence. Now, it is time to
introduce a fourth model which I will call Use Pricing (UP). The
following would be some of the characteristics of Use Pricing.
In certain segments of the stock photo market Alamy has been experimenting with both price points and the nature of licenses in an effort to grow sales and stem the tide of customers moving to microstock. One particular segment where they have seen a significant decline in sales is travel. Recently, one of Alamy's travel customers outlined for me the details of Alamy's new offer. This story examines the issue.
According to the NY Daily News
Getty Images may sell its WireImage celebrity and entertainment division to
Reuters for something “north of $300 million.” The deal could be announced in the next two weeks. Getty acquired WireImage in 2007 when it purchased MediaVast Image for $207 million.
Corbis Images has acquired
Splash News for an undisclosed amount. From its Los Angeles base Splash provides candid celebrity photography and video content to the world’s premiere print, online and broadcast media distributors of entertainment news.
After reading my story “
Getting Images Seen” on how Getty Images orders search returns John Lund did some searches for his own images on the Getty web site. He came up with some additional insights. Check out the full text of his article on his
blog.
As photographers head off for vacations with plans to shoot the
locations they intend to visit, Alamy has supplied some statistics on
the worlds most photographed cities based on the number of images in its
collection. I’ve provided their analysis below, but I thought it would
be fun to compare the number of images on Alamy with the numbers on
Getty Images, Shutterstock and Dreamstime. Keep in mind that Alamy has a
lot of editorial celebrity and red carpet images in its numbers.
Consequently, there is very little correlation between the Alamy numbers
and those offered by Getty creative or the microstock agencies.