Macrostock
NBC News has reported that “
News media paid Melania Trump thousands for use of photos in ‘positive stories only.’” President Donald Trump’s most recent financial disclosures revel that the first lady earned between $100,000 and $1,000,000 in photo royalties in 2017 from
Getty Images. (Federal officials are only required to give an income range in their filings.
The Mega Agency has signed a deal with American Media, Inc. (AMI), the leading publisher of celebrity journalism and health and fitness magazines in the United States, that makes it AMI’s premium content partner. Mega already globally syndicates exclusive content for AMI, which owns and operates the leading print and digital celebrity and active lifestyle media brands in the United States.
Olycom, a major Italian photographic agency headquartered in Milan and founded in 1958 by Walfrido Chiarini as Olimpia Fotocronache has filed for bankruptcy. Everything regarding debts is in the hands of a judge. LaPresse, the Italian multimedia news agency led by Marco Durante, has acquired the analog and digital libraries of Olycom including the Publifoto brand, the historical archives Olimpia and Olycom and related brands covering the whole of the twentieth century, with a collection of over 15 million images.
One has to wonder if Getty does any analysis of their Creative Collection in terms of what sells and what doesn’t. Clearly, as we
reported yesterday, the largest and fastest growing segment of the Getty collection is EyeEM with 4,558,201 RF images. Back in
August 2016 EyeEm had only recently started contributing to Getty Images and had 256,152 images in the collection. They have 17.79 times as many images now as in 2016. At that time Getty had a total of 16,687,710 images in the Creative Collection. That collection has grown 43% in size in two years, but nothing like EyeEm’s 1779% growth.
In this report I have searched each of the different RM and RF collections on the Creative section of
www.GettyImages.com to determine the number of images in each collection. Collection sizes vary greatly from EyeEm with 4,558,201 RF images to Silkroad Images, PictureIndia, Chic Sketch and Corbis Historical, all with fewer than 200 images each.
One of the hardest things for stock photographers to calculate is their actual costs of stock image production. As in any business it is critical to understand your costs if you hope to eventually earn a profit from their production. This story will provide an outline of some of the things that need to be considered when determining costs. It will also provide some average costs figures that some leading professionals work toward.
I would like to encourage every stock photographer to begin to calculate, on an annual basis, their Return-Per-Image (RPI) for each agency they work with. This is particularly important for those photographers who hope to realize a profit for the time and expense they invest in producing stock images.
Contributors to 500px Marketplace are finally learning what Visual China Group (VCG) has planned for them. VCG has just sent them a message outlining some “major enhancements” that are coming. “ “These changes will help maximize your potential earnings by positioning your content at the
right price and with the
right distribution. Starting July 1st, 2018, we’re offering our community an
exclusive opportunity to work with our newest global distribution partner, Getty Images,” the message says. (emphasis mine)
Getty has just sent out an email to its customers promoting its Creative Royalty-Free Imagery. When you click on
View All Creative Images you find that there are 16,844,390 images in the Creative RF collection. There are also 6,590,271 "Creative RM" images in the total Creative Collection.
agefotostock has appointed Yolanda Sandoval as Business Development Manager for the News & Press area of the company following the launch of their new website that simplifies their business into
three primary business areas, Press, Creative and Economic imagery. Economic imagery was formerly referred to as Creative Stock photography. Sandoval will work out of the Madrid office.
After years of Shutterstock taking market share from Getty, it seems that the two have achieved a state of relative parity with regard to gross revenue generated from the licensing of still images. Customers no longer seem to be leaving Getty because its prices are too high. In fact, Getty seems to be charging selected customers less per-image than what Shutterstock would charge them. Where AdobeStock fits in is unclear, but for the time being each seems to have a customer base that favors them. There does not seem to be a lot of movement of customers from one to the other.
Arcangel Images has sent the following message to the photographers it represents. “Again, we ask all photographers not to split rights-managed photoshoots between libraries or submit to other outlets near identical RM images to those held by Arcangel. Aside from devaluing your work, this can and will lead to major licensing conflicts. This not only affects our reputation as a supplier of high-end imagery, one which has taken almost twenty years to build but can be costly for the photographer, as they may be liable to pay legal and re-printing costs.”
Bridgeman has announced the acquisition of
Lebrecht Photo Library, the world’s largest image bank for music and related arts, with a collection of over 400,000 specialist images. Lebrecht is the world's most comprehensive image bank for every kind of music ever created - classical music, jazz, opera, rock music, musical instruments, notation, Broadway musicals, dance and ballet. It also has an extensive archive for literature and historical personalities.
Does anyone know. who owns the copyright to image
607387712 of Marilyn Monroe on Gettyimages.com. Evidently Getty doesn’t. It seems that Getty has the rights to license the image for “Standard Editorial Rights,” but that does not include commercial use rights or print cover rights. Evidently it also doesn’t include the right to license a use for wall décor because Getty will not license the image for that purpose.
SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, has acquired
Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary Oath. Flickr was founded in 2004 and sold to Yahoo in 2005. Yahoo, in turn, was acquired by Verizon in 2016 for
$4.83 billion. Verizon combined Flickr with AOL to create a new subsidiary called Oath.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s stock photo agencies began placing more and more copies of the images they represented with distributors around the world. Initially, this resulted in significant increases in revenue for the image creators and the primary agencies. The Internet and agency consolidation has changed all that, particularly for the image creator. Now, in many cases the distributor system has simply become a way to siphon off a bigger portion of the gross fee paid by the customer to middlemen before the image creator gets his share.
Image Source has announced a new strategic partnership with high end brand, Luxy Images to deliver a bespoke (customized) image service direct to clients in Europe at
www.imagesource.com.
Blend Image, at one time the leading stock photo production company in North America, has announced to its image creators that it is “winding down” operations, “trying to negotiate deals that might provide members with the option to move their content without having to resubmit it,” and making plans to otherwise return content by October 2018.
Over a billion searches are conducted annually on Gettyimages.com. Getty often provides information on a few search terms that are being used more frequently this year than in the previous year. Recently, they provided the following list and the percentage increase in 2017 compared to 2016.
The major stock agencies seem to have reached a revenue plateau. It is time to consider a major change in marketing strategy. There is a strategy that should be relatively easy to implement which could result in higher, overall revenue from licensing the same number of images.
Now that 500px has been
sold to VCG it appears that the 500px Marketplace is in transition. Major contributors to Marketplace are receiving notices that their agreements will be terminated effective June 27, 2018. It is not clear that Marketplace will cease all licensing of imagery at that time, but that appears to be the case.
Given stock imagery oversupply, and ever falling prices, in order to justify continued production of the type of images customers want to buy, professional image creators need to find a way to reduce, or eliminate, some of the middleman cuts.
I was talking to a photographer recently who has both RM and RF collections with Getty Images. The question he faces is whether to put new images into the RM or RF collections. Getty is pushing many of its photographers to move many of their images from RM to RF. Certainly, there is a much better chance that an image will get used if it is available for licensing as RF rather than RM. But, if the photographer’s goal is to maximize revenue, will images offered as RF earn as much revenue overall as those offered as RM?
One of the issues these videographers face is accurately tagging their video clips so they can be easily discovered by customers.
Microstocksolutions LLC has released its
VRmeta® app for iOS and Android that is designed to make it easier for videographers to accurately tag their digital video and 360°/ VR clips with time and location-based metadata.
In
Aurora Photos latest newsletter to contributors President and Founder José Azel offered insights on the current state of the stock photo industry that are worth every stock photographer considering