Personal Use
Libris by PhotoShelter and
Greenfly Inc. have announced a strategic partnership to empower effortless content sharing across social media. This relationship unites Libris’ digital asset management platform for visual storytelling with Greenfly’s new product, Greenfly Connect, which fully automates the last-mile content workflow for social media. With the power of Libris and Greenfly, brands can now tap into the networks of their influencers and exponentially boost their reach across social platforms.
Forbes Magazine has a story entitled “
Move Over Stock Photos, It’s Time For User Generated Content.” There certainly is an increasing demand for User Generated Content (UGC) and the market is being flooded with it, but there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding how much it is likely to take over the stock photo market.
Getty Images, has agreed to make Getty’s award-winning collection of sports, news, entertainment, archival and creative images available to enhance the voice responses from Alexa on all Echo devices with a screen. Exactly how image creators will be compensated for this use of their images has not been explained.
Lance and Laura Longwell made it their life mission to travel. Despite both working 9 to 5s they found time to explore the world and in doing so set up
TravelAddicts.net, an amazing site full of their adventures and stunning images from all corners of the globe. However, they soon had issues with image theft as their images were being used without permission. The Travel Addicts turned to
Copytrack, the online compensation recovery portal, for help.
More and more photographers are willing to give their images away rather than trying to earn some revenue from their use.
Unsplash is one of many free sources for image. Can photographer who are trying to license rights to their images compete with the availability of free?
Shutterstock has announced the availability of a curated collection of images within Amazon's newly launched Posters & Prints program. A dedicated Shutterstock storefront on Amazon will give customers access to thousands of images that they can select to have printed and delivered - all without leaving Amazon.
Recently, I was contacted by a Business School student who is developing an app that “will be used by internet publication firms, as well amateur and professional photographers.” He asked if I would provide some insight into the industry, specifically on topics such as photographer compensation, and the market share of "real photo’s" vs. stock photos. Here’s my response.
According to
Getty Images CEO, Dawn Airey, “Over 97 per cent of visitors come to our websites to look at – not purchase – amazing imagery.”
Microsoft say that worldwide there are about 400 new powerpoint presentations being prepared each second. That works out to about 12.6 billion presentations a year. A significant percentage of them use multiple images. Some are the creator’s personal images. But the vast majority are grabbed from the Internet via Google, Bing, Flickr or somewhere else. If users paid even $1.00 for each image used in such presentations the annual gross revenue might be more than 5 times the revenue generated worldwide by the stock photo industry.
Recently, I was asked to comment on whether a photographer under exclusive contract with a stock agency that licensed the work as Rights Managed could simultaneously post the same images on one of a series of social media sites.
The
Permission Machine (PM) is a startup in Belgium that is trying to educate social media users that they need permission to use the images they find on the web and provide them with a simple, easy way to license uses.
Dreamstime has released a plugin for WordPress that enables WordPress users to easily access and embed free and commercial content from Dreamtime’s 22.5 million image library.
Frans Lemmens has a problem. One of his clients operates an iPad travel magazine called TRVL Magazine. They use a lot of his images. They encourage readers to share the images found in their app on Facebook. Frankly, readers would probably do this anyway whether they are encouraged to do so, or not. Also, in order to market their app this activity is probably critical for TRVL.
Getty Images makes it hard for some customers to purchase RM images. See what I learned when I tried to license usage of 4 images from Getty. We complain about the unauthorized use of images online and then we make it almost impossible for many potential image users to find out how to license images legitimately.
Anyone who reads the comments on Selling Stock knows that travel photographer Bill Bachmann is a strong advocate of Rights Managed licensing and adamantly opposed to ever making any of his images available as Royalty Free. Imagine his surprise when he discovered that someone had found one of his images on Bing, grabbed it and used it as a background for another photo. And the other photographer was so proud of what he had done that he explained that the image he created was a "Bing Royalty Free background with model added."
Alamy has launched Alamy iQ, a service designed to help customers better manage all the visual assets they own or have licensed rights to use. Alamy iQ will be particularly beneficial to global organizations that have people sourcing visual assets from many locations for a variety of uses. It will complement or replace existing asset management systems, help speed decision making and eliminate risk.
If we want to reduce copyright infringements we must make it easier for people to be honest. Reasoned education is not working. Aggressive pursuit of infringements is not slowing the number of infringements. This story suggests three steps that are technologically possible today and which the industry ought to be exploring.
PicScout has announced the launch of the ImageIRC Post-Usage-Billing Service designed to assure photographers and content licensors that their work will be properly acknowledged on social media platforms which embrace the ImageIRC Post Usage Billing solution.
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.