Pricing

Nikon Moving Manufacturing To Thailand

By Jim Pickerell | 527 Words | Posted 12/21/2020 | Comments
I purchased my first Nikon camera in 1958 when I lived in Tokyo. At that time Nikon was the premier Japanese camera company. Nikon has announced that they will now move all manufacturing of new equipment from Japan to Thailand. The reasons are simple: Blue Collar workers in Japan average $18.94 per hour -- Blue Collar workers in Thailand average $4.15 per hour.

Don’t Reveal Your Shutterstock Earnings To Anyone

By Jim Pickerell | 559 Words | Posted 12/7/2020 | Comments
Shutterstock doesn’t want their contributors revealing how much – or how little – they earn. Presumably, this is because they believe that if contributors knew how little they might receive for the imagery they submit they wouldn’t bother to submit anything.

Getty “Market Freeze” Update

By Jim Pickerell | 175 Words | Posted 8/11/2020 | Comments
After publishing our article “Getty’s RF ‘Market Freeze’: Expensive Customer Mess?"  I received the following clarifying message from Matthew McKibben, Getty Images, PR Manager in The Americas. He said:

Stock Photography: Is Volume The Answer?

By Jim Pickerell | 1402 Words | Posted 7/29/2020 | Comments
I can remember when I was primarily an assignment photographer and occasionally sold outtakes from assignments on the side. Most of the income I needed to support my family came from assignments. Stock sales gave us a little extra. Demand for stock started to grow and it became harder for me to get assignments as I was working in an area where the competition was stiff from a lot of top quality experienced photographers. Buyers wanted to pay a little less than it cost to do an assignment. They liked having instant access to the stock image they needed and not having to spend a lot of their time organizing assignment shoots.

Getty Helps Designers Take Advantage Of Photographers

By Jim Pickerell | 346 Words | Posted 7/24/2020 | Comments
A Getty Images photographer reports that he gets a lot of sales to a Scottsdale, Arizona company called Design Pickle that offers full design services to businesses. Getty licenses these photo uses for $0.17. The photographer gets a $0.03 royalty for his work.

Our Royalty System Is Destroying Photographers

By Jim Pickerell | 1376 Words | Posted 7/10/2020 | Comments
Since the 1980s “The legal and political environment has been tilted substantially in favor of shareholders and against workers,” according to Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard, and Anna Stansbury a Phd candidate at Harvard University. This story discusses the way this principal has played out in the stork photo business.

List Prices Mean Nothing

By Jim Pickerell | 261 Words | Posted 7/5/2020 | Comments
What’s an image worth? Owen Franken sent me his image (shown below)  of sliced duck in a Paris restaurant as it appears on the Getty Images website. The list price on Gettyimages.com for a large file is $475 Euros. If all the customer needs is a very small file, only suitable for online use, the price is only 50 Euros. Getty licensed this image to a customer in Canada for $0.14 and the photographer received $0.03 for his work. The photographer’s royalty share of the gross sale price is 20% so actually the photographer was only entitled to $0.028, but in a moment of generosity Getty rounded the payment to the next highest cent.

What Is Canva?

By Jim Pickerell | 872 Words | Posted 3/26/2020 | Comments
When the question of market leaders in the stock photo industry comes up the names photographers usually think about are Getty Images, Shutterstock, AdobeStock, iStock and Alamy. Maybe they should be thinking about the Australian company Canva. The users and buyers of photographs are people who design products that needs visuals. Canva has been built to provide a host of services designers need to do their jobs.

Will EyeEm Be The Main Future Supplier Of Stock Images?

By Jim Pickerell | 684 Words | Posted 3/20/2020 | Comments
As I pointed out in yesterday’s story EyeEm is the single largest supplier of stock images to Getty’s Creative Collection. Currently 8,005,719 of the 30,472,764 images in Getty’s Creative Collection have been supplied by EyeEm. That’s 26% of the total collection making EyeEm by far the largest contributor to Getty Creative.

Getty Creative Collection Transformation

By Jim Pickerell | 2640 Words | Posted 3/18/2020 | Comments
In the last four years there has been dramatic shifts within the Getty Images Creative Collection. It is unclear how this has affected gross revenue generated as Getty has stopped providing a public breakdown of the revenue segments of its business. Nevertheless, it is believed that since 2016 annual gross Creative revenue has consistently generated about $280 million of the company's roughly $850 million in gross revenue.

Where Getty Goes From Here

By Jim Pickerell | 1753 Words | Posted 12/2/2019 | Comments
Paul Roberts of the Seattle Times has recently interviewed Craig Peters, Getty Images CEO, and published an analysis of the company’s current situation entitled “Its Crunch Time For Seattle Based Photo Giant Getty Images, And For Photographers” that everyone in the industry may want to read.

RM Alive And Well At Alamy

By Jim Pickerell | 193 Words | Posted 11/25/2019 | Comments
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the Death Of Rights Managed Licensing, but Alamy reports that it is alive and well at Alamy.  They say, “There’s been lots of discussion in recent weeks about the future of Rights-Managed licensing. Alamy has no plans to discontinue offering RM images and will continue to offer photographers a choice to license their photos as Rights-Managed or Royalty-Free."

Premium Access At Getty

By Jim Pickerell | 1351 Words | Posted 11/20/2019 | Comments
For over a decade image creators have been discouraged by Premium Access pricing. I believe PA was first instituted around  2006 as a way for Getty to get a guaranteed monthly payment from some of its largest Enterprise clients rather than the company be being subject to the erratic monthly image needs of some of these customers where they might purchase a huge number of images one month and little or nothing the next.

Growing Revenue At Shutterstock?

By Jim Pickerell | 1184 Words | Posted 11/15/2019 | Comments
I was asked recently what I thought Shutterstock could do to grow revenue. My answer was not much. I don’t think it will be possible to grow the downloads very much. Shutterstock has focused for several years on growing the number of Enterprise customers. But, I don't think that is likely to work either. The one thing they could do is raise prices on at least some of the images they license. See my thoughts on why this is a good idea that they are not likely to adopt.

Death Of Rights Managed Licensing

By Jim Pickerell | 1700 Words | Posted 11/6/2019 | Comments
Getty is shutting down all Rights Managed licensing on www.gettyimages.com. This may effectively be an end to the entire marketing strategy of pricing stock images based on how they are used. While there are still a number of small and mid-sized agencies that continue to price images based on usage, it seems highly unlikely that they will be able to continue to build their image collections or attract many customers in the future. Every stock photographer and stock agent should read this explanation of Getty’s plans for “phased retirement of rights-managed creative images.”

Future For RM Photographers

By Jim Pickerell | 729 Words | Posted 10/25/2019 | Comments
A 65-year-old photographer who has been selling his work as stock for many years and licensing his images as RM wrote recently asking my advice. He has a large collection of images and licenses a lot directly to clients, but over the years he has also made a small percentage of sales through stock agencies. See my advice.

What To Do When Competitors Discount Prices

By Jim Pickerell | 489 Words | Posted 8/16/2019 | Comments
An editorial stock agent tells me that he is trying to hold the line, or increase, the prices he charges for images because his providers tell him that their costs are increasing. Meanwhile, a competitor who is offering dramatically lower prices in an attempt to win customers has entered the market. As a result, the agent's providers are seeing poorer sales. He asks for advice as to what he should do? I’ll give some answers, but I also want to invite my readers to chime in with any thoughts they might have, or strategies that have worked for them.

RM Licensing No Longer Makes Sense

By Jim Pickerell | 1492 Words | Posted 7/30/2019 | Comments
Photographers trying to license their images as Rights Managed (RM) need to give some serious though about whether this strategy is still in their best interests. In theory, licensing based on usage should enable a photographer to occasionally get higher prices for certain uses, rather than giving away all future rights and allowing multiple re-uses for a low Royalty Free (RF) license. The following are some reasons why this “theory” no longer works.

Free Images For Sketches, Internal Presentations And Pitches

By Jim Pickerell | 663 Words | Posted 6/27/2019 | Comments
A reader asked,  “Is it known how much money is lost when premier and enterprise customers are able to get high resolution images that they use for sketching, internal presentation or pitches at subscription prices and only pay for the ones they use in print?”? The answer if NO. Nobody had any idea, or is tracking, of how many images are used in this way compared to how many are actually used in delivered products. But, we do offer some related data of the loss through subscriptions compared to licensing based on use.

Rights Managed Future At Getty

By Jim Pickerell | 565 Words | Posted 5/30/2019 | Comments
A stock agent asked if I had heard a rumor that Getty isn’t selling RM images anymore. The rumors are almost true. I did a story back in March entitled the "End of RM" where I reported that Getty Images personnel were telling some stock agency suppliers that in 3 to 5 years there will be no more RM licensing.

Ad Agencies Turn Away From Stock To Assignments

By Jim Pickerell | 368 Words | Posted 5/27/2019 | Comments
As more and more consumer are turning to social media for information about the products and services they want to buy Ad agencies and brands are finding that they must up the quality of their offerings in order to get attention. According to Erik Radle, CEO of Dallas-based Miller Ad Agency, “People are finding out that the content has to just sing. It has to just dazzle. We’re spending a lot of time doing photo shoots because the days of stock photography being meaningful on social media are over. That just doesn’t cut it any more and will get you ignored.”

EyeEm No Longer Subsidizing Getty Sales

By Robert Kneschke | 1153 Words | Posted 5/27/2019 | Comments
A few years ago EyeEm decided to guarantee its photographers a minimum compensation for each image licensed through the Getty website regardless of what they received from Getty. Over the years they have steadily lowered that minimum and with the last sales report they have finally dropped the idea of a guaranteed minimum royalty. This article explores what happened.

Another Look At The Market In China

By Jim Pickerell | 643 Words | Posted 5/2/2019 | Comments
The stock photo market in China may be bigger, and more lucrative than many people think. Gaopin Images tells Selling Stock that their average gross sale to Chinese customers in 2018 was $35, 17% more than what Getty is earning worldwide and 44% more than the gross China sales Getty is reporting to its contributors.

Future Value Of Stock Images

By Jim Pickerell | 462 Words | Posted 4/29/2019 | Comments
I was asked recently to appraise the value of a collection of stock images that were being donated. Back in the 1990s and even the early 2000s this would have been a relatively easy task. I would look at the revenue the collection had generated in previous years, determine the rate of revenue decline year over year and assess, based on the type of imagery, the length of time they might continue to have commercial value.

PIXTA Makes Business Alliance With Naver OGQ Market In South Korea

By Jim Pickerell | 194 Words | Posted 3/19/2019 | Comments
The Japanese microstock agency PIXTA which purchased Topic, a South Korean premium stock agency a couple years ago, has decided to make a business alliance with OGQ Co.,Ltd. in their "Naver OGQ Market." Naver is Korea's version of Yahoo or Google. The sales price for each image use will be 200 South Korean Won. This is equivalent to about $0.18 in U.S. dollars.