Web Use
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.
Canva, the Australian Graphic Design site that claims to have 50 million premium photos available via subscription, detected a data breach on May 24th of the records of 139 million customers.
Pond5 has launched a new Web resolution in an effort to grow the use of their clips in the social-media space. The price defaults to 20% of the contributors 4K master price (or 40% of HD price if it’s a native HD file). Contributors will be able to adjust this percentage in their account preferences or on the clip edit item page.
For the last four years the Australian Government has published an annual "Consumer Survey on online copyright infringement". The
103 page report focuses on the unlicensed use of Music, Video Games, Movies, TV, e-Books and PC software. Unfortunately, it does not deal the unlicensed use of photographs.
SmartFrame has developed a revolutionary, patent-pending new image format for the internet that seeks to redefine and become the ubiquitous digital image standard. Having spent 5 years developing the technology and building the infrastructure to support exponential growth, SmartFrame is now seeing the technology being adopted by photographers, picture agencies, publishers and brands globally and is on target to having over 1 billion SmartFrames on the Internet in the next 4 years.
WebPurify, a full-service digital content moderation and review company with over 12 years experience is a new sponsor of the
Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA). The Irvine, CA based company’s mission is to maintain the quality and integrity of media libraries. WebPurify’s offers a combination of live content moderators and AI technology that can be a huge asset to stock photography websites in helping to curate, manage and moderate the copy associated with images and videos.
In 1968
Andy Sacks, a 20-year-old University of Michigan photographer covered Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign stop in Detroit for the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. This is a story about how the photos he captured that day ended up getting used hundreds of times 40 to 50 year later and he received no credit or a reasonable share of compensation for their use.
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.
Since its launch in 2013
Unsplash has been providing a platform where photographers can upload their images for the enjoyment of others. The photographers allow anyone to use their images for free, for any purpose and without credit. While the photo library only contains 400,000 photos (compared to the 180 million on Shutterstock), the company says it’s had more than 48 billion photo views and 310 million photo downloads since launch. Currently, it is seeing 10 photo downloads per second.
Copytrack has completed its
Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and will be launching a Global Copyright Register (GCR) this summer that will work in conjunction with their Global Copyright Enfocement services (copytrack.com). With their Presale and ICO they have a total of 8,600 investors who have purchased around 16 million tokens. The purchase of images found on the GCR will be tracked in a Blockchain and paid for using cryptocurrency tokens.
The Poynter Institute, headquartered in St. Petersburg, FL, is considered by many to be a global leader in journalism education. Poynter claims to be “the world’s leading instructor, innovator, convener and resource for anyone who aspires to engage and inform citizens in 21st Century democracies.” In a
recent article formatted as a conversation between two Poynter employees -- Kristen Hare and Ren LaForme -- the two took the position that it’s hard to get anyone to read an online article if it is not accompanied with an image.
Stocktrek Images has revamped its website with the emphasis on a new appearance to enhance its customer interaction. With the client's approach to licensing images changing significantly in the past years, Stocktrek has developed a new website to incorporate the requirements and demands of today's clients.
Hemis.fr, an independent photography agency founded in France in 2004 has launched a new website with a trendy design. The site has a high speed search engine that is fully responsive to Smartphone and Touch pad search. The site is searchable in both French and English.
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?
A writer for the Boston Globe asked me to discuss the role, if any, that stock photos plays in fake news. “Can or should the stock photo industry do anything to curb the use of its photos on fake news sites.” Stock photography is not “Fake.” This is not to say that there aren’t some photos that are designed to be outright distortions of the truth, but the vast majority of stock photos are taken with the hope of showing an actual event or something that illustrates real life.
Are graphic designers trying to raise their clients to the next level of quality becoming frustrated with generic images and insisting on more images that relate specifically to the brand. Here’s what one website design company in Pittsburgh is doing.
Top Hat IMC, a Pittsburgh
website design company, has launched its very own in-house brand photography service.
According to
Getty Images CEO, Dawn Airey, “Over 97 per cent of visitors come to our websites to look at – not purchase – amazing imagery.”
Shutterstock, Inc. has made its visual search features,
first introduced for desktop use in March available for mobile use. Reverse Image Search for mobile invites users to capture the world around them on their mobile phones, and then upload them via the
Shutterstock app to search Shutterstock’s collection of over 80 million images for similar content and style.
Shutterstock has launched a new editing tool in open beta.
Shutterstock Editor is a simple, fast and free way to edit photos.
Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from investors trying to assess the stock photo industry growth potential and figure out where Shutterstock, Adobe and Getty Images are headed. In general here is what I’ve been telling them.
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.
Photographers with a limited number of images that they market directly from a single online site may want to check out the Australian company
Searchmyimages.com. For a reasonable monthly fee photographers can upload their images to this site. Searchmyimages will then constantly search the web for these images and informs the photographer when and where uses are found.
Have you gotten tired of reading all the “terms and conditions” on the social media sites? Or have you just given up and assumed they are OK. If you really read (and understand) all the terms on these sites is there any time left to engage on the sites? Is there any time left to take pictures?
Should the price paid to use a photo cover the cost to produce it? Most stock photographers recognize it is highly unlikely that they will regularly recover the cost of producing an image from a single sale. The profit and loss calculation is much more complicated.
Before reading this colloquy between Paul Melcher and myself the reader should review my story on “
Authentic And Real Images” and all the comments that started our whole conversation. Paul makes some excellent points. To a large extent I agree with his entire analysis. There is about to be some dramatic shifts in the way advertising is delivered. These stories look at some of the implications for photographers.