Here are links to a few items I spotted on the Internet that are worth reading. They include observations on the Getty Images search engine, World Assignment photographers and Should I Work For Free.
iStockphoto has added a new collection of “editorial use only” stock
images to www.istockphoto.com. These images are intended for use by news
outlets, publishers, magazines, bloggers and presenters as a
descriptive visual reference to a product, place, event or concept.
For those who would like background on the stock photo industry, its
history and trends this story provides links to a number of stories on
PhotoLicensingOptions.com that readers may want to review.
This story provides links to a series of articles that include the results of a photographer income survey, analysis of the sales of microstock photographers, the size of the market for stock photography and other data useful to understanding stock photo industry trends.
Most print publications have recognized for some time that the
handwriting is on the wall and the old business model for newspapers in
particular where 80% of the cost of producing a newspaper was covered by
advertising and 20% by subscriptions is no longer viable. To a large
extent magazine publishers have the same problem.
The concept of royalty-free stock photography was invented in the early
1990s because many picture buyers felt that it was unfair for image
prices to be based on how the image would be used rather than their cost
to produce. The pay-based-on-use system (rights-managed wasn’t even a
term used at that time) was a particular problem for picture buyers
because they needed to track future use of any image they purchased to
make sure the use wasn’t exceeding the license. Customers wanted a way
to avoid this extra administrative hassle.
With the growing success of Masterfile’s Master Creative campaign, the
stock image company has released yet another challenge to the creative
community – Photo Adjustment Mastery.
AIGA, the professional association for design, announced an exclusive
partnership with Shutterstock, the world's largest subscription-based
provider of royalty-free stock photography, illustrations, and stock
footage. Shutterstock is also offering AIGA members a 15 percent
discount on anything purchased from its more than 14 million image
library of photographs, illustrations and vector files.
The stock photo industry has evolved in many interesting ways in the
last 50 years. This story looks at the changes from mostly editorial rights-managed, to the 1976 copyright law change, to the print catalog era, to CD-rom delivered royalty-free, to the Internet and finally to microstock. We identify some of the key drivers of these changes and show how some unrelated developments made the changes inevitable.
Alamy has reported that in the last eight weeks it has added a record
1.2 million images to its collection which now exceeds 22 million
images. In January alone the collection grew by 620,000 images.
A year ago
the company had in the range of 18 million images on its site.
Over 20,000 photographers and 500 picture agencies have contributed mages to the
Alamy.com site.