In celebration of its 20th anniversary, Corbis has launched
Storied, a Web site and collection of culturally and historically significant images presented by notable personalities.
Notable industry analyst Dan Heller has joined technology company PicScout as vice president of marketing.
Pessimism over the future advertising plans of advertisers and media-buying executives appears to have bottomed out, or is at least leveling off, according to the most recent in a series of every-other-month surveys being conducted among ad executives following the economic meltdown.
Many traditional sellers want to believe that all microstock is doing is stealing traditional customers. However, there is a lot of evidence that disproves that theory.
Recently, I wrote an article comparing the advantages and disadvantages of various marketing strategies. I suggested that in terms of the number of images licensed for commercial uses "rights-managed licenses account for 3% of the total number of annual licenses. Traditional royalty-free images make up 6%; 20% goes to subscription services and 71% to microstock.”
How long will it take before traditional prices drop to microstock levels? If Alamy's sales are any indication, microstock sellers might not be cannibalizing traditional sales in terms of number of units licensed, but they certainly are cannibalizing revenue as traditional sellers fight to compete.
NBC Sports has selected Denver-based Thought Equity Motion as exclusive content-licensing agent. The is the second deal for the two companies; Thought Equity has been the exclusive rep NBC News content for the past two years.
It is difficult to estimate the number of image licensed annually using this model due to the lack of solid statistical information, which is more easily available with other licensing models. Nevertheless, I estimate the units licensed by subscription at 20% of the worldwide total. It could be higher. If so, the corresponding percentage that microstock makes up would be lower.