As a result of the publicity surrounding Shepard Fairey's use of an Associated Press photograph, taken by Mannie Garcia, as reference for his very successful Obama Hope poster, a university inquired into standard stock-industry practices for the use of photographs as reference for fine or street art.
The Kelsey Group of BIA Advisory Services forecasts a reduction in local advertising spending in the U.S. through 2013. Kelsey also projects an increasing shift towards digital media.
"I am writing to you today with some unpleasant news," begins an internal email from Getty Images chief executive officer Jonathan Klein. "We have tried very hard to avoid lay offs during the continued turmoil in the world's economy. However, it is now clear that we have no alternative."
Canada's Torstar Syndication Services has launched GetStock.com, claiming that its 10-million-image inventory makes it the largest stock agency in Canada. The imagery comes from Alamy Images, Aurora Photos, TopFoto, IPNstock and Toronto Star Photos, among 21 agency-suppliers and an additional 40 individual photographers.
The long-tail theory is indeed about inventory and not pricing. Andersons theory is based on giving away things that are abundant in order to get customers' attention and draw them back to buy scarce, unique and relatively controlled items. That does not work in stock photography, where there is no way to determine what is abundant and what is scarce in advance. Still, the long tail exists in stock licensing, and it is entirely the domain of microstock companies, making the discussion inextricably tied to how images are priced.
The European Council-funded Metadata Image Library Exploitation Project will hold its final international conference on June 3, during the Dresden-based annual congress of the Coordination of European Picture Agencies. The MILE Project event, "Know Your Rights: How to Cope with Image Rights," will be free to CEPIC attendees and carry a 15 Euro cover charge for others.
"The long tail" is a phrase first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004
Wired magazine article. The concept describes a new way to look at markets and is illustrative of the business strategy of Internet companies, including Amazon.com and Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities, to a very large base of customers. This buying pattern creates what is called a power-law distribution curve or long tail. In this series of articles,
Selling Stock will examine how the long-tail strategy applies to the stock-photo industry.
The Copyright Registry has announced that members in good standing of the American Society of Media Photographers are now eligible for free services. The Registry, which beta-launched in 2008 in anticipation of the passage of an orphan-works legislation in the U.S., offers a set of free services; however, registering as a creator carries annual fees, as do several other services.
Founded in 2006, Quantcast bills itself as "a new breed of audience [measurement] service, focused on helping buyers and sellers quantify the real-time characteristics of digital media consumers." The company's statistics on several leading stock-licensing companies provide a new dimension of information on image buyers.
A survey on current and future media, conducted by The Rosen Group, has revealed that the majority of American readers still read print publications and pay for subscriptions. Nearly half of the survey respondents think this will still be the case in 10 years.