Referring to the Apple-championed move away from digital rights-management technologies, image-licensing startup GumGum says it wants to be the iTunes of content, making the licensing process so easy it eliminates the need for content piracy.
While there is still a large gap between traditional royalty-free and microstock, image pricing and contributor commissions are rising at leading microstock Web sites. Even with recessionary woes, there are no signs of a slowdown in the micro segment.
Image-monitoring company PicScout estimates that 90% of stock images are published without appropriate licensing or payment to their owners. Despite the proliferation of laws that criminalize image piracy, it remains a global problem.
Reed Elsevier, the world's largest publisher with over $9 billion in annual revenue is in the process of cutting its exposure to the print and advertising segments of the market and intends to concentrate on higher growth online and subscription activities.
In the very near future, RM photographers and traditional RF photographers will need to take a hard look at the whole issue of volume relative to price.
Getty Images Inc. has entered into a definitive merger agreement to be acquired by affiliates of the private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC in a transaction valued at approximately $2.4 billion, including the assumption of existing debt.
As Jonathan Klein promised when Getty Images acquired Pump Audio, the company's music collection is expanding beyond the independent artists that were the sole focus of Hudson Valley's alternative-music business. In a first major representation agreement, Getty has partnered with top indie film studio Lionsgate.
Photographers considering other sites need to determine how they will compare with iStock. In an attempt to learn more about comparative sales, I decided to use the same keywords to search several sites, order the images by number of downloads and count the total number of downloads for the 100 most downloaded images.