Fashion photographers beware! Much of your market is about to disappear. Why bother dealing with temperamental photographer and models when customers can hang the clothes on a mannequin and give the mannequin a human looking body and expression with Photoshop. That’s what
Looklet is doing.
If you’re a photographer who licenses your work as RM because you believe that’s the way to earn the most money (or a reasonable fee) when your pictures are used, it’s time to take a look at Offset. Many photographers are so opposed to microstock and subscription that they refuse to consider anything connected in any way with Shutterstock. If it is a Shutterstock initiative then it must be bad.
The good news for Corbis photographers is that there will be no third cut before their royalty share is calculated. However, there are still a number of issues that aren’t clear. This story offers some additional clarifications and insights and a number of questions that are still unclear and need to be answered.
If you produce footage you might want to check out a couple of new sights. The first is the
Stock Footage Newsroom where there are short summaries and links to full articles produced by Footage.net. This site will keep you up to date with what is happening at as number of footage distributors. The other is
B-rollStock.com.
In the UK photographers can receive royalties when someone photocopies a page from a magazine or book that contains their image. In December the EPUK discussion group reported that REX Features, a UK editorial agency purchased by Shutterstock a year ago, misrepresented its right to collect certain monies from
DACS on behalf of some of its photographers and falsely reported to the photographers what it had received from DACS. The full story is available
here.
VCG acquired parts, but not all, of Corbis’ assets. To understand what this means for the industry, it is important to have some idea of the amount of revenue the acquired assets generated in 2015? For a long-time Corbis has been thought to be the third largest seller of stock photography in the world after Getty and Shutterstock. If this is true, then how much does the combination of a significant part of the Corbis collection with Getty Images change the industry?
Getty Images has introduced Ultra Pack pricing which effectively lowers prices on all premium creative Royalty-Free images, Editorial images and Videos by between 8% and 31%. The only images not affected by this price reduction are RM.
The tedious process of uploading images for consideration by iStock is about to get much easier. On February 7th Kasper Ravlo will be launching a new tool called
Q-hero. The average time to submit a file for review will drop from over one minute per image to less than 1-2 seconds. Instead of being the slowest site for image submissions, iStock will become the fastest.
Shutterstock is not making enough money so they have decided to lower the royalties paid for Enhanced Licenses. Here's what it means for image creators.
In an effort to make it easier for more people to use Shutterstock imagery the company is partnering with
Optimizely and
Sprinklr. By integrating
Shutterstock’s newest API directly into their platforms, customers of these organizations will be able to easily search, preview, and license from the Shutterstock collection. Contributors will earn a royalty each time an Optimizely or Sprinklr customer licenses one of their images.