Every so often I put together a list of the most important stories we’ve published in the recent past. If you are engaged in the business of stock photography the links below are to stories that we’ve published so far in 2014. If you are a subscriber you’ll be taken to the full story when you click the link. If you are a customers who uses “credits” you’ll be taken to a brief description of the story. At that point you will need to decide if you want to use some of your credits to read the full story.
Shutterstock has reported $80.2 million in revenue and total downloads of 31.5 million for Q2 2014. About 28 percent of the revenue was paid out to contributors in royalties. At the end of the quarter the company had 478 employees worldwide.
Dreamstime has opened an office in San Francisco at 180 Sansome Street will provide the company with an expanded presence in Silicon Valley. This connection to the area's top-tier technology talent will prove invaluable as the firm continues to offer innovate tools for its users such as the Dreamstime Companion App and WordPress plugin.
On Monday August 4th, Rohn Engh died of a sudden onset of infection causing serious pneumonia and multiple complications. The doctors and nurses at the VA hospital were excellent and did everything possible for him, never giving up. The infection took Rohn in one week. He was two months shy of his 85th birthday.
Flickr has announced to its community of image creators that it will be offering a licensing option, but it has failed to explain when it will happen or exactly how it will work.
ImageBrief reports that in July they made their highest single image sale ever, a $30,000 fee for a stunning aerial image of
Rio de Janeiro taken by Flavio Veloso of Brazil Photos.
In the near future Tom Zimberoff, Founder and CEO of
PIXterity, will be launching a new portal that proposes to supply member photographers with a huge amount of contemporary data (Big Data) that will enable them to know what image buyers are actually paying top producers for the images they purchase for their projects. Photographers who place their work exclusively with PIXterity are expected to get much better prices for their stock and assignment work. Currently there is a very interesting, long discussion on the LinkedIn Group of
American Photographic Artists, APA that readers may find interesting.
Can usage fees continue to drop? Most videographers think that
Shutterstock’s prices for video clips at $19 for web use, $49 for an SD file, $79 for HD and $299 for 4K are about as low as prices could go. Any lower and videographers would no longer go to the trouble of creating new clips.
Pearson’s conference call updating investment analysts on the company’s financial results for the first half of 2014, offered some interesting insights into where the education business is headed. By the end of 2014 Pearson will have cut its physical infrastructure and warehousing capacity in half compared to what it was 2 years ago. They will have cut 4,000 jobs, around 10% of the their workforce, primarily in print-related activities in mature markets.
Last week we published a story about
AudioBlocks a new platform licensing royalty-free music by subscription. Today, I want to examine the parent company,
VideoBlocks, that was launched in 2010 and licenses royalty-free video clips by subscription.