In business it often helps to try to walk in your customer’s shoes. The following is a situation that developed when a busy designer was trying to give his customer a quality product on a tight deadline (aren’t all deadlines tight these days), and keep the cost of the project reasonable and within the customer’s budget.
Alamy has decided to lower the payout threshold for contributors and make payments whenever a contributor has $75 on account. No fees will be charged at the Alamy end regardless of the method or currency the contributor chooses.
One of the surprising things that came out of this year’s
Visual Connections event in New York was the degree of confusion and misunderstandings graphic designers and art directors have about image rights. Many seem unsure as to what they can and cannot do with the images they license.
On his
Thoughts of a Bohemian blog Paul Melcher points out that content is no longer king. Given the rise of amateur photography and the “corpocrates” that regularly license RM imagery for a few dollars, pros are content kings without kingdoms.
The stock visual media industry is seeing a pick-up after the longest downturn in living memory. Visual Connections New York, the world’s largest marketing event devoted to commercial licensing of visual media, drew more buyers and exhibitors this year than in 2012. Buyers could learn about 72 different stock agency brands from around the world, including 21 new to New York and 22 from outside the US (Canada, UK, Germany, Sweden and Argentina).
Stock photography is changing rapidly. The most serious issues facing stock photographers are:
they have no idea who their potential customers are;
they don’t know what their customers are looking for in the way of images; and
they don’t understand how their customer’s businesses are changing.
Getty Images has done a deal with
Pinterest that will track the use of any of the 80 million photos and illustrations on Gettyimages.com whenever they are posted on the digital scrapbooking site. (A little over 7 million of those photos are on the Creative section of the site.)
Stipple has introduced two new products: Stipple Mobile and Stipple Search. With Stipple Mobil you can create Stippled photos right from your phone. Easily add videos from your camera and YouTube; Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia profiles; and more to your photos. Photographers can instantly share everything on Facebook and Twitter.
BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, has agreed a global five-year partnership with
Getty Images, in which Getty Images will represent BBC Motion Gallery, BBC Worldwide’s prestigious video clip sales business. The agreement will see the world-renowned BBC Motion Gallery brand continue, with Getty Images as the exclusive global distributor.
PhotoShelter has just released the results of a new survey designed to determine “What Buyers Want From Photographers.” The 48 page report is available for
Free here.