During the New Media Conference at the CEPIC Congress in Istanbul a panel of picture buyers offered their views on what they are looking for from stock photo collections. Lewis Blackwell moderated the discussion. Picture buyers on the panel included Peter Raffelt of Gruner +Jahr; Matt Burgess of Creature; Martin Casson of Dentsu in the UK; Alexander Karts of Die Bildbeschaffer and Paul Millen from an advertising agency in Istanbul. Two issues of particular interest to image creators and sellers revolved around the use of microstock by these large commercial customers and the lack of outstanding unique images in stock collections.
HP and LicenseStream have launched
Snap Stock Images, a service of Snapfish and a new microstock photo licensing service featuring affordable images from photo enthusiasts and professional photographers. Currently, Snapfish has more than 100 million members in 22 countries. Professional image buyers, including small and midsize business owners, graphic designers, advertisers and marketers, will be able to access hundreds of thousands of images that are available on the site at launch. Many of the images were shot by amateurs, but images from Veer and LicenseStream are also available.
At the annual CEPIC Congress, this year in Istanbul, where stock photo
agents and distributors from around the world meet, I asked attendees
the following and agreed to enter the names of those who answer into a
drawing for a chance to
WIN $100.00.
Describe a situation where a fee of $10.00, or less, is justified for the COMMERCIAL use of a single image?
Selling-Stock subscribers also have a chance to win. Send your answer in now!
Image fingerprinting could be a solution for many of the problems photographers face in trying to protect their images. The technology for providing, in camera, a unique fingerprint of every image a photographer creates is already available. All that has to happen is for the camera manufacturers to build this technology into the next models of their professional equipment.
Ingram Image has entered into a binding agreement to acquire the
goodwill and trading assets of Reflex Stock. Reflex offers a unique mix
of visual content, which currently comprises 10 million images.
Reflexstock.com offers traditional Premium quality Royalty Free and
Rights Managed content alongside Budget Royalty Free, MicroPrice Images
and a subscription service. Ingram also acquires Reflex’s successful
industry Design Blog.
After spending six month translating all aspects of its customer experience into German Alamy has launched a German website at
www.alamy.de.
An increasing number of stock photographers are fed up with low prices and low royalty percentages and are looking for a way to get out of the whole agency/distributor rat race. Many are setting up their own sites and are looking for ways deal more directly with their customers. They recognize that they won’t make as many sales, but feel that the higher fees they will receive for each use will generate more total income in the long run. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that by licensing their images directly to end users photographers would receive 10 or more times the revenue for each image licensed compared to what they are receiving from their agencies now.
Have you given Getty Images exclusive rights to represent some of your
images? Are those same images available for licensing on Veer or Corbis
under the brand name Ocean Photography? Many photographers will be
surprised to discover the answer is YES. Photographers who produced images for PhotoDisc and Photographer’s
Choice RF have recently found some of their images on Veer being
marketed through the Ocean Photography brand.
For the third consecutive year Alamy pledges a Scholarship for the 2011
Young Photographer’s Alliance (YPA) scholarship program. The
YPA is a global community where young photographers connect with the
inspiration, resources and contacts they need to build successful and
sustainable careers as the great artists and communicators of the
future. Program sponsorships provide mentoring, financial support and
expertise to students who have been identified as having outstanding
potential.
iStockphoto has announced the launch of its premium-quality Vetta video collection with clip prices that range from 55 to 150 credits (credit prices vary from $0.99 to $1.54 depending on the size of the credit package purchased). Currently there are over 300,000 video clips on iStock, but only a few thousand of the best are in the Vetta collection. However, it is expected that the Vetta collection will grow rapidly. Approximately 5,000 videographers have contributed clips to iStock.