With the Getty Images' acquisition of Jupiterimages on the horizon, many international distributors working with both companies are feeling very vulnerable. Some believe that after the deal goes through, Getty Images will consolidate sales of all its brands with a single company for a given territory and withdraw the images from other local distributors.
Several traditional royalty-free production companies--including Image Source, Moodboard, Blend and Cultura--have begun to explore microstock to determine if it offers a growth opportunity in a difficult market. Each has a slightly different strategy.
Alamy has clarified a few aspects of its arrangement with the Copyright Clearance Center to create the new ReadyImages service that was announced yesterday. The company's Rachel Wakefield said the ReadyImages offering is quite different from CCC's past photo-industry activities, which concerned many photographers.
Photolibrary has provided
Selling Stock with a list of 49 Index Stock photographers for whom the company has no contact information. All of them are owed money from sales made by Index Stock prior to Photolibrary acquiring the company.
Jupitermedia has adjusted previously reported third-quarter earnings by reporting a non-cash impairment charge to goodwill in the amount of $40 million, in connection with the recently announced agreement to sell the company's images business to Getty Images. Quarterly revenues are down compared to both the previous quarter and same period of last year. There is also a sharp decline in sales through distributors.
Traditional stock photographers are often stymied by microstock's acceptance and upload requirements, which are very different from those of traditional agencies. The Yuri Arcurs Distribution Network may offer some of the elite and very productive traditional people-and-lifestyle shooters a way of breaking into the microstock market.
Traditionally, direct mail brochures and catalogs have been among the biggest users of stock and assignment photography. Look for that market to continue to decline due to postage costs and general ineffectiveness of this type of marketing.
Digital-photography revenue, including that of traditional and micro-payment stock, is expected to grow 54% by 2013. What share of this total will be coming from still stock?
The Picture Archive Council of America aims to become the Google of commercial stock imagery. PACA plans to launch a stock-image search engine with a simple interface that will enable customers to quickly identify collections with images that relate to any of more than 120,000 of the most used search terms.