With the acquisition of eStockMusic.com, Jupitermedia Corp. has added online music, for as low as $1.00, to its micropayment offering of royalty-free still photos, illustrations and footage available through Stockxpert.com.
Companies offering stock images for sale need to continually provide customers with new material and a greater "depth of choice." But as growth in number of images exceeds growth in revenue, RPI automatically falls. The problem is that older images in the count have less chance of selling and that skews the averages.
With Getty Images going private, others in the industry will lose access to valuable data that has helped them keep up with future industry trends. Without access to Getty's detailed quarterly figures, it will be nearly impossible to make long-range industry projections.
PhotoShelter Inc. has made it possible for photographers with a Flickr Pro-level account to easily upload a copy of some or all of their images to the PhotoShelter Personal Archive (PSPA) and begin distributing them for commercial use.
The primary reason for offering images as RM rather than RF is the hope of earning tens of thousands of dollars from a single sale. But the number of such sales is infinitesimal. Stock image sellers should consider whether it's better to have two separate types of RM images. The two divisions of RM would be Rights Managed Non-Exclusive (RMN-E) and Rights Managed Exclusive (RME).
The Kelsey Group has reported in its "Outlook for Directional and Interactive Advertising" that global advertising spend was just over $600 billion in 2007. It predicts that number will hit $707 billion by 2012.
Stockxpert, Jupitermedia's microstock brand, has expanded its product offering to include royalty free footage.
Reed Elsevier, the world's largest publisher with over $9 billion in annual revenue is in the process of cutting its exposure to the print and advertising segments of the market and intends to concentrate on higher growth online and subscription activities.
In the very near future, RM photographers and traditional RF photographers will need to take a hard look at the whole issue of volume relative to price.
Getty Images Inc. has entered into a definitive merger agreement to be acquired by affiliates of the private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman LLC in a transaction valued at approximately $2.4 billion, including the assumption of existing debt.