Some people complain that10 million photos are too many. Now, spffy.com gives you access to 1 billion pieces of visual content.
A recent survey of stock photo buyers, conducted by the Piper Jaffray investment bank, found that 59% of respondents use images from microstock sources. This is up from 45% in 1Q 2007 and 30% in 2Q 2006.
Gregg Stallings and Lynn Martin have joined Aurora Photos, Stallings as director of sales and Martin as director of royalty free.
The Corbis incentive program announced last week offers up to 90% discounts on RF images - with a few twists. The discounts are for low-volume customers, but if you qualify, it's a great deal.
Since 2004, Alamy has been providing detailed information relative to the company's operations, though as a private company, it's not required to do so. The following 2006-2007 financial breakdown can be useful to image suppliers.
Alamy had gross sales in Q3 2007 of $7,506,000 and is on track to exceed $28 million in all of 2007, up 15.5% from its 2006 revenue of $24,237,364.
For 25 years Ron Chapple has been one of the world's leading stock photographers, always on the cutting edge of the next trend. In the 1990s he was the top seller of RM imagery for FPG, a major stock photo agency of that period. After Getty Images purchased FPG, Ron established Thinkstock, an RF production company. In 2004 he sold Thinkstock to Jupitermedia for more than $4 million. While still producing RM and traditional RF, he recently became an aggressive producer of microstock.
The regional, rights managed stock agency Folio, based in Washington, D.C., has closed its doors after 20 years, citing “significant competitive changes†resulting from the proliferation of RF and Microstock sources.
Internet advertising - including pure-play Web sites and digital extensions of traditional media - will replace newspapers as the largest ad medium in 2011, according to research from Veronis Suhler Stevenson.
RM sellers are winners under the MRR strategy. Many photographers will note that size of usage is being ignored; a few customers will get really big uses for less than they might have paid in the past.