In light of Getty Images' latest moves, I predict that very soon (certainly in less than a year) virtually every company producing RF images will try to sell their images through as many microstock portals as possible, as well as traditional portals.
Getty Images will use Punchstock.com to launch a new RF brand called Valueline on August 31. Prices for Valueline images will be $19 for a 1mb low res image and $49 for all other RF file sizes from 10mb to 300mb.
Getty Image has announced a new Web-use price of $49 for a 500k 72DPI file of any of its images, regardless of brand or pricing model. This fee entitles the purchaser rights to use any selected RM image on any commercial or editorial Web site, email, mobile devices or multimedia project for one year.
In the last 10 years, price and demands have changed in the text and trade book industry. At present, there are pricing requests for circulations of up to 1.5 million, and it is not uncommon to get pricing requests for 500,000 to a million circs. Prices, like circs, have changed, too.
Yahoo! has announced that it will close its photo-sharing site Yahoo! Photos on Sept. 20. The company decided to focus all its efforts on Flickr, though users can transfer their images to various sites.
There are many reasons why we are likely to see a further decline in overall industry revenue." Overall industry revenue will go down; however, given the $70 million to $100 million that micropayment is adding to total industry revenue by bringing new buyers into the market, there hasn't been much falloff in dollars yet. It's not because customers are spending significantly less money. The pie is just being divided among a lot more suppliers.
Traditional stock photographers argue that it's impossible to make money selling at microstock prices. But microstock photographer Erik Reis has found it a viable business option.
Some in the investment community see a dramatic slowdown in the growth of the imaging market. I disagree. Overall, I think industry revenue is flat. Microstock is growing rapidly, but the revenue generated from these sales is being offset by a loss in traditional revenue.
a21, Inc. has reported $5,696,000 in revenues for 2Q, down 7% from the previous quarter.
The SuperStock revenues were down $130,000, or 4% for the stock image division.
Four years from now, more money will be spent in the U.S. on online ads than newspapers ads. This is bad news for image producers because the average price paid for a picture used in an online ad is much lower than the price for print use. It also seems likely that many micropayment photos will be satisfactory for Internet and mobile use, further depressing prices.