After 28 years of publishing Selling Stock, in 2019 I will begin to wind down my regular daily coverage of the stock photo industry. The site (
www.selling-stock.com ) with all its archives will continue to be available to readers, indefinitely.
The Mega Agency is adding 2.5 million iconic and historic entertainment images to its rapidly expanding archive. The media company, a leading provider of news, sports and entertainment content, will now represent and license the Phil Ramey photo archive to its global customer base.?
Koch Equity Development is expected to make a $500 million, non-controlling investment in Getty Images. Getty says the equity investment is expected to close by the end of this year.
Recently I was told by a stock agency that my
Photographer Income Survey Results were not relevant to Specialist Agencies because the results are “rather negative and don’t offer a possible positive call to action.” In the following series of stories I will outline a “Positive Call to Action” for stock agencies.
Once the data has been collected then it will be time to talk to Getty – as a group. For years they have shown they are unwilling to pay attention to suggestions from individual agencies. The more Specialist Agencies that participate in the analysis the better.
In May I
analyzed the sales of a few photographers who are major, direct suppliers to Getty. A major issue that all Specialist Agencies need to consider is whether the breakdown in the various price ranges in this analysis are representative of Getty’s total sales? Specialist agencies need to check their own figures against this baseline to determine if this is an accurate representation of Getty as a whole.
In July 2018 I did an
analysis of the more than 200 Getty Creative collections to determine how many images had been added to each collection in the almost two years between
August 2016 and June 2018. Overall there was a 37% increase in the number of images added, but there were wide variations in the sources of the growth.
Shutterstock has announced a partnership with rights and clearance agency,
Greenlight, a part of Branded Entertainment Network. Greenlight clears content with rights holders for use in commercial advertising and corporate campaigns. Greenlight also represents the rights for some of the biggest icons, including Albert Einstein, Steve McQueen, Whitney Houston, Sophia Loren, Thomas Edison, and more.
According to photographers
Masterfile has been unable to make any royalty payments to photographers since January 2018. The company
filed for bankruptcy in 2017. Payments to the bankruptcy lawyer are prioritized ahead of payments to photographers. It appears the company has not been generating enough revenue to cover fixed expenses and still pay royalties.
Shutterstock has announced a new content integration within Final Cut Pro X. The Shutterstock extension is the only stock footage extension to be integrated with the release of Final Cut Pro X and will enable seamless access to video, still image and music collections.