Articles by Jim Pickerell
The Getty family is acquiring all of the Carlyle Groups 51% equity stake in Getty Images for about $250 million and rolling over about $2.35 billion of outstanding debt. The deal gives Getty Images an enterprise value of under $3 billion compared to $3.3 billion in 2012 when Carlyle acquired a majority stake in Getty. At that time Carlyle invested about $500 million in the company. It is believed that the Getty family has ended up owning a significant portion of the debt.
I saw a story recently that said
Dreamstime had identified Kiev as the 15th most photographed city in the world. That surprised me. as I had expected a lot of other cities to be much higher in terms of tourist destinations than Kiev. I couldn’t find the original Dreamstime story in order to see who they had as number 1, but I found a lot of other lists of top cities and top travel destinations. They were all differed depending on who put together the list. I found one list of “25 Most Photographed Cities in Europe” and Kiev wasn’t on it. I decided to search
Shutterstock’s collection of 216,094,727 images to see which were the top cities with the most photos.
I have created a SurveyMonkey survey in an effort to gather data on the general income ranges of Editorial Still Photographers around the world. Go to this link to respond to the survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PhotogIncomeSurvey Please encourage all editorial still photographers to respond to this survey. The resulting data could be very helpful to photography students, working photographers, the organizations that license rights to use editorial photography and those who purchase editorial photographs.
Imaginechina, has recently won 38 copyright infringement lawsuits against Nasdaq-listed Baidu Inc., the largest search engine and one of the biggest Internet companies in China. The Haidian People’s Court in Beijing adjudicates in the first-instance verdicts that Baidu and its affiliates have pirated a total of 150 images from 20 contracted photographers and that Baidu ought to compensate the plaintiffs RMB 415,000 yuan ($60,940) for the violations and the related costs.
ImageRights International Inc. has intensified its image search and copyright enforcement operations in Germany to drive value for its global photographer and photo agency client base. ImageRights-developed artificial intelligence (AI), combined with its proprietary web search and image analysis algorithms, has enabled the company to analyze millions of German web domains to determine if an image use could be pursued for copyright enforcement purposes.
Blend Images photographers have been notified that
Tetra Images has acquired the Contributor Contracts, Distribution agreements and the Blend trademark. Tetra has securely obtained all banking data from Blend and will be mailing the first pdf royalty statements for August sales by email at the end of September. Payment for August sales will be made October 1, 2018. Blend has invoiced all licenses through July 2018 and will be paying out royalties until October, or presumably until all the licenses have been collected.
A multi-year review of Shutterstock download trends going back to Q3 2010 provides some interesting insights into how adding more images to the collection relates to sales growth. (See chart) Back in 2010 Shutterstock had 12.3 million images in its collection and 11.1 total downloads for that quarter. In theory the more choice you offer your customers the more sales you are likely to make. That pretty much held true through 2012 as Shutterstock almost doubled the size of its collection.
SmartFrame has developed a revolutionary, patent-pending new image format for the internet that seeks to redefine and become the ubiquitous digital image standard. Having spent 5 years developing the technology and building the infrastructure to support exponential growth, SmartFrame is now seeing the technology being adopted by photographers, picture agencies, publishers and brands globally and is on target to having over 1 billion SmartFrames on the Internet in the next 4 years.
At the end of 2017 Shutterstock had about 300,000 “active contributors.” In the press release put out on August 1, 2018 they said, “Since the launch of Shutterstock, more than 450,000 photographers, artists and designers have become contributors to our platform.” Since it is hard to believe that they added 150,000 new contributors in just six months, I suspect they make a distinction between “active contributors” and “all people who have ever contributed” in their 15-year history. We asked their PR department, but got no clarification.
Photographers who think they can protect the images they post online by only uploading small files need to think again. Now with Topaz Labs $99
A.I. Gigapixel program anyone can re-size any images they find online, make it up to 600% larger than its original size and also improve sharpness. For more about how it works check out this
YouTube video.