Articles by Jim Pickerell
One has to wonder if Getty does any analysis of their Creative Collection in terms of what sells and what doesn’t. Clearly, as we
reported yesterday, the largest and fastest growing segment of the Getty collection is EyeEM with 4,558,201 RF images. Back in
August 2016 EyeEm had only recently started contributing to Getty Images and had 256,152 images in the collection. They have 17.79 times as many images now as in 2016. At that time Getty had a total of 16,687,710 images in the Creative Collection. That collection has grown 43% in size in two years, but nothing like EyeEm’s 1779% growth.
In this report I have searched each of the different RM and RF collections on the Creative section of
www.GettyImages.com to determine the number of images in each collection. Collection sizes vary greatly from EyeEm with 4,558,201 RF images to Silkroad Images, PictureIndia, Chic Sketch and Corbis Historical, all with fewer than 200 images each.
Sources tell me that in an all-staff conference call on Wednesday, June 13, 2018, Nick Evans-Lombe and Adrian Murrell informed the
SilverHub.Media staff that the company would be going into administration, the UK version of bankruptcy protection.
Tom Zimberoff has written a very long and detailed story on
Distrupting Stock Photography which makes some strong points about how the industry got to where it is today. Toward the end of his report he outlines a new business model which he calls “Business Made Easy For Photographers.”
The U.S. Copyright Office is proposing changes to fees for copyright registration. The Office has issued a statement outlining the proposed changes in detail, but on average, fees will increase by as much as 41%. According to
the statement, the Office analyzed potential changes to fees and wants to ensure that they are “fair and equitable and give due consideration to the objectives of the copyright system,” as required by the statute.
Shutterstock has announced the launch of its Dublin office with the intent to initially hire 40 professionals including engineering roles, and to potentially grow the team further over the coming years. This project is supported by the Irish Government through IDA Ireland.
One of the big mysteries in the stock photo agency business is the percentage of “
Unique images” licensed annually. Some agencies, like Shutterstock, report the total number of images licensed, but many of those licensed are used by multiple customers so the actual number of
different, unique images used is much smaller.
Imatag has analyzed over 120,000 images on the websites of 23 major news organizations in Europe and North America and determined that
only 3% of those published have credit or copyright metadata. Photographers will be surprised to learn the names of publications stripping data compared to those that credit photographers and leave metadata.
If you’re a photographer that counts on the licensing of stock images to provide a portion of your annual income the following are a few stories you should read. In the past decade stock photography as a business has declined dramatically. There is little hope that the situation will improve.
Back in 2016 Tony and Chelsea Northrup discovered that their image, originally published on the cover of their
Adobe Lightroom 6/CC for Photographers book, had been used by an Australian company on the packaging of a smartphone case, and the product sold in Australia and New Zealand without their permission.