Have you noticed that when a customer searches for “man” on some major agency sites a different number of images will be returned than if they had searched for “male.” An agent called this to my attention after hearing complaints from a number of customers about this problem when searching on GettyImages.com.
Yuri Arcurs, one of the most successful stock photographers in the world, is running another of his photographer training programs in Capetown, South Africa. This program is for 17 to 24-year-olds that are highly competitive, goal-oriented and have strong entrepreneurial and creative characteristics. Candidates must survive a two-week Boot Camp beginning February 1, 2016. (This is not marine training, but it will be an intense experience to determine what the candidates know and how quickly they learn.)
One of the big questions for a freelance photographer approaching a new client is: “What should I charge.” What do others get for doing the same type of work? What has this client paid in the past? Recently, I was made aware of a web site called “
Who Pays Photographers?” Photographers can go to this site, enter the name of a publication or organization they would like to work for and get some idea of what the organization has paid for previous jobs.
Most image creators believe that adding images to online searchable databases will grow downloads and sales. This is particularly true, when one assumes that the new images being added are better than the ones produced earlier because the image creator has improved through experience and has a better understanding of what customers want. However, an examination of the sales by iStock’s leading contributors indicates that adding images is often counter productive in terms of increasing downloads. In fact, contributors who add very few, or remove, images often show the greatest download-per-image in the collection.
To better understand the potential for an iStock turnaround it is worth comparing iStock and Shutterstock downloads. At the end of my report on
Shutterstock’s Q3 results I estimated the number of IOD (single image) and subscription downloads Shutterstock will have for 2015. For an explanation of how I calculated the iStock numbers see this
story. The following chart compares the sales of these two companies.
Previously, I have supplied an analysis (
here) and (
here) of iStock’s downloads in 2015 and the number of images 430 of their leading contributors have in the collection. While 430 is only a small percentage of iStock’s more than 100,000 contributors this small group has somewhere between 55,070,000 and 58,554.000 downloads since the company’s founding in 2002. I believe this represents about one-third of iStock’s total downloads.
An increasing number of iStock’s most productive contributors have been dramatically reducing their production of new images in the last two years.
Where is iStock headed? In 2015 single image downloads were DOWN significantly compared to 2014, and 2014 was down compared to 2013. The company
introduced subscriptions in April 2014 and that has had a major impact on the decline in single image sales.
Panoramastock has recently been listed on a small cap tech stock exchange called the NEEQ (National Equities Exchange and Quotations). The exchange is also called the New Third Board Stock. The company’s stock code is 834877.
In early January
Videblocks will begin making clips from Discovery Channel’s,
Discovery Access library available through Videoblocks
Marketplace. Videoblocks launched Marketplace in April 2015, had
374,000 clips by August and now has over 880,000. The Discovery material will quickly push them over one million clips.