After I published “
50 Year Licensed For Rights Managed” James West provided some clarifications and explanations of why Alamy has offered a 50 year license to one customer. See his explanation and some additional comments by Jim Pickerell.
After reading my story on
why usage fees will continue to decline Larry Minden wrote, “Is there no one among the thousands upon thousands represented by Alamy who will stand up to those idiots and tell them a 50-year license is unneeded and an absurd bastardization of an RM license?" This story explains why complaints from suppliers are unlikely to have much effect in the long term outcome.
Shutterstock has introduced a new tool in the Shutterstock Darkroom
section of its site that is designed to help contributors better
understand Keyword Trends. The tool allows them to compare five keywords
at a time in order to determine the relative number of times a
particular keyword is used to request images on Shutterstock.
Photographers complain that stock photo fees are way below what it costs
them to produce images. And they are right. But, the prices volume user
pay for images will continue to decline. Here’s why.
Anyone who has been in the photo business for any length of time knows
that Jay Maisel is one of the truly great photographers and a
first-class person. His unique vision kept him busy for over 40 years
shooting annual reports, magazine covers, jazz albums, advertising and
more for clients worldwide until he retired from active commercial work
in the late ‘90s. This story is about what happened when an artist of this caliber exercised his right to protect his work.
In November of last year we wrote about World Assignments,
an organization designed to help buyers find photographers who worked in
various locales around the world or had expertise in working in such locations.
Alamy has announced that its US sales of the company’s images have
increased 30% in the past year and as a result they have contracted with
the New York Internet Company (NYI) will oversee its infrastructure
upgrade for North America, starting in New York.
In 2009 I started to use
iStockcharts to track about 196 of the top 250 sellers on iStockphoto. While figures for the other 54 of the 250 contributors were available, their names were not. Consequently I left them out of my research. iStock has over 100,000 contributors, but it is believed that well over 90% of the images in the collection and well over 90% of the total downloads belong to the 37,085 contributors whose information is available on iStockcharts.
PhotoShelter (
http://www.photoshelter.com) has released a new e-book entitled
The Photographer’s Guide to Selling Like a Pro. The book provides photographers with concrete strategies and firsthand insight on how to grow a photography business through better sales tactics. It provides key business tips direct from veteran sales leaders in the fields of advertising, automotive, travel, insurance, and home shopping industries.
Getty Images has notified agencies (Image Partners), whose work is currently being licensed by Photolibrary, of Getty’s intention to “retire” (close down) all the Photolibrary websites during the last quarter of 2011.