As the stock industry changes, traditional stock agencies and distributors are losing ground because they have failed to adopt new technological efficiencies. Granted, constantly keeping up with the latest technological changes can be expensive, and most agencies have already invested huge amounts to get where they are today. But, microstock sellers have introduced a number of strategies that traditional agencies and distributors should be considering – if not rushing to adopt.
Many experienced professional photographers have been watching image prices fall but just cannot bring themselves to license their images for $1. Yet the truth is that at today's microstock prices, it does not take all that many sales to match what a photographer would earn from a single rights-managed sale, and there are a currently a lot more microstock sales than rights-managed ones.
Those who think microstock is under-priced will be chagrined at today's announcement of Fotolia's latest offering. Today, the New York-based microstock announced the launch of PhotoXpress, an online stock-image bank offering visitors a collection of 350,000 images free of charge.
Former Getty Images chief financial officer Lawrence Gould and vice president of e-commerce Tom Donnelly have launched their second venture: microstock business Vivozoom. The duo launched royalty-free stock business ImagePick in 2007. The differentiating factor is that Vivozoom is the only microstock Web site that warrants the use of its imagery---to the tune of committing to cover damages and costs of up to $25,000.
The Washington Post reports that it is taking an average of 18 months for hard-copy copyright-registration applications to be cleared since the U.S. Copyright Office implemented its new electronic application system last July. It takes six months to process an electronic application, despite the fact that the system was supposed to be able to do it in one month.
The Sygma Preservation and Access Facility opened in France last Friday, after more than five years of work by its owner Corbis. Built by management company Locarchives, the facility houses 50 million negatives, printes, transparencies and contact prints.