According to the latest figures ZenithOptimedia, global ad spending will decline by 6.9% in 2009 compared to last year. The largest losses will be in emerging Central and Eastern European markets, which will drop by 13.9%. North America is projected to decline by 8.3%, with the United States losing 8.7%, more than both regional and global averages. Western Europe's projected ad-spend decline is 6.7%.
The search leader continued expanding its image-related offerings with Similar Images, an experimental search feature from Google Labs. While Google did not pioneer the underlying image-recognition technology or image-to-image searches, the company’s increasing attention to all things visual offers insight into online image-consumption trends. For stock producers and marketers, this foreshadows both opportunities and challenges.
Injecting a little fun into the upcoming annual BAPLA Picture Buyers' Fair in London, TopFoto has designed its PBF stand to look like a bar. The company will also giving away bottles of William Wilberforce Freedom Ale.
PantherMedia's proposed credits-per-day subscription plan is structured so customers who need larger files for print uses pay more reasonable prices for their images than is the case with existing subscription and microstock plans.
Given the rapidly changing trends in the stock photo industry, photographers need to pay close attention to the duration of new contracts they are being asked to sign.
Cambridge, U.K.-based technology company Imense has launched Annotator, which it says is the first semi-automatic tool that can reduce keywording time by a factor of 4, while providing more commercially relevant keywords.
The number of traditionally priced transactions is declining, as is the average price per image.