Though recent revenue reports of leading stock-licensing companies have disappointed investors, Jupiterimages CEO Alan Meckler says his company's rights-managed business is on the rise. Meckler credits Getty Images' refusal to distribute Jupiterimages stills several years ago as largely responsible for the current upward trend.
In the last 10 years, price and demands have changed in the text and trade book industry. At present, there are pricing requests for circulations of up to 1.5 million, and it is not uncommon to get pricing requests for 500,000 to a million circs. Prices, like circs, have changed, too.
To celebrate its five-year milestone, Turbo Photo plans to make over 1,000 Web-resolution images available free of charge for the month of September. New subscribers get a choice of 50 free images as a signing bonus.
Corbis has partnered with Moving Pictures Magazine to produce and license celebrity images, interviews and video from the Toronto International Film Festival.
While copyright infringement lawsuits are an ever-present part of the photography business, much recent litigation has been directed at search engines. Content owners, including Viacom, Universal and Perfect 10, are alleging that a number of Web 2.0 companies have committed various offenses, ranging from direct infringement to facilitating content misappropriation by others. Now industry groups are actively weighing in.
PicScout, which has offices in San Francisco and Herzeliya, Israel, has expanded its copyright-monitoring service to include Australia. The Israeli company services the Big Three stock agencies and smaller, specialty agencies alike.
Getty Images has launched a business-to-business affiliate program, which will allow Web site owners to earn commissions by pointing traffic to gettyimages.com. The company hired LinkConnector, an affiliate-marketing company based in Cary, N.C., to manage the program.
Yahoo! has announced that it will close its photo-sharing site Yahoo! Photos on Sept. 20. The company decided to focus all its efforts on Flickr, though users can transfer their images to various sites.