When the question of market leaders in the stock photo industry comes up the names photographers usually think about are Getty Images, Shutterstock, AdobeStock, iStock and Alamy. Maybe they should be thinking about the Australian company
Canva. The users and buyers of photographs are people who design products that needs visuals. Canva has been built to provide a host of services designers need to do their jobs.
As I pointed out in
yesterday’s story EyeEm is the single largest supplier of stock images to Getty’s Creative Collection. Currently 8,005,719 of the 30,472,764 images in Getty’s Creative Collection have been supplied by EyeEm. That’s 26% of the total collection making EyeEm by far the largest contributor to Getty Creative.
Due to the unforeseeable circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic the CEPIC Congress 2020 cannot be held from 27 to 29 May. In order to avoid the negative impact this cancellation would cause registered delegates, CEPIC has been able to secure new dates of 30 September to 2 October 2020 at the existing venue, Gran Meliá Victoria in Palma de Mallorca. There will be a Welcome Reception on 29 September.
This week, the U.S. Copyright Office announced some changes in its special handling requirements and some additional information about the impact of the coronavirus on the copyright registration system. You can find the complete announcement
here.
In the last four years there has been dramatic shifts within the Getty Images Creative Collection. It is unclear how this has affected gross revenue generated as Getty has stopped providing a public breakdown of the revenue segments of its business. Nevertheless, it is believed that since 2016 annual gross Creative revenue has consistently generated about $280 million of the company's roughly $850 million in gross revenue.
Since June 2018, CEPIC has been actively collaborating closely with Google, and later with IPTC, and DMLA to find a way to make Google Image Search users aware that certain image found need to be licensed. On Wednesday February 26th at 3pm EST there will be an online Zoom meeting on Google Images Licensable Badge – Nuts & Bolts with Doug Dawirs, Senior Technical Adviser of the DMLA and hosted along with industry experts to explain, and gather input, on the upcoming UI,
Schema.org and IPTC changes. To register in advance for this meeting go here:
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/vpMucu-trDIu6pKIFcgRfuu5EPnVgsQlHQ
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2019 revenue of
$166.4 million up 3% compared to Q4 2018 and up from $157.42 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.44 per image, up from $3.40 in Q4 2018. Total image and video downloads for Q4 were up to
47.7 million compared to 46.8 million a year earlier. At the end of the year Shutterstock had over 314 million images and 17 million video clips, for a total of
331 million pieces of content in its collection.
Alamy has been acquired by
PA Media Group a UK-based news and information business. Founded 20 years ago, Alamy has one of the world’s most diverse creative and editorial stock imagery collections, comprising almost 200 million photographs, vectors and 360-degree panoramic images sourced from a network of over 100,000 photographers and 650 picture agencies and archives. . The business has close to 100,000 customers in more than 150 countries, working across a range of sectors including publishing, design, advertising and broadcast.
Alamy may be the fifth largest company in the in the stock photo industry (after Getty Images, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, and iStock) and has been doing reasonably well in a very sick industry. Alamy’s latest reported sales figures are for 2018 and can be found on the
Companies House website. on October 17, 2019. This report was recorded on October 17, 2019 and shows that Alamy had gross annual sales of £22.7 million ($29,305,500 ).
CORRECTION - Please re-read yesterday's story on
Future Demand For Photography. I made a serious math error in the original story. The situation for photographers is much worse than earlier reported.
Unsplash’s statistics page currently reports
70,263,886 downloads per month. The
combined monthly downloads of Shutterstock, Getty and Alamy only total about
16,433,333 downloads, or about 24% of Unsplash's monthly totals.
About Michael Masterson
Michael Masterson has a broad range of experience in marketing, business development, strategic planning, contact negotiations and recruiting in the photography, graphic design and publishing industries. In addition to his long experience at the Workbook and Workbookstock, Masterson owned and was creative director of his own graphic design firm for several years.
Masterson has been a speaker or panelist at industry events such as Seybold, PhotoPlus Expo, Visual Connections and the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) national conference. He is currently the national president of the American Society of Picture Professionals (ASPP). He also serves on the board of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council in his Los Angeles community. He chaired the marketing committee for the Los Angeles Conservancy, a historic preservation advocacy group, for many years.
He currently heads Masterson Consulting, working on projects ranging from business development for creative companies and sourcing talent for them to promoting and marketing industry events as well as providing resume and professional profile services for job-seekers. He can be reached at zvpunryqznfgrefba@tznvy.pbz.