Selling-Stock has managed to gather more information about what has been happening at VCG. According to sources sometime after the Corbis acquisition VCG decided to copy Getty’s Premium Access strategy and launch a PA plan of its own. In addition to all the Getty and Corbis creative and editorial images, the iStock images are also available to the customers who purchase a PA plan.
On April 26, 2019, the Fourth Circuit Court overturned a Northern Virginia District Court decision that allowed Violent Hues Productions, LLC’s to use a cropped version of a photo to promote a Film and Music Festival without compensation to the creator. Violent Hues had made no effort to request permission or compensate photographer Russell Brammer for the use and claimed “Fair Use” in court. (See
July 2018 story.)
It is less than one month until the annual
CEPIC Congress convenes in Paris on June 5 thru 7, 2019. Each year this event is the single most important meeting of people from all over the world who are engaged in the picture licensing industry.
On May 9, 2019 Mark Milstein will be offering a seminar in New York on Time-based Metadata: The Key to Video Discoverability and Content Immortality. The presentation will be at B&H Photo. Click
here to register. You can also watch online.
ACSIL and
Thriving Archives have completed their fourth
Global Survey of Stock Footage Companies (AGS4) since 2007 and estimate worldwide stock footage revenue in 2018 at $570 million, more than double what it was in
2007. Data for the survey launched in July 2018 was collected from 84 of the estimated 415 footage licensing companies worldwide.
Will more images in an agency collection grow revenue? Is more choice always better?
Shutterstock is adding 1,608,350 new images a week to its collection. That’s 229,764 new images a day. The average customer reviews 500 or fewer returns before changing search parameters. So how do they make it possible for customers to review all those new images?
The stock photo market in China may be bigger, and more lucrative than many people think. Gaopin Images tells Selling Stock that their average gross sale to Chinese customers in 2018 was $35,
17% more than what Getty is earning worldwide and
44% more than the gross China sales Getty is reporting to its contributors.
I was asked recently to appraise the value of a collection of stock images that were being donated. Back in the 1990s and even the early 2000s this would have been a relatively easy task. I would look at the revenue the collection had generated in previous years, determine the rate of revenue decline year over year and assess, based on the type of imagery, the length of time they might continue to have commercial value.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2019 revenue of
$163.3 million up $6.7% compared to Q1 2018, (excluding Webdam which was sold in the first quarter of 2018). The revenue was almost flat with the $162.1 million generated in the previous quarter. During the conference call CFO Steven Berns pointed out that traditionally revenue for Q1 is very similar to revenue in Q4 of the previous year. Revenue per download averaged
$3.42 per image, compared to $3.40 in Q1 2018.
Shutterstock, has announced the renewal of its agreement with The Associated Press (AP) to distribute AP’s daily global photo output for license to customers based in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland.