Agencies/Distributors
Shutterstock has entered into a partnership with Microsoft to give brands access to the stock photography company’s library of images for use in ads. The API integration with Microsoft Advertising will give advertisers on the Microsoft Audience Network
FREE ACCESS to millions of commercially licensed images.
Shutterstock’s gross revenue in 2019 was
$648,500,000. Total royalties paid out to all contributors in 2019 was about
$181,730,000. Total Shutterstock stock owned by Jon Oringer is worth over $650,000,000.
A
Getty Images photographer reports that he gets a lot of sales to a Scottsdale, Arizona company called
Design Pickle that offers full design services to businesses. Getty licenses these photo uses for
$0.17. The photographer gets a
$0.03 royalty for his work.
Now that all of
Getty Images’ Creative Image offering is Royalty Free the company seems to be trying go occasionally get a somewhat higher price for certain uses by offering a
Market Freeze. They tell customers, “With Market-freeze, you can rest easy knowing we'll remove this image from our site for as long as you need it, with custom durations and total buyouts available.”
Getty Images has passed along a keywording tip to its photographers who may be taking pictures related to Black Lives Matter.
After reading my story “
Copyright Protection For Photos Is Dead” Paul Melcher wrote, “If there is no more copyright, then there is no more licensing. If there is no more photo licensing then there is no more reason for the existence of ‘Selling Stock’"
Mobistok in Hamburg, Germany has announces a new platform for licensing uses to stock images which puts power back into the hands of photographers. Anyone who shoots images with their smartphones can go to Mobistok to put their imagery up for sale. While many stock photo websites make it a bit more difficult for individuals to sell their photos, Mobistok has been created from the ground up as a seamless way to sell photos and videos.
On May 26th Shutterstock announced that in an effort to cut costs and increase profits as of June 1, 2020 it would dramatically reduce future royalty rates paid to contributors. The new rates will no longer be based on a contributor’s lifetime earnings. At the beginning of each year all contributors will start with zero downloads/licenses and a 15% royalty rate. Previous sales history will be disregarded when it comes to determining royalty percentage. The number of downloads needed to rise to a higher royalty level are as follows:
The chart below allows you to easily track the last 10-year growth trend of Shutterstock quarter-by-quarter and see the number of images in the collection, number of downloads and the gross quarterly revenue at the end of each quarter. You can also see the average revenue-per-download and revenue-per-image-in-the-collection trends.
Founder John Griffin has announced that he will be closing the microstock site Cutcaster on Saturday April 25, 2020 after nearly 12 years of operations. He gave everyone a few days notice so buyers could make use of any existing funds they have on account and he encouraged contributors with more than $5 on account to request a payout before the closing deadline.
Shutterstock, Inc has launched an annual subscription for
Shutterstock Footage. Shutterstock’s collection of 18+ million HD and 4K video clips are now available for license through a range of cost-effective monthly plan options or for less than $9 per clip through an annual plan.
Design Pics Inc., based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada has assumed the interim management of Masterfile during the bankruptcy process. Masterfile first filed to restructure its business in
April 2017 and was unable to make any royalty payments to photographers after
January 2018. According to information supplied to creditors by Harris & Partners, the insolvency trustee, as of March 3, 2020 Masterfile had total assets of $270,000 and total liabilities of
$4,092,654.41. They owe royalty payments for the images they licensed to 530 stock agencies and independent photo creators.
House of Pictures, the picture agency for premium interiors, has been part of Image Professionals GmbH since
October 2019. The Munich-based agency group unites various leading specialist picture agencies under one roof. The website
www.houseofpictures.com has undergone a complete re-launch, presenting new agency content, updated functions and a revised, fresh design.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that its footage offering is now available for license in SD, HD, and 4K for customers using
iOS and
Android applications. With over 17 million videos in the collection, searching, saving and licensing footage content allows customers to create engaging video content from a mobile or tablet device.
“Sheltering in Place” will certainly hurt many photographers. Photographers won’t be able to get out to shoot new images. Customers won’t be coming to your studio. You might be able to shoot still lifes in your home, but getting props may be difficult. So what can you do to pay your bills? One possibility, particularly if you have a large stock photo collection, is to check out
Canva and see if they will pay a one-time fee to purchase rights to a significant number of your images for inclusion in their Free collection that they make available to their Graphic Design customers.
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.
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.
A reader asked recently, “Is it true that Unsplash is now getting more downloads than Getty, Shutterstock and Alamy combined?” According to
Unsplash’s statistics page they currently have
70,263,886 downloads per month. Based on Shutterstock’s last
quarterly report they have about 15,433,333 downloads monthly. Their downloads per quarter haven’t changed much quarter-to-quarter over the last two years so I think this number is a pretty good average and not really growing.
Freepik Company, a platform of free and exclusive graphic content, has signed Rod Oliveira to a newly created position of Chief Marketing Officer in a move to strengthen an area of great strategic relevance for the brand.