Macrostock
One of the arguments for licensing images as Rights Managed is that only then can they be licensed for Exclusive uses because all the uses of the images are controlled and limited. With Royalty Free customers can continue to use the images they acquire in unspecified ways long after initially licensed with very few limitations.
Using numbers from Getty Images it is interesting to look back at the RM and RF unit sales and revenue trends over the last decade. Between 2003 and 2007 when Getty was a public company they provided investors with very precise gross revenue and average price per image figures. This made it possible to make a reasonable estimate of the number of images licensed in each category.
I recently received a note from a frustrated Getty Images RM photographer who has been with Getty since they acquired Tony Stone Images in the 1990s, and whose images have earned millions of dollars for Getty in more than two decades. This photographer would like to contribute more images to the RM collection, but is limited to 20 images per-quarter. Images were recently returned to him because he submitted them before the beginning of the new quarter.
Getty Images appears to be trying to drive its
www.gettyimages.com customers to iStock where the customers can get images for a fraction of what they would cost on Gettyimages.com.
Is
Prime.500px.com a viable market for stock photographers? It advertises itself as offering “Inspirational Royalty Free Photos” and certainly there are some beautiful images in the collection.
Getty Images has pulled together from its many collections a group of images that they call
Getty Images Prestige. They say it is a “carefully curated selection of the world's most powerful imagery. Prestige images are distinguished by their unique aesthetic approach, exceptional craftsmanship and uncompromising quality - all available for use exclusively.”
Recently Dennis Davis, an experienced Los Angeles corporate, lifestyle, and food photographer (see his
portfolio) posted the following on a blog. “
I am moving out of commercial assignment photography into selling my photography after the fact. I am looking for recommendations on stock agencies and methods for selling fine art images and video.”
James West, CEO of
Alamy, has just posted his latest answers to contributor questions at
Ask James Take 3. Highlights of the 10 minute video include the fact that sales of iPhone photos acquired through its Stockimo app are selling “slightly better” per 1,000 photos than sales of the rest of the Alamy collection. He gave no indication as to how many of the 1 million images per month are iPhone produced images.
After reading my recent series of stories on iStock (?See
here,
here,
here,
here and
here) a reader asked, “What are the implications for rights managed? Does it mean placing one's images with a number of websites is actually a self-defeating exercise and one only needs to place them with one super star agency and wait for the high returns to roll in? Or does that conclusion not apply to rights managed? Or are rights managed images dead in the water these days?” All good questions, read this story for answers.
Alamy has launched another “Ask James”, where customers, contributors and journalists can ask CEO James West any questions they have about Alamy, Stockimo, or the industry in general.
Get Your Questions In. Questions must be submitted via email to:
nfxwnzrf@nynzl.pbz no later that Thursday July 10th.
Fresh, brash and outspoken. With their uninhibited photographic style and unbridled joy of experimentation, food bloggers have conquered a huge fan community on the internet. No wonder even the traditional media are rolling out the red carpet for the new stars. Food bloggers get their own columns, produce cookbook best-sellers and operate cooking shows for an audience of millions. The most interesting among them are now at the center of a new blog where the food image agency
StockFood once again lives up to its reputation as a trendsetter.
Every once in a while someone asks me if Corbis is a place to put their images? Corbis has a nice looking website and I assume they are still making a reasonable number of sales, but I never hear much about them. Photographers never tell me the are happy with Corbis sales, either in volume or price.
It may be time to retire Rights Managed as a licensing model. RM pricing doesn’t work for most customers anymore.
Moreover, it no longer really maximizes the potential earnings of photographers. There used to be a time when all image uses were in print. In those day when an art director purchased an image for a magazine ad, a book or a brochure she knew exactly how the image would be used in the layout and how many copies would be printed. Those days are mostly gone forever.
PantherMedia has added a handpicked collection of fancy images to its archive of more than 28 million images. The
Premium Collection is composed of special interest images like architecture, food, ecology and sustainability as well as people and lifestlye.
May was another record month for
Image Brief with 128 photographers receiving awards for an average image sale price of $1,238. (That’s $158,464 in total sales.) Three photographers --
Matthew Doggett,
Rainer Waelder and
Slobodan Blagojevic -- each had sales for $10,000 each.
DisabilityImages.com, a leading stock source for high quality stock images of real people with real disabilities, has agreed to represent selected imagery from
Design Pics. DisabilityImages serves a select group of customers with narrowly focused and specific needs. The company has developed a strong reputation in this niche, and has a thorough understanding of the needs of customers within this community.
A subscriber just pointed out that at the bottom of the search return page on
www.gettyimages.com they are now encouraging customers to go to
iStock. He did a search for travel and at the bottom of the first page after the customer has looked at only 100 thumbnails she is encouraged in big bold letters to:
It’s No Longer About The Image. It’s About The Data That Can Be Mined Using Images. The value of images is declining. The value of data that can be mined by tracking image use is increasing.
Recently, I received a request from Clive Thompson, columnist with
Wired Magazine, asking about the number of stock photography images licensed annually. He was more interested in the increase/decrease of the number of images sold than in any impact it might have had on revenue. Here’s what I told him.
Stocktrek Images with specialized image collections in Healthcare and Biomedical Science, Armed Forces, Military Aviation, Space, Weather, Astronomy and Dinosaur Art has introduced a $35 price for web and mobile use of its images. The new web and mobile sizes of 600-800 pixels are ideal for use on web sites, online ads, digital magazines, periodicals, mobile applications, tablets, and other handheld devices.
Getty Images has announced the call for entries for its
Getty Images’ grants programs for 2014. The grants will include – The
Grants for Editorial Photography,
Creative Grants and the
Contour by Getty Images Portrait Prize – as well as the
Emerging Talent Award. The deadline for entry and Applications is May 15, 2014 by 11:59 p.m. GMT (London Time). For more information see
http://www.gettyimages.com/grants.
StockFood has released a new collection of food images that points to a new trend in food photography, and to a certain extent in stock photography as a whole. They call their collection “
Perfectly Imperfect” which describes the spirit of spontaneity that is increasingly in demand in every type of photography.
Carlyle Group should be trying to sell Getty’s Midstock division (iStock, Thinkstock and Photos.com) to Shutterstock before the value of that segment of Getty’s business collapses. Carlyle should recognize by now that Getty Images has been a bad investment. It is the time to cut losses.
Getty Images has announced to its Flickr contributors that it has provided notice to terminate its existing agreement with
Flickr. The original 5-year agreement went into effect in July 2008. Getty has been unable to come to a new agreement at this time. Getty says they continue to be open to working with Yahoo!/Flickr.
Earlier this week I wrote about the
average price per image licensed at Getty. This article will examine some of the publicly available and widely reported numbers related to the number of images licensed.