Macrostock
The Getty Creative collection has grown by 4% in 4 months and now stands at 17,376,859 images. At that rate the collection size will be about 19,462,082 images by the end of 2017. In August 38% of the collection was RM images. Today 36.8% of the images are RM. At this rate of decline less than one-third of the images will be RM by the end of 2017. A huge percentage of these RM images are supplied by
image partner agencies that only, or predominately, represent RM images
A week after announcing that it had
acquired 86.6 percent of Framepool, Broadside Enterprises, Inc. (also known as Emaji) has announced that Frampool AG has entered into an agreement with
ImagineChina, one of the largest photo and video agencies in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
After my story last week on “
High Level Thoughts On The Stock Industry” John Fowler asked, “Have you found any encouraging information at all from any RM photographers? There must be some folks doing something that works for them.”
According to a document filed with Companies House in the U.K. (see
here) it appears that Rex Features Limited (owned by Shutterstock) lent
Silverhub Media the money necessary to purchase
Splash. In return Rex Features has received very extensive control over the activities of Silverhub with regard to certain unspecified assets.
Celebrity photo agency Splash News was sold to Corbis in 2011 and has now been acquired by
SilverHub Media. SilverHub Media recently did an
exclusive deal with Shutterstock for worldwide representation of the images in its collection. Thus, the Splash images should now be available through Shutterstock.
Many
Shutterstock investors see the steadily rising number of images in the Shutterstock collection and the number of new content creators being added each quarter and come to the conclusion that there is no problem on the supply side of the stock photo business. But, having more and more product is not enough. It needs to be the right product that fulfills the customer’s needs. And the right images need to be easy for each unique customer to find.
Once Getty’s
Unification Project is fully implemented one of the issues Getty and iStock photographers will need to consider is where to upload new images in order to minimize effort and maximize sales and revenue.
As I pointed out in a
previous article I recently contacted a number of very successful photographers who, in the 90s, earned most, if not all, of their income from stock photography. After 2000, and despite a lot of continuing hard work and cost cutting, many saw significant earning declines and eventually had to look for something other ways to support themselves and their families.
If you think hard work, and continuing to produce better and better images is all that’s needed to make money in the stock photography business, think again. Here’s the story of one very successful photographer who started in the business in the late 1970s and how the last 16 years have impacted his business.
PicturEngine has gone public with a promotion to the 95% of design professionals that use stock photography. For the first time, buyers looking for a comprehensive all-in-one search tool can review and license photography from all industry sources – and get no duplicates.
Blend Images has announced exclusive representation of the
Built Images stock library. With over 25,000 property-released photographs of contemporary commercial and residential architecture, interior design and home lifestyle, the “Built” collection is one of the most comprehensive and diverse image resources of its kind available for use in advertising and graphic design. This unique collection represents work from more than fifty of the top architectural photographers from the United States and around the world.
It does little good to blame someone else for how things have changed. We’re not going back to the old ways. The important thing is to figure out how to move forward. As might be expected not all readers agree with my take on where the industry is headed. A month or so ago a reader wrote: “
When you write articles you must be impartial. The problem is you are very close to the Picture agencies that are destroying Photographer’s jobs. So its very difficult for you to be impartial.”
A new stock photo source called
Foto Sushi, LLC has launched a custom library of unique portrait photography suitable for any project. This small collection of what many photographers will classify as very simple images is interesting because it was created by Jon Anderson, a seasoned Art Director and Creative Director, who believes he has identified an unfulfilled need of his colleagues – image buyers.
Yesterday, I talked about why the business of licensing rights to stock photos - as currently structured - is
Designed To Fail unless some major changes are made. Two of the changes needed are:
(1) make finding the right image for a project much easier for the buyer, and
(2) improving supplier efficiency.
Today, Peter James made comments on my
Facebook page to several of the stories listed there. I can understand his frustration. Here are links to the stories he looked at, his comments and my reactions to those comments.
Alamy reports that a current visual trend seems to take advantage of “instagram – like” filtering that pulls up the black point of the image and reduces the contrast.
Some European photographers, particularly in France, think many of our industry’s problems could be solved with a Photographer’s Union. Unfortunately, a Union of Professional Photographers would probably only make the situation worse for most union members.
Blend Images, the world's leading multicultural stock photography agency, has recently announced the launch of a new website with a focus on world-class curated royalty free imagery
and motion clips. The new
Blendimages.com offers an improved user interface, a simplified pricing model, large image previews, and is the only place to search the entire Blend Images collection.
RM photographer working with the major stock production companies may have some very difficult decisions to make in the near future.
With the rise of
Offset,
Stocksy,
AdobeStock Premium and
iStock Signature it seems that RM photographers that are not also owners or shareholders of production companies, like
Blend Images,
Image Source and
Tetra Images, may find that they can earn more by moving their collections to RF.
The needs of stock photo customers are changing. Successful agencies and distributors are adapting to those needs. Increasingly, customers are turning away from the large collections that purport to have everything. They are moving toward smaller, tightly curated collections that have a narrow focus in terms of the subject matter they represent.
Aurora Photos is one such agency.
Many RM photographers are opposed to Royalty Free because they believe that for a single low fee they would be giving away all future rights to use their images. That’s not quite true. Check out this story to see the real differences and understand how much you might really be giving away if you license your images as RF.
In response to changes in the industry and client requirements
Africa Media Online has introduced a new simplified pricing model. The South Africa based picture library has moved away from the complexities of narrowly defined RM usages and is now offering clients a simple procedure for establishing what an image costs.
After reading last week’s article on “
Rights Simplified Pricing” a reader asked if I could expand on why an alternative to Rights Managed pricing is needed. He said that seldom has he found that customers are unwilling to pay
fotoQuote RM rates that are based on how images are used. The following is my response.
To deal with increased customer demand for simpler, easier to understand pricing, and the general decline in the use of Rights Managed images industry wide,
plainpicture in Germany has introduced a new pricing model they call
(RS) plainpicture Rights Simplified.
One of the principal reasons for licensing images as Rights Managed rather then Royalty Free is to insure that the customer pays additional fees whenever they reuse an image. With RF, once purchased, the customer can use the image as many times as they want. But how often do such multiple uses occur?