Stock
Microstock image contributors are removing images from Fotolia in a boycott of Fotolia’s
Dollar Photo Club (DPC) subscription service. So far more than 400,000 images have been removed from Fotolia since April 25, 2014.
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.
A lot of people like to ridicule stock photography and hold it in contempt like “
Truly Awful Stock Photography” or “
Unsalable Stock Photos” or “
20 Worst WTF Stock Photos,” but we’re not sure what the organizers of
The 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity are trying to do.
PressFoto, has launched
ImageRent, a new service that makes more than 3.5 million stock photos immediately available for commercial, editorial or personal use online at a minimal cost. The maximum file sizes available are 72dpi, 600x600px web size images.
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.
Getty photographers are getting some surprising insights into the use of their images on Pinterest as they review their Getty sales reports this month. For many photographers over half the reported sales are for “Pinterest/Portal” usage. The gross fee paid to Getty for such usages is $0.03 and the photographer’s royalty share is $0.01.
Getty Images has launched its iStock
subscription offering in an attempt to compete with
Shutterstock. There are two levels of iStock subscriptions – iStock Essentials and iStock Signature. With iStock’s offering customers can download 250 images a month with the monthly plan or 750 images a month with the annual plan. With Shutterstock there is a daily limit of 25 images a day (750 a month) regardless of which plan you purchase.
The
CEPIC Congress scheduled to be held in Berlin on June 4 through 7, 2014 is less than 2 months away. Already nearly 350 stock photo agents and industry suppliers are signed up to attend. For a full conference program see
here.
The
Permission Machine (PM) is a startup in Belgium that is trying to educate social media users that they need permission to use the images they find on the web and provide them with a simple, easy way to license uses.
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.
Dreamstime has released a plugin for WordPress that enables WordPress users to easily access and embed free and commercial content from Dreamtime’s 22.5 million image library.
Recently, on the “
Stock Photography, buy and sell your images” group on LinkedIn photographer Pierre Charrlau complained that his Getty Images sales have “greatly diminished” and wanted to know if others were having the same experience.
On its web site for Flickr contributors Getty asks, “What are the average prices for RM and RF?” and then gives the following answer. “The average licensing fee for royalty free ranges from $175 to $225. And for rights managed licensing, keeping in mind that uses and fees vary widely; the average is around $550-$650.”
Fotolia has decided that in order to attract more customers to their microstock offering they need to lower prices for professional users. They have created a members-only Dollar Photo Club and are promoting it to readers of Graphic Design USA (
GDUSA).
In celebration of the one-year anniversary of
Stocky United, Brianna Wettlaufer has been appointed CEO of the company. Wettlaufer, who was co-founder and former VP at iStockphoto, (which was acquired by Getty images for $50 million in 2006) brings over 10 years of leadership and innovation to her role.
After many years, the Ninth Circuit finally entered a decision in the Alaska Stock, LLC v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (HMH) case. In Anchorage U.S. District Judge H. Russel Holland had originally tossed the federal lawsuit after finding that the photographs had been improperly registered with the Copyright Office.
A reader asked if anyone produces a list of the stock photography subjects that are in greatest demand. As far as I know such a list does not exist. In very general terms the subjects in greatest demand are model released people in business and family situations, but to be useful it is necessary to get much more specific.
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.
In all the excitement about 35 million FREE images it is worth looking back at some of things that have been happening at Getty Images in the last three months. After watching revenue decline for the fifth straight quarter, and many of its top producers cut back on production or stop supplying new images altogether, Getty evidently decided that their turn-around strategy wasn’t working and they needed to make some radical changes.
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.
Most photographers believe stock photo prices are declining everywhere. But not at
Shutterstock where they have seen a 27% increase in 3 years from $1.91 per download in Q4 2010 to $2.43 in Q4 2013. RM and traditional RF photographers are thinking, “This is not a story for me. I’ll never go near any distributor with prices that low.” Please don’t give up. Let me walk you through some numbers that you may find useful and interesting.
iStock has announced that in April it will launch a subscription product based on the
Thinkstock subscription product. The low priced Thinkstock product has been the fastest growing part Getty Images’ business.
If you couldn’t make it to the Microstock Expo (MExpo) in Berlin last November now from the comfort of your home or office you can see and hear
all the discussions that took place during the two-day conference. Of course, this material will be particular interest to microstock shooters and distributors, but even if you are licensing your work at RM or traditional RF prices you will find that many of the discussions provide important insights into where the stock photo industry is headed.
Over 9,000
iStock photographers have received notices that they were overpaid for sales made through the Partner Program (PP). Getty plans to reclaim the overpayments by deducting the amount from the future royalty payments owed the contributors over the next six months. It is unclear exactly how much the total overpayment was, but based on what some photographers are being told will be deducted from their accounts it could have been millions of dollars.
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.