Stock
There is a growing demand for narrowly focused image collections that provide high quality, tightly edited and in depth coverage of their particular niche.
DisabilityImages is a good example of one such collection.
Over time royalty rates have declined. Usage fees have dropped dramatically in the last few years. And the huge oversupply of images is making it less likely that any images will ever be licensed. Faced with these facts many photographers have pulled back on new production of stock images, if not dropped out of the stock photo business entirely. Now,
Lightrocket offers a marketing option that may make some of those businesses sustainable.
Many microstock image producers keep a very low profile. Recently we came upon a list
www.microstocktime.ru/tools/ of the top 100 individuals and companies with the
largest portfolios on Shutterstock. We tried to learn a little more about Africa Studio, the number one contributor.
Visual Connections has announced that
Visual Connections Chicago (), the leading forum to meet and learn from image/footage buyers, will be moving to a new venue in 2014. Bookings for the Thursday, April 24, 2014 event will open on Wednesday, December 18 at 10am ET.
Getty Images has announced that as of January 1st 2014, they are dropping the placement fee for RM Photographer’s Choice. This means that there are no longer any fees associated with Photographer’s Choice RM and RF!
Photographers all over the world are making sales through
ImageBrief. While it can be a lot of work responding to briefs the photographers we talked to seem generally happy with the results. ImageBrief reported that in October and November they negotiated sales for 168 photographers operating in 30 different countries. (See list below)
Stocksy has announced that it has become the world's first stock photo website built around responsive web design principals. This step has made Stocksy the only stock photo site that can provide the same optimized research and buying experience across any smartphone, tablet or desktop device.
Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") has reported that
Fotolia’s revenues for the fiscal year ending December 2012 totaled
$87 million. Moody’s expects revenues to increase in the “low to mid-single digit percentage range over the next 12 months.”
It’s time to take another look at
PeopleImages.com that Yuri Arcurs Productions launched 17 months ago. Yuri has long been the world’s most successful microstock photographer, and until June 2013 his work was represented on virtually all the world’s microstock distributors.
Getty Images has supplied selected investors with its third quarter revenue figures. Indications are that revenue continues to decline. For the year ending June 30, 2013 revenue was $897 million. For the 4 quarters ending September 30, 2013 indications are that the revenue is less than the $897 million, but we have been unable to determine exactly how much it has declined.
As of December 1, 2013
Universal Images Group Limited (UIG) has opened a new Content Management facility for Asia based in Tokyo, Japan.
The formula for producing stock images that sell is simple. Produce what customers want. All they want are images of “better quality” that are “more creative,” “natural, not staged” and that clearly illustrate a “concept” the customer needs at the moment. Also, the “price” for usage must be lower than anything else available.
Design Pics Inc. has announced the acquisition of AgStock Images, a California based photo agency specializing in agricultural photography. Founded in 1996 by Ed Young,
AgstockImages.com is a comprehensive library of worldwide agricultural photography, representing over 115 leading agriculture, produce, livestock, entomology, botany and plant pathology photographers, including photographers who are also professors and researchers across the United States, Canada, Europe and South America.
This story contains a list of the 99 Shutterstock contributors with the largest portfolios. All have more than 17,000 images on Shutterstock and the leading contributor, Africa Studio, has 346,683. Combined these 99 contributors have 4,433,257 or almost 14% of all the images on Shutterstock.There is a hot link to each contributor’s collection.
As happens every fall there is a whirlwind of photo conferences – PACA Annual Conference, Visual Connection and PhotoPlusExpo (all in New York), and this year Microstock Expo in Berlin. In light of everything I’ve seen and heard between October 20 and November 17, 2013 I’ve provided a few observations as to where I think the stock photo industry is headed.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker and itself a massive consumer of image content for its products and services, has taken the bold step of promoting the theft of images online. Through its newly revamped Office product, Microsoft is replacing an image search functionality – one that routed the user to vetted sources for searching, transacting and integrating content into their online projects – with a general
Bing search. While Microsoft is certainly free to remove one piece of Office functionality and push users onto the Bing platform, the methods of how it is doing so underscores a blatant disregard of intellectual property.
Hundreds of thousands of images in major stock distributor collections are never viewed by any customer. If customers can’t see them they certainly can’t buy them. Tens of thousands of images are being added to stock photo databases every day. A very high percentage of them will quickly fall into an abyss never to be seen again. Is there a solution to this problem?
Does exclusive representation make sense in today’s stock photography world, or is it better to place your images with multiple distributors? Here are a few things to consider.
Shutterstock has reported a record 25.4 million downloads and $56.8 million in revenue in Q3 2013. The Shutterstock collection has grown to more than 30 million still images and over 1.3 million video clips. Revenue per download grew 4% year-over-year to $2.35. The growth in revenue per download was driven primarily by a growing portion of revenue that is derived from video footage downloads.
In business it often helps to try to walk in your customer’s shoes. The following is a situation that developed when a busy designer was trying to give his customer a quality product on a tight deadline (aren’t all deadlines tight these days), and keep the cost of the project reasonable and within the customer’s budget.
Alamy has decided to lower the payout threshold for contributors and make payments whenever a contributor has $75 on account. No fees will be charged at the Alamy end regardless of the method or currency the contributor chooses.
One of the surprising things that came out of this year’s
Visual Connections event in New York was the degree of confusion and misunderstandings graphic designers and art directors have about image rights. Many seem unsure as to what they can and cannot do with the images they license.
The stock visual media industry is seeing a pick-up after the longest downturn in living memory. Visual Connections New York, the world’s largest marketing event devoted to commercial licensing of visual media, drew more buyers and exhibitors this year than in 2012. Buyers could learn about 72 different stock agency brands from around the world, including 21 new to New York and 22 from outside the US (Canada, UK, Germany, Sweden and Argentina).
Stock photography is changing rapidly. The most serious issues facing stock photographers are:
they have no idea who their potential customers are;
they don’t know what their customers are looking for in the way of images; and
they don’t understand how their customer’s businesses are changing.
Getty Images has done a deal with
Pinterest that will track the use of any of the 80 million photos and illustrations on Gettyimages.com whenever they are posted on the digital scrapbooking site. (A little over 7 million of those photos are on the Creative section of the site.)