Stock
In
Aurora Photos latest newsletter to contributors President and Founder José Azel offered insights on the current state of the stock photo industry that are worth every stock photographer considering
I have been looking at some of the Visual Trends 2018 reports. I hope they are helping customers because I don’t think they are doing much for image creators. Take
Getty’s trend report which evidently came out of the UK office. They say, “our Creative team analyzed 1 billion searches and 400 million imagery downloads on GettyImages.com, studied advertising trends, and examined pop culture shifts to predict three defining visual trends of 2018.
Six prominent footage companies have signed on so far to take part in
Footage.net's 2018 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) exhibition, set to take place April 9-12 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Current participants include Bridgeman Images, FootageBank, Global ImageWorks, INA, Reelin' in the Years Productions and the WPA Film Library. More footage companies are expected to sign on soon.
After I published my article proposing the development of an
Image Creator Locator or ICL, several readers pointed out that the
Plus Registry is designed to accomplish the same goal. See here for how ICL differs from Plus in its aims.
Joe Sohm, the creator of
Visions of America has been crisscrossing the U.S. for more that 30 years documenting the country as he sees it in all its beauty and uniqueness. From Presidential Campaigns of both parties to Landscapes & Cityscapes, Sohm is one of the most prolific Americana photographers. He has approximately 33,000 images in his collection. The collection is represented by the three major agencies – Getty Images, AdobeStock and Shutterstock – as well as a host of other agencies around the world.
I’ve been hearing more and more complaints from experienced photographers about the low royalties they are receiving for the use of their images – often less than $1.00. In many cases these low figures result because the primary agent with whom they placed their images is using a secondary distributor to actually handle the licensing to the customer.
As of January 31st Anthony Harris has stepped down as CEO of Image Source and Christina Vaughan has returned to the CEO position. In 2015 Christina turned over her leadership of Image Source to Mr. Harris, but remained a small shareholder. She moved to the position of CEO at
CueSongs, and oversaw the initial deployment and beta testing of the new CuePro platform, which won the Technology Strategy Board competition in 2014 and received a substantial grant to develop its “Frictionless Music Licensing for Online Broadcast”.
If you’re an image creator, or a stock photography customer and you’ve been thinking about getting involved with the new
KodakOne you might want to think again. The initial coin offering (ICO) of KodakCoin, that was supposed to launch on January 31st, has been delayed several weeks. In order to eventually license rights to images it will be necessary to use KodakCoins.
Blockchain tracking of stock image licensing may be a way to improve the working environment for image creators without getting involved in cryptocurrencies. One of the things that concerns image creators when they hear discussions about blockchains is that they always seem to be tied to collecting money in some type of “new economy” cryptocurrency like
KodakCoin.
You’ve seen all the stories about how stock photography is junk, will chase customers away and destroy a company’s business. Well now Darren Johnson, publisher of Campus News, says that Stock Photography actually
Performs Better for his publication
Than Original Photography
Kodak and
WENN Digital, in a licensing partnership, have announced the launch of the KODAKOne image rights management platform utilizing blockchain technology and KODAKCoin, a photo-centric cryptocurrency to empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management.
Copytrack, the German organization that tracks use of images on the Internet and then pursues infringers when an unauthorized use is discovered has announced that its “blockchain powered copyright registry and enforcement platform is preparing the enter the second round of the crowdsale” as a way of raising revenue for future expansion.
It is hard to find a stock photographer who has been in business for any period of time who can point to rising revenue per-image-licensed. Some who have dramatically increased the size of their collections may be able to point to overall annual revenue growth, but not growth per-image-in-the-collection.
Here are a few stock photo industry changes that I predict will occur before 2019.
1 – At least one radically new and different business model for licensing stock images will be introduced. 2 – Customers will become more disenchanted with the major stock photo distributors. 3 - Image creators may be given more useful information about what is in demand.
See More explanation
Last week Shutterstock notified its editorial shooters that they had begun showcasing all of their Premier Editorial content on Shutterstock.com. Previously this content has only been accessible through the Shutterstock Premier website. “The new editorial tab will include our historic Rex collection, images from strategic partners, including AP, BFA, epa, and live coverage of breaking news, entertainment and sports events,” they said.
The market for editorial stock photos is quite different from the commercial market. Shutterstock may be having a difficult time adapting. In January 2015 Shutterstock
purchased Rex Features for $33 million. At the time it was believed that Rex’s gross 2014 revenue was about $7 million.
iStock has done a deal with
Joomag that allowed Joomag users to purchase as few, or as many, images a month as they would like to use for $2.99 each. Joomag provides a graphic design service to over “500,000 businesses across all sectors” that allows customers to create digital newsletters, magazines, catalogs, brochures, ebooks and more and deliver these products either online or in printed form.
Benji Lanyado, CEO & Founder of
Picfair, the London-based fair trade photography platform, has used a
blog post and a
tweet to call on the photographer community to turn away from free images websites that offer "exposure" in return for free images.
Storyblocks, formerly Videoblocks will generate about $30 million from licensing stock imagery in 2017. Currently, they have a little over 200,000 subscription customers who pay $149 a year for unlimited access to about 115,000 video clips. They also offer about 200,000 photos, 200,000 vectors and other illustrations and 100,000 pieces of music for a separate subscription price.
In July 2016
Alamy published an infographic with a timeline for the history of stock photography. They have just released an updated version with 10 new milestones based on comments they received from the public. You can find the updated timeline
here.
This story is
FREE. Feel free to pass it along to anyone interested in licensing their work as stock photography. On October 23rd at the DMLA 2017 Conference in New York there will be a panel discussion on Stock Photo Prices and whether there is anything that can be done to raise them -- even slightly. I will moderate the discussion.
Contributors report that Getty Images believes there is still a demand for RM imagery. However, they are seeing fewer high quality submissions on a consistent basis, despite the fact that they have many more RM contributors than was once the case. The company is trying to encourage more production by posting increasingly frequent shoot briefs on the Getty contributor website.
Videoblock has rebranded itself as
Storyblocks. The existing video and audio libraries are being maintained as separate subsites:
Videoblocks by Storyblocks and
Audioblocks by Storybloacks. (Each offering requires a separate subscription.) The former GraphicStock library is now part of Storyblocks.
Shutterstock, Inc. has launched its
Flashstock business as
Shutterstock Custom, a proprietary platform that provides an efficient and innovative way for its 1.7 million customers to create branded content.
The big question for the industry is, “Why would customers agree to pay slightly higher prices?”
Everyone seems to believe that the only way to get, or keep, customers is to constantly give them lower and lower prices. I think there are a couple other things customers want:
(1) better quality and
(2) the ability to find what they need quickly. The industry is missing out on both these levels.