Stock
Pond5 and Adobe have teamed up to develop a one-of-a-kind plug-in that gives video editors seamless access to the largest collection of over 1.1 million royalty-free stock videos, including 330,000 royalty-free music tracks and sound effects, all exclusively within Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.
PACA’s (Picture Agency Council of America) 17th International Conference will be held this year in Chicago from October 19th through the 21st at the Chicago Marriott Downtown. In addition to PACA members the event is open to all ‘sister’ trade organizations for the image, illustration and advertising industry. These include:
Fotolia has moved to expand its service in Latin American and Australia just two months after private equity firm
KKR took a 50% stake in the company.
John Lund is one of the world’s most successful stock photographers. His images have a clean, graphic, conceptual style and generally illustrate business concepts. His images are often humorous. Using photoshop and digital tools he creates images that put people and animals in impossible situations, but they are done so skillfully that viewers often ask, “Did that really happen?” The following are five tips for succeeding in stock photography.
The summer heat in Washington has got me thinking about air conditioning. That brought to mind a story I did back in 2006 about air conditioning photos and microstock. It all started when a customer asked for a stock picture of an
air conditioning repairman working on a home system to use in a small yellow pages ad.
Thousands of images from the National Geographic Stock: Vintage Collection are now available at
The Granger Collection. The rare historical catalogue, part of the National Geographic Image Collection, documents the world and its inhabitants, including indigenous people, their cultures, the environment, and the natural world from the 1880s through the 1970s.
Jacksonville, FL based
SuperStock has acquired Seattle based
Science Faction Images. The 40,000 tightly edited high-end science and high technology images in the Science Faction collection will allow SuperStock to “better serve our clients in publishing and advertising,” according to Lanny Ziering, CEO of SuperStock.
At least five private equity firms are bidding to buy
Getty Images from Hellman & Freedman (H&F) in a leveraged buyout worth an estimated $4 billion.
Based on our recent analysis of sales made by 193 of iStockphoto’s top sellers, total company downloads may have declined by as much as
22% in the first 6 months of 2012 compared to the same period in 2011. This story will walk you through how we collected the data, arrived at this number and explain why such a small sample of contributors is representative.
Professional photographers shooting travel photos have another new competitor. Foap.com is collecting iPhone photos from tourists and selling them for $10 each. To get started uploading pictures all the photographer needs to do is go to iTunes and download the
app.or go to
foap.com. The photographer receives a 50% royalty, payable through PayPal monthly.
ABC News VideoSource has upgraded and expanded its website to provide greater and easier access to ABC News’ vast archival footage online. Producers and researchers will now be able to browse, license and, in some cases, immediately access tens of thousands of video assets from ABC News’ expansive archives with the click of a mouse. It offers customers, including documentary filmmakers, educators or anyone with an interest in archival video footage, historically-rich news video from a vast collection spanning from 1896 to the present.
Following its acquisition of
Specialist Stock and its move into the footage side of the stock image business
Robert Harding World Imagery has created its Comprehensive Research Facility (CRF) which not only offers research of its own collections but will also research a range of satellite suppliers including BBC Motion Gallery, NHNZ, Footage Search and SKYWORKS amongst others.
Alamy has published an 11-page
white paper that examines the challenges current pricing and licensing models face. The paper summarizes a round table discussion where key industry decision makers, including picture buyers, photographers, journalists, commentators and stock image providers, examined the issue.
T3Media, Inc. (formerly Thought Equity Motion), a leading provider of cloud-based video management and licensing services, has announced the launch of a new licensing offering—
Paya ™ (Pay-ya), the world's index of licensable content™. To watch a short video that explains how Paya works, click
here.
Universal Images Group (UIG), owned by industry veteran George Sinclair (also the founder of the Virtual Picture Desk in 2002 and co-author of Britannica’s Image Quest), has acquired the business rights and digital library of the
MyLoupe and the
Ad Stock Images picture agencies.
In the near future photographers can expect to see are some dramatic
changes in the way subscriptions are defined. Until now, most
subscriptions have allowed customers to download 25 images per day for
the duration of the subscription ranging from 1
month to 1 year. Now a number of new options are being introduced.
Stock photographers regularly complain about the “Race To The Bottom” in
terms of pricing and they look for someone to blame. Favorite whipping
boys are Getty Images, Alamy and microstock. But, these distributors are
not really the problem. The problem is technology.
Anyone thinking about setting up their own fully functional search engine to license images should read
Yuri Arcurs article about the trials and tribulations he went through in creating
PeopleImages.com.
Every few months I put together a summary of some of our most important
recently published stories. This selection is designed to help investors
who are trying to understand the industry as well as image creators
just beginning to explore the idea of licensing their images. Regular
readers will have seen these stories. Please refer friends interested in
licensing images to this series of articles.
Evolve Images (
www.evolveimages.com) has announced that Lewis Blackwell has joined the company as Chief Creative Officer. Blackwell brings to Evolve an impressive array of credentials with leading experience in the image creation and licensing industry, as well as deep knowledge and active membership of the image-buying community.
Most online databases of stock photos contain hundreds of thousands of
images that are never seen by potential buyers. This can be attributed
to the fact that the sole way of finding images is through the use of
keywords. Learn more about how Visual Search could go a long way to solving this problem and the specific strategy used by
Pixolution.
Late last week
Shutterstock sent out a press release introducing – a little pre-maturely it turns out – a new image discovery tool called “Shutterstock Instant.” In fact, if you go to the Shutterstock site there is no evidence that this feature exists. It turns out it is still a prototype. As with all prototypes when it is finally released to the public it may be quite a bit different than it is today.
123RF has launched 123RF Stock Footage. Clients can choose from over 75,000 high definition video clips at
www.123rf.com/stock-footage/ in addition to Royalty-Free Stock Photo and Illustrations.
Hellman & Friedman, the owners of Getty Images Inc, have retained Goldman Sachs Group Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co to examine a possible sale or public offering of the business. According to press reports a sale or IPO could value Getty Images at $4 billion. This move follows announcements last week by
Shutterstock and
Fotolia. Shutterstock hopes to raise $115 million in its IPO and Fotolia received a $150 million growth investment from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. for a 50% stake in the company
Will the stock photo market generate $5 billion annually in revenue by the end of 2012?
Don't You Believe It.In its recent S-1 filing Shutterstock quoted BBC Research as saying the "market for pre-shot commercial digital imagery is expected to exceed $5 billion in 2013." I think the market for stock still photos, illustration and footage will generate no more than $2 billion by the end of 2012.