Stock
StockFood, the leading food media agency, is adding a new product to its extensive visual collection: instructional Recipe Videos, offered with a package of additional complementary information services. The Recipe Video collection is targeted at the food, retail and hospitality industries, as well as a broad user group of online media.
123RF has announced a partnership agreement with Zcool, mainland China's
renowned creative designer platform for graphic designers. Designers
show their work on Zcool and there is a degree of sharing of the work.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P. (together with its affiliates,
"KKR"), today announced a $150 million growth equity investment in
Fotolia. In addition, KKR, TA Associates and Management worked with KKR
Capital Markets and a number of relationship banks to put in place a
$150 million senior financing for the Company.
Shutterstock has filed plans with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an initial public offering (IPO). The company intends to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “SSTK” and hopes to raise around $115 million through this IPO. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have yet to be decided.
In web advertising what produces the best results still photos or videos? You may be surprised. This story outlines some of the things that are happening that will change the way customers choose their images and some of the things you can do to increase sales.
In March it was reported by Moody’s and Standard & Poors that the
gross revenue for Getty Images in calendar 2011 was $945 million. This
figure, and how the various lines of business break out, provide some interesting insights into the state of the stock
photography business.
The stock photography industry has to face the challenge of becoming relevant in an economy that has no patience for inadequate business models. Today the vast majority of photographs are used without any contact with the traditional photo industry, which has completely lost control of production and distribution. But the industry continues stubbornly to apply old rules to this new landscape. It does not see, or purposely wants to ignore, that their model does not fit current needs and thus is chasing customers away.
Evolveimages.com has introduced a new simplified licensing model for Rights Managed (RM) Images that they call EvoRights. EvoRights focuses on four primary price drivers: use type (commercial or editorial), intended media (print, digital or both), duration and geographic distribution and allows customers to determine the usage fee in as little as three clicks.
An Australian company called
ImageBrief, has developed a way for buyers to submit briefs directly to photographers for the images they need. This cuts out the stock agency middle men, and eliminates the need for buyers to wade through massive online databases of images.
iStockphoto has launched a simple and intuitive
plugin for several programs in the new Adobe® Creative Suite® 6 (CS6). The FREE plugin enables designers to search and directly download images within the programs without interrupting their workflow. A one-click comp replace feature automatically exchanges comp images with purchased images, perfectly resized and positioned within the working page layout or design.
As of the end of April PacaSearch had 169,352,194 searchable images on
www.pacasearch.com. That is a lot of images. And the number is constantly growing. But, the number is not what makes searching on this site unique. What’s amazing is the fact that all the images are easily available for licensing because trademark, copyright and release issues have been addressed and sales models have been created.
Alamy has announced the expansion of its
100% Royalties project, designed to give young photographers experience of a professional stock photography agency. Launched in a number of universities in the UK and USA in 2011 the project has proved a real success. In fact, it has been such a success that it is being extended into a second year.
RM photographers Take Note!! With the launch of
PeopleImages.com Yuri Arcurs has taken away your last best argument for why professional art directors and graphic designers should go to traditional RM sites to license the images they need.
Four non-disclosed sources have told Reuters that
Shutterstock is looking for underwriters for an initial public offering (IPO). A Shutterstock spokesperson refused to comment on the report or to supply financial details about the company.
Bigstock has announced a partnership with the Freelancers Union, a non-profit membership organization for independent workers. The partnership will provide the union's nearly 200,000 members with creative assets and inspiration.
What's the most that has been paid for a single photo for editorial, product or other type of commercial use? Learn about some top sellers and tell us of other examples.
Many photographers, upset with the low prices their distributors are charging for uses, have become enamored with the idea that PicturEngine will allow them to set their own prices for use of their work. That may not work as well as they hope.
Getty Images will become the sole global distributor for Lonely Planet’s 420,000+ travel images as of July of this year. The collection from approximately 370 photographers has been built up over the last 14 years.
The Associated Press and Fotolia have announced a collaboration giving customers access to millions of royalty-free images. AP Images customers will be able to buy editorial, rights-managed and royalty-free images, including millions from Fotolia, on
APImages.com.
Non-exclusive microstock photographers whose images sell frequently on the current microstock sites may want to take a hard look at
PicturEngine’s new portal and marketing strategy.
Photographers set the price for the use of their images and receive 100% of the fee customers pay.
Previously we wrote about the new search engine
PicturEngine. The key question is not how well the search works, the number of images they offer or the chance for photographers to ask for higher prices for their work. The key question is how will they make customers aware that their site exists? The question is marketing.
Alamy reported this week that it is moving into stock video with an initial offering of over 100,000 video clips from some of the most respected stock video agencies and videographers around the world including: Corbis, Blend, Image Source, Rubberball, Specialist Stock, DV Archive, Spotmatik, Wave Break Media and Aqua Geo Graphic.
At the
CEPIC Congress in London on 16 through 18 May each day will begin with an inspiring key note address. The speakers are listed here.
Everywhere Brazilian photographer Ferando Martins, head of Brazil’s Câmera Clara Photography Studio, looked he kept seeing the same face. Jesper Bruun, a native of Denmark, was everywhere. He was a tourist in Australia, a rockstar in France, a family man in Bolivia. He and a young woman were customers for Banco do Brasil and he is also pictured as a call center worker for Deutsche Bank. Martins’ customers seemed to prefer using images of Bruun rather than images Martins could produce.
Back in 2008, in an effort to try to compete with microstock, Alamy introduced its
Novel Use licensing model. This strategy allowed the company to license RM and traditional RF images for very limited small uses without risking loss of revenue when these same customers wanted to make larger uses of the images.