Stock
Corbis Images (
www.corbisimages.com) and The Associated Press (
www.ap.org) have launched their Media offering that provides customers with more than 10 million images covering a range of breaking news, sports and entertainment, archival and creative images.
Our semi-annual analysis of iStockphoto sales has once again produced interesting results. As of January 2, 1012
istockcharts was tracking the sales of 38,163 of the more than 100,000 iStock contributors. More than 90% of the images in the iStock collection belong to this group of contributor. Combined these contributors have had a minimum of 114,875,519+ downloads since each started working with iStock. During 2011 alone a minimum of 18,615,558+ images (and probably about 21.5 million) were licensed for use.
The Authors Coalition of America, LLC, has identified a number of
American authors who may be due royalty payments from non-U.S. sources. These royalties have been received to compensate authors for the foreign reprographic use of U.S. copyrighted materials.
The core business of providing pictures for commercial and consumer use
has moved from hiring a professional photographer to shoot an
assignment, to RM stock, to RF and then to
microstock. The next paradigm shift will be iPhoneography. Learn how this may impact you. Check out Jack Hollingsworth's two day workshop on the subject
Design Pics Inc., has acquired of
First Light Associated Photographers Ltd., a Canadian based photo agency. The agency was originally founded in 1984 by Pierre Guevremont, Ron Watts and Brian Milne. First Light has been based in Toronto. Design Pics is located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
In 2011
Pond5’s collection grew to over 900,000 and is expected to reach 1 million by early 2012. Currently this is largest collection of video clips on the web. In addition, the site offers 7.6 million still photos, 677,000 illustrations, and one of the deepest audio collections in the world, with more than 200,000 sound effects and 100,000 music tracks. Pond5 also has a small collection of customizable After Effects templates.
I’m regularly contacted by photographers, some with excellent
portfolios, wanting to know how they can license rights to their images
in today’s market. Recently, I was contacted by a nature and wildlife
photographer whose work was excellent. This photographer regularly
conducts Photo Workshops where he teaches others how to take great
scenic and wildlife pictures. Here’s what I told him.
Design Pics Inc., headquartered in Edmonton, Canada announces the acquisition of
Pacific Stock, a Hawaii based photo agency. The agency was originally founded in 1987 by Barbara Brundage.
Microstock sites are usually thought of as places to go to find generic commercial images, not editorial coverage. But, recently several microstock sites have started accepting unreleased, editorial images.
Dreamstime has provided links to images related to some of the major events its contributors covered in 2011.
It has been pointed out that publishers need to license rights for long terms (25 years and more) because it is so difficult for them to track
down image owners in order to license reuses years after the initial license. This is particularly true as a result of agency consolidations and agencies going out of business. I recognize the problem, but there is a simple solution that would be easier for the book publishers to administer and much fairer for image creators.
A philosophical battle is being waged on the web between
ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) and
APA (American Photographic Artists) over how to address the issue of the lack of compensation from the
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) for the collective licensing of reprography and digital uses of literary and visual works, and other secondary uses of audiovisual works. Here’s some background.
Image creators need to recognize that the fatal flaw in the stock photography business model is that there is no way to control supply relative to demand. This was not a big problem in the 1990s when demand exceed supply, but that state of affairs will never happen again. As a result Stock Photography is and will continue to be a very risky business.
The sale of
Masterfile to Arius 3D Corp for $21.4 million is still hanging in the balance. The two companies have agreed to extend to January 31, 2012 the closing of the previously announced proposed acquisition by Arius3D of all of the issued and outstanding securities of Masterfile.
Recentlty, a photographer asked what to charge for use of photos on a
travel app that is designed to help tourists discover new places to
visit, things to do, places to eat and drink etc.? Here are my thoughts.
Recently I wrote about
PhotoShelter’s survey of 500 buyers of stock in their new Free guide to
Selling Stock Photography.
Getty Images notified its editorial photographers on November 9th that
it is revising its editorial contract and cutting the royalty rate to 35
percent. Under the current editorial contract Getty pays photographers
50 percent for some sales and 35 percent for others.
PhotoShelter has published a new Free guide to Selling Stock Photography that can be found and downloaded
here. The guide includes results of a survey of 500 buyers of stock that shows which collections they search most frequently.
Masterfile has added 1.5 million budget-friendly photos and illustrations to its website at
www.masterfile.com, complementing its large collection of premium rights-managed and royalty-free images. Customers can easily toggle between the RM/RF collection and the $10 collection, but images from both collections are not shown at the same time.
Shutterstock Images LLC has released its
Shutterstock for iPad app, available for free download now in the Apple App Store.
Just 8 months after launch
ImageCollect.com, a celebrity picture library offering images at microstock prices, has doubled in size in 3 months and now has more than three million images available for download. The library contains archival imagery and current content supplied by top entertainment photographers. The company expects to have more than 5 million images by early 2012.
Aurora Photos is excited to announce the launch of the
myPhone Collection of stock photography, a collection of images taken with iPhones and other mobile devices by some of the world’s top photographers and iPhoneographers, and now made available to pictures buyers for both editorial and commercial licensing. To coincide with the launch of the myPhone Collection, Aurora is also introducing a new modified Rights Managed licensing model called
Easy Rights Managed. The model offers simple, quick, broad, and managed rights at reasonable prices.
After reading
Stock Photo Market Size In 2011 Tom Zimberoff asked several question that need a more detailed response. This story explains why growing microstock revenue does not mean that a growing number of microstock images are being used.
The Occupy Wall Street movement’s “we are the 99 percent” campaign is
basically about a fairer distribution of wealth. Photographers and those
who handle the distribution of images to end users need to launch an
Occupy Book Publishers movement.
In an effort to give volume customers a better deal and compete with Getty’s Premium Access and Thinkstock programs
Corbis Images has launched a new Royalty-Free (RF) subscription service that offers customers easy access to more than one million RF images at greatly discounted prices. The service, called ‘OnDemand: Royalty-Free’ is available to all customers to help solve their creative storytelling needs.
Since Getty Images went went private at the end of 2007 and Alamy
stopped providing quarterly figures at the end of 2009 it has become
very difficult to estimate the size of the stock photo market worldwide. This article is an update of my previous articles and provides an overview of the amount of revenue being generated in each segment of the business today.