Stock
Corbis Images has made an undisclosed investment in
Demotix following the media distribution partnership between the two companies
announced in March.
The Associated Press and
Corbis Images have announced a comprehensive cross-distribution partnership that provides customers access to more than 10 million images covering an unparalleled range of breaking news, sports and entertainment, archival and creative images.
Masterfile has upgraded its website with a suite of timesaving tools for creative professionals. "The new
Masterfile.com is a game changer. It makes the task of sifting through millions of images an enjoyable, rewarding and ultimately creative experience," says Steve Pigeon, President.
Arius3D Corp plans to buy
Masterfile Corp. for $21.4 million, in a bid to expand into the traditional 2D market. Under the deal's terms, full consideration will be paid in cash, unless Masterfile opts to receive $12 million of the purchase price in stock. The Masterfile portion of the business will continue to operate under its current brand name and under the direction of Steve Pigeon, founder and president.
Recently a photographer asked how to price extended educational use of
an image that was first licensed by the publisher for textbook use two
years earlier. Initially the image was printed full page, inside. Now
the publisher wants virtually all rights for 20 years. This story explains how I would approach the problem.
Every professional photographer in the world should
add his or her name to the PLUS Registry. It’s FREE. It will take a couple minutes at most. And it may help someone
who wants to pay you money to find you.
Within the framework of
Visa pour l'Image,
CEPIC is organizing a roundtable with photographers, picture agencies and photographers cooperatives exploring the "Relationship between Agencies and Photographers: Art + Commerce or Photographers and Agencies - Making this Symbiotic Relationship Work"
AudioMicro, Inc., which operates a network of digital content licensing marketplaces, has announced that
ImageCollect.com, its celebrity picture marketplace launched just five months ago has more than 1,500,000 mostly “red carpet” images available for download. The company expects to have more than 4 million images on its site before the end of the year. The collection includes archival imagery from companies like Globe Photos and current content being supplied by top entertainment photographers.
Equidyne Holdings LLC, innovating in the field of digital and visual media, has announced the launch of a new subsidiary,
Visual Steam. Visual Steam is a new kind of sales services organization supporting the content licensing and creative services industries. The company’s goal is to generate revenue for clients. Visual Steam offers contract sales services to handle all or part of a client's sales efforts, customized training programs, workshops and complimentary marketing services.
The picturemaxx image search engine is unique in its approach to
providing an image search experience that benefits customers –
particularly editorial - as well as agencies trying to license images.
The company is headquartered in Munich with offices in New York, London,
Berlin and Vienna. Virtually all German speaking media customers (97%)
use picturemaxx as their primary source for finding content. This story explores the advantages and disadvantages of this system for both the customer and the image creator.
The 2011-12 school year is about to begin. The use of printed books is
declining. Many school systems will expand their use of computer and
iPads this school year. Beginning in kindergarten children will be
taught using digital devices.
iStockphoto COO Kelly Thompson will be moving from Calgary to Manhattan in September to become Senior Vice President, Product Development for Getty Images. He will lead a team of Getty Images and iStock Product Managers as they evolve the packaging and positioning of iStockphoto.com, Thinkstock.com, Photos.com and Clipart.com.
Editor's Note: James West, CEO of Alamy, provided a detailed explanation of the company's Alamy Permium Account strategy on the Alamy blog. For more information about this read
our story published last week and contributor comments on the
Alamy blog.
It’s time to institute a new pricing model. In the ‘80s the only pricing
model was Rights Managed (RM), but the term itself wasn’t even invented
until the ‘90s. Back then every price was based on usage and there was
no other option. In the early ‘90s Royalty Free (RF) was introduced. In
the early 2000s microstock came into existence. Now, it is time to
introduce a fourth model which I will call Use Pricing (UP). The
following would be some of the characteristics of Use Pricing.
In May Peter Phun published an article on BlackStar Rising entitled “
It’s Time for Pro Photographers and Hobbyists to Call a Truce.” The article has received a lot of comments. I would like to weigh in with my thoughts on the difference between professionals and non-professionals.
In certain segments of the stock photo market Alamy has been experimenting with both price points and the nature of licenses in an effort to grow sales and stem the tide of customers moving to microstock. One particular segment where they have seen a significant decline in sales is travel. Recently, one of Alamy's travel customers outlined for me the details of Alamy's new offer. This story examines the issue.
In the digital world everyone loves to work for free. Particularly when it is an opportunity to help someone else earn money as a result of their efforts. With that in mind
Magnum Photos is looking for
volunteers to help them tag their online archive. If you’re interested sign up
here.
After lowering royalty rates for non-exclusive contributors in January, iStockphoto introduced a
new strategy in early May that made it possible for non-exclusive contributors to offer a portion of their images at higher prices. Non-exclusive contributors are now allowed to nominate up to 15% of their total portfolios for inclusion in the Photos+ brand.
Shannon Fagan, a very successful former New York stock photographer, has
set up shop in China as a consultant and content aggregater. He has
spent a cumulative equivalent of 2 years in Shanghai and Beijing since
2006 working with, and doing business development for, China's
commercial photo agency sector. He permanently moved to Beijing in
December last year. He has interacted with nearly all the key players,
support components, and service providers, and developed an “insider’s”
knowledge of the opportunities and pitfalls of China’s stock photo
industry. This interview provides
some insights into the Chinese market.
After reading my story “
Getting Images Seen” on how Getty Images orders search returns John Lund did some searches for his own images on the Getty web site. He came up with some additional insights. Check out the full text of his article on his
blog.
As photographers head off for vacations with plans to shoot the
locations they intend to visit, Alamy has supplied some statistics on
the worlds most photographed cities based on the number of images in its
collection. I’ve provided their analysis below, but I thought it would
be fun to compare the number of images on Alamy with the numbers on
Getty Images, Shutterstock and Dreamstime. Keep in mind that Alamy has a
lot of editorial celebrity and red carpet images in its numbers.
Consequently, there is very little correlation between the Alamy numbers
and those offered by Getty creative or the microstock agencies.
After reading my story on
why usage fees will continue to decline Larry Minden wrote, “Is there no one among the thousands upon thousands represented by Alamy who will stand up to those idiots and tell them a 50-year license is unneeded and an absurd bastardization of an RM license?" This story explains why complaints from suppliers are unlikely to have much effect in the long term outcome.
Photographers complain that stock photo fees are way below what it costs
them to produce images. And they are right. But, the prices volume user
pay for images will continue to decline. Here’s why.
Alamy has announced that its US sales of the company’s images have
increased 30% in the past year and as a result they have contracted with
the New York Internet Company (NYI) will oversee its infrastructure
upgrade for North America, starting in New York.
In 2009 I started to use
iStockcharts to track about 196 of the top 250 sellers on iStockphoto. While figures for the other 54 of the 250 contributors were available, their names were not. Consequently I left them out of my research. iStock has over 100,000 contributors, but it is believed that well over 90% of the images in the collection and well over 90% of the total downloads belong to the 37,085 contributors whose information is available on iStockcharts.