Stock
Educational publishers regularly set up “preferred provider” agreements
with image suppliers who represent large collections. Publishers outline
certain standard terms and uses. The image provider is then asked to
stipulate a fee that will be charged for each use. Based on the fees
providers agree to charge the publisher decides which supplier to use. McGraw
Hill School Education Group has recently requested quotes from
potential preferred providers and they have introduced a new concept for
determining circulation of the product. Instead of talking about the
number of copies printed McGraw Hill now refers to the number of “unique
users.”
Veer (
www.veer.com) has announced the introduction of an Extended Customer Protection Plan, providing customers with up to $250,000(USD) coverage for 100 Veer Credits. Veer credit prices range from $0.78 to $1.41 depending on the size of the credit package purchased.
Science Photo Library, has signed a licensing agreement with
Global Grid for Learning, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cambridge University Press and one of the most comprehensive digital educational content collections in the world.
The Stock Artists Alliance (SAA), a photographer trade association, has
announced that it is discontinuing operations. Founded in 2001, this
organization came into being after Getty Images announced that it
planned to make significant changes in its photographer contracts. At
that time relations between Getty Images and its contract photographers
had become steadily “more strained” over a period of 18 months.
Those who license rights to use photos in textbooks should include
language in their invoices that requires publishers to provide the
licensor with a password to any web site where the licensors images are
used.This story explains why it is important and provides recommended language.
One of the great benefits of the Microstock marketing strategy is that
distributors have always offered customers a variety of ways to organize
search returns. In particular, sort-by-downloads has been a very
popular option. A “Redeemed Credits” option would get more of the best selling images of
the higher priced brands near the top of the search return order. This
method of searching would allow customers to see all the various brands
in a single search and still see more of the expensive images in the
early pages. See explanation.
Recently, I posted on the “Stock Photography: buy and sell photos” group
on LinkedIn.com some of the information about photography revenue
relative to printing revenue that is found in this
story. Peter
Dean came back with a related question that deserves some careful
examination. He asked, “Approximately how many more images are used
these days in print compared to 10 years ago?” He also wanted to know
whether print revenue is Static? going Up or going Down?
Two companies have announced new video offerings.
age fotostock is promoting its
THP Photo & Video Services (Technological Hosting Platform) that consolidates imagery from many suppliers and hosts it for distributors around the world. Stock Footage Online (
www.stockfootageonline.com) has launched a new site with links to 80 leading stock footage specialist libraries.
At ASMP’s recent Strictly Business 3 education weekend in Philadelphia
four photographers explained how they had reinvented their businesses in
the current challenging business environment. Here are their stories. There will be more success stories at the last Strictly Business 3 conference in 2011 which takes place in Chicago April 1st through 3rd.
In January of 2011 Yuri Arcurs was interviewed by John Lund and gave the
following account of where his business is today. Yuri is the world’s
best selling microstock photographer, has a staff of more than 50 and
the overhead for his stock operation exceeds $200,000 a month.
Corbis Images has announced a new worldwide distribution agreement with London based
Demotix , the multi-award winning source of “Street Journalism.” Later this month, Corbis Images will begin offering an edited selection of breaking news photography from Demotix through
corbisimages.com.
Recently the U.S. Copyright Office launched a pilot program that enables
photographers to use the Electronic Copyright Office (eCO) system to
complete group registrations of “databases that predominantly consist of
photographs" or “published photographs."
Getty Images has announced that as of April 1, 2011 they will have a new
contributor agreement. For American photographers the date may have
some relevance. We call it April Fools day and it is usually celebrated
with practical jokes and hoaxes on family, friends and work associates.
However,Getty’s move may not be a joke.
Getty’s move to sell some of its royalty-free images on both
www.gettyimages.com and www.istockphoto.com is presenting some problems
in pricing usages and is sure to drive more Getty Images customers to
iStockphoto.
Many Western stock photographers are beginning to wonder if it isn’t
time to explore the potentials of the Chinese market. I asked Jerome
Lacrosniere, CEO of ImagineChina in Shanghai for some information about
the state of the Chinese stock photo industry.
Picnache.com has put together a list of the top 1000 keywords used by customers to search for stock photos in the last 6 months to 2
years. This dataset was compiled from about 500,000 searches and
prioritized according to which words were used most frequently.
Here are links to a few items I spotted on the Internet that are worth reading. They include observations on the Getty Images search engine, World Assignment photographers and Should I Work For Free.
iStockphoto has added a new collection of “editorial use only” stock
images to www.istockphoto.com. These images are intended for use by news
outlets, publishers, magazines, bloggers and presenters as a
descriptive visual reference to a product, place, event or concept.
For those who would like background on the stock photo industry, its
history and trends this story provides links to a number of stories on
PhotoLicensingOptions.com that readers may want to review.
This story provides links to a series of articles that include the results of a photographer income survey, analysis of the sales of microstock photographers, the size of the market for stock photography and other data useful to understanding stock photo industry trends.
The concept of royalty-free stock photography was invented in the early
1990s because many picture buyers felt that it was unfair for image
prices to be based on how the image would be used rather than their cost
to produce. The pay-based-on-use system (rights-managed wasn’t even a
term used at that time) was a particular problem for picture buyers
because they needed to track future use of any image they purchased to
make sure the use wasn’t exceeding the license. Customers wanted a way
to avoid this extra administrative hassle.
The stock photo industry has evolved in many interesting ways in the
last 50 years. This story looks at the changes from mostly editorial rights-managed, to the 1976 copyright law change, to the print catalog era, to CD-rom delivered royalty-free, to the Internet and finally to microstock. We identify some of the key drivers of these changes and show how some unrelated developments made the changes inevitable.
Alamy has reported that in the last eight weeks it has added a record
1.2 million images to its collection which now exceeds 22 million
images. In January alone the collection grew by 620,000 images.
A year ago
the company had in the range of 18 million images on its site.
Over 20,000 photographers and 500 picture agencies have contributed mages to the
Alamy.com site.
If you license rights to your photos for textbook use then here are a few articles you should read.
For over 30 years Tom Grill has been teaching photographers how to take
marketable stock shots. In mid-November last year he decided to take at
least one stock photo a day for a year and post them to
this blog.
These are not images from his normal, planned stock shoots. Rather they
are grab shots from things he is exposed to daily. Some will be taken
while he is on one of his normal shoots, but all the shots will only be
happenstance, not anything planned in advance as part of his regular
shoots. He is also supplying information about the techniques used to
create some of the images.