Stock
After a long quiet period as a blogger, Yuri Arcurs has decided that it is time to
comment on Adobe Stock. Yuri is generally considered the most successful microstock photographer. For many years he was a strong advocate of non-exclusive representation, and placed his images with virtually every microstock distributor.
Scott Braut, Head of Content at Adobe, is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA) (formerly PACA)
annual meeting in New York on Monday October 26, 2015 at 9:00am. Single session passes for the keynote address only are available for $65. For more information, see
here under events. (Hint: you may need to expand your window.)
Stock footage provider Dissolve has launched its premium royalty-free stock photography collection. It includes over 200,000 photos hand-picked from some of the world’s most acclaimed photography agencies, bringing the number of stock elements Dissolve licenses to over 1 million.
Recently, an investor looking for information about Shutterstock, Getty Images and Adobe asked me if the
stock photo market functions efficiently? Here’s what I told him.
Flickr is curating its collection of over 10 billion images and contacting selected photographers to determine if they want to participate in
Flickr Marketplace. The Marketplace is expected to prepare images for licensing by many of the industry's RF and Microstock stock photo distributors and to pay image creators 51% or what Flickr receives.
Recently, I received some second hand information about a major editorial agency in Europe that licensed about 70,000 in 2007. The number of images licensed was up to about 400,000 in 2014. Sounds great. But, here’s the rest of the story. The average price paid for each use in 2007 was about $167.00. The average price for each use in 2014 was a little over $12.00. Consequently, in spite of the almost 6 times growth in the number of images used in 2014 compared to 2007 the total revenue generated in 2014 was less than half that generated in 2007.
Adobe has made it easier for companies with multiple designers (a creative team) to access, manage and license images from one shared Adobe Stock subscription at no extra cost. The service called “Pooled Images” allows an unspecified number of team members to have access to the same Adobe Cloud account.
Stock footage provider
Dissolve has announced that it will add royalty-free photography to its creative offering on October 1 of this year. The move comes after two years of steady revenue growth and a burgeoning reputation in the footage-licensing market.
SuperStock has launched
Purestock, a subscription service that currently has about 3 million images, vectors and video clips. All the material on Purestock has been sourced from an entirely different set of contributors than those who supply Superstock and none of the Superstock images can be found on Purestock.
Adobe Stock has announced that it is running a promotion from September 1st to September 20th that will discount the cost of images by 50%. For this limited period single images purchased will cost $4.99 instead of $9.99. Normally the royalty percentage might be expected to be calculated on the lower price, but to the huge relief and appreciation of image creators Adobe has announced that “regardless of this discount occurring, your commission will be unaffected and you will continue to generate royalties at the current rate.”
Image users on the
MicrostockGroup website report that Shutterstock has “dropped the price of single On Demand sales from 2 for $29 to $9.99 for each image.”
Previously,
500PX had priced the images in its Marketplace at flat rates of $50 for web resolution, $250 for print resolution, and $750 for products for resale. Now they have introduced a second tier for images their editors deem of lower quality. The flat rate prices for images in this tier, called Core, are $35 for web resolution, $150 for print resolution, and $300 for products for resale. The prices for the first Prime tier will remain the same.
ZUMA Press Inc. (
www.zumapress.com), a leading visual media provider for the editorial community, has announced that it is now representing images from Fairfax Syndication (
www.fairfaxsyndication.com), the most comprehensive range of Australian content from a portfolio of over 300 publications and websites.
TechDirt reports that photographer Art Dragulis took a photo of
Swain’s Lock along the C&O canal in Maryland and uploaded it to Flickr. Roughly four years later, he discovered Kappa Map Group was using his photo for the cover of its Montgomery County, Maryland atlas. He sued for copyright infringement. And he LOST.
When Rights Mananged images are represented by multiple distributors it is possible for agencies that had nothing to do with an initial license to collect a fee for secondary uses. Consider this situation.
Shutterstock has won the most images race with
Alamy. Shutterstock now has more than 60 million royalty-free images in its collection in addition to 3 million video and music clips for a total of over 63 million pieces of content.
For new readers, or those who may have missed some of what I have written over the last few months, the following are a list of stories worth looking at to get a sense of where the industry is headed.
In the subscription environment customers pay for -- and the image creators receive a royalty for -- many images that are never used in any type of deliverable product. Nobody knows how many. Adobe Stock has changed all that. Now Adobe gives users
free use to any images considered during the users design and creative processes. Users only pay for the images that actually end up in a deliverable product. As a result, creators may begin to see a significant decline in the number of images licensed.
If you’re a videographer and have been discouraged by low prices and low royalties for your work it’s time to check out
Videoblocks. In April at the National Association of Broadcasters conference the company added a new feature when they launched the Marketplace section of their site. Customers must have an annual subscription in order to access Marketplace. When they choose any of the Marketplace clips they pay an additional $49 if it is HD or $199 for 4K.
Subscription licensing is in for some dramatic changes. We know that a significant number of the images subscription customers download are used in the designer’s “creative process,” but never find their way into a deliverable end product. Traditionally, creators of all the images downloaded – whether used in a deliverable product or not – have received an equal royalty share of the revenue paid for the subscriptions.
Adobe has hired Scott Braut, formerly VP of Content at Shutterstock. He has been named Head of Content and will drive the company’s overall content strategy and operations for
Creative Cloud. Adobe says content is a strategic area of growth and focus as it builds a growing, strategic creative marketplace. Scott has over 20 years of experience in content licensing, product development, eCommerce, and digital media.
Shutterstock has released a new
infographic on Design and Emotion in Stock Photography.
Hong Kong based
Super Image Market launched in November 2014 has established a simple “Pathway” for making images available to customers rather that operating as a traditional agency or distributor. Contributors establish the license fee for each of their images on an image-by-images basis. SIM pays them 80% of every sale. (During the initial launch period until the beginning of 2016 contributors will receive 100% of every sale.)
ImageBrief will be adding a stock search aspect called MyMarketplace in the near future. Right now they are reaching out to their premium photographers to collect images for this service. It is unclear when the actual service will be available for buyers to search, but it will add stock search to the briefing and finding a photographer they can hire directly features they already enjoy.
Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from investors trying to assess the stock photo industry growth potential and figure out where Shutterstock, Adobe and Getty Images are headed. In general here is what I’ve been telling them.