Stock
An increasing number of iStock’s most productive contributors seem to be pulling back on their production of new images. Of the 430 photographers and illustrators we have been tracking for more than four years only 34% have added more than 100 images to their collections in the last six months. That leaves two-thirds of this group of contributors who have added fewer than 100 images or removed images from the collection.
Since 2009 I have been tracking the image downloads of some of iStock’s leading contributors. Beginning in 2012 I increased the number of individuals tracked on a semi-annual basis to 430. While 430 is only a small percentage of iStock’s total contributors which number more than 100,000 combined this small group has at least 55,479,000 downloads and given the way iStock reports these numbers possibly as many as 58,416,000 downloads. I believe these numbers represent about one-third of all iStock downloads since the company’s founding in 2002.
Downloads for 430 of iStock’s leading contributors have continued their steady decline in the first half of 2015. Getty had hoped that the
launch of iStock subscriptions in April 2014 and the launch in September 2014 of a
single price for images, regardless of the file size needed, would turn iStock’s fortunes around and bring customers back from its competitors. Neither strategy seems to have worked.
Newzulu Limited (ASX: NWZ) is pleased to announce that it has entered a strategic partnership and content syndication agreement (Agreement) with
Alamy. Newzulu’s crowd-sourced news archive will be featured among Alamy’s collection of over 50 million images from which the platform has generated over US$154 million for its contributors in the last 15 years. Newzulu and Alamy will work together to generate revenue through the sale and licensing of Newzulu’s crowd-sourced content to Alamy’s editorial, creative and commercial clients worldwide.
Several of my readers have differing opinions with regard to the meaning of the term “no exchange of equity” as it appeared in Masterfile’s
May press release. I thought it meant that no money changed hands. I asked Steve Pigeon, CEO of Masterfile, for clarification.
Pond5 has re-launched its free Pond5 plugin for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC which gives editors instant access to nearly 5 million royalty-free video and audio clips.
Shutterstock, Inc. and
Penske Media Corporation (PMC) have agreed to form an alliance that will create and license entertainment and fashion images and videos to the world’s top media, publishing and creative companies. (Check out PMC
brands and
events.)
Thanks to
Adobe Stock gross microstock revenue will start to decline. Let me explain why. I estimate that about $143 million of
Shutterstock’s 2014 revenue came from subscription and that there were about 114 million subscription downloads. It all those customers were to switch to Adobe Stock they could probably get all the images they need for $43 million or less
and save $100 million annually. Check out the numbers.
Matt Munson, CEO of Twenty20, recently made the case for why User Generated Content (UGC) will be
The Death Of Stock Photos. He argued that “stock photos do not depict reality” and that “brands that use them risk coming off as generic and out-of-touch” with consumers.
Adobe has launched
[St] Adobe Stock as part of its Adobe Creative Cloud subscription offering. Creative Cloud customers are now able to launch Adobe Stock directly within CC desktop software such as Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop or After Effects, and add watermarked or licensed images to their Creative Cloud Libraries. This will allow them to access and work with images across multiple desktop tools.
Visual Connections has announced the dates for its October conference in New York. This year
Visual Connections New York 2015 will be on October 28th immediately following the
DMLA (formerly PACA) Annual Conference that runs from Sunday October 25 through Tuesday the 27th. And if that isn’t enough photo related events for you
PhotoPlus Expo will be October 22-24, 2015 at the Javits Convention Center.
Many traditional suppliers of stock image (those that have been in business 15, 20 years or more) need to give some thought to what the image producing crowd wants. They need to consider possible ways of adjusting their business model in order to meet some of the needs of these part-time image creators. And they need to recognize how these photographers may change the entire stock photography licensing business.
Masterfile Corporation (“MFC”) - a global licensor of premium stock images - has sold 100% of the shares of its European operations to Mediapro Mediamarketing GmbH of Vienna, Austria. The transaction which closed on April 30th includes Masterfile companies in France, Germany, Italy and the UK (collectively “Masterfile Europe”).
Stockmile promotes itself as offering “FREE images” and says it has become an excellent source of photography, vector graphics, illustrations, clipart, handpicked bundles, and more for personal and business use.
LookLagoon has launched a new website that features professional, high quality images of nature, wildlife, and landscapes. Individual photos are available under royalty-free licenses at prices that range from $3 to $10 depending on the file size of the photo purchased.
If the blogs are any indication more and more Shutterstock contributors seem to be complaining about declining revenue. While individual royalties may not have been as high as some would have liked, for several years they were at least going up steadily month to month to month, or compared to the same month a year earlier. Within the last year or so an increasing number of contributors are complaining about revenue stagnation or decline.
The launch of Windows 10 later this year could dramatically change the way people find pictures. On April 29th during the annual Microstock Build Developers Conference in San Francisco Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella described how Microsoft intends to (1) Build the Intelligent Cloud, (2) Reinvent productivity and business process and (3) Create more personal computing.
Shutterstock has reported $97.5 million in revenue for Q1 2015, a 34% increase over Q1 2015. There were 33.4 downloads for the quarter. About 28% percent of revenue for the quarter was paid out to contributors in royalties. The average price per download was $2.87 up from $2.68 in the previous quarter and a 17% increase compared to Q1 2015. There were 51.6 million images in the collection as of March 31, 2015 plus 2.6 million video clips. At the end of the quarter the company had 542 employees worldwide.?
In March,
Shutterstock began testing a new collection called
Premier Selects that is only available to Enterprise customers. For more about how it works check out
https://premier.shutterstock.com.
Pond5, has unveiled auto-tagging technology that they claim is the first of its kind in the stock media industry. Built with artificial intelligence, this pioneering feature automatically generates keywords for each photo and video uploaded to the Pond5 platform.
The U.S. Copyright Office has created a
Fair Use Index to assist creators and user in understanding what is considered “Fair Use.” Fair use is a longstanding and vital aspect of American copyright law. The goal of the Index is to make the principles and application of fair use more accessible and understandable by presenting a searchable database of court opinions.
Want to know more about the people who are producing images that are licensed at microstock and subscription prices?
Shutterstock Panorama is worth a look.
Recently, I was asked to comment on whether a photographer under exclusive contract with a stock agency that licensed the work as Rights Managed could simultaneously post the same images on one of a series of social media sites.
EyeEm has raised $18 million in new venture capital and currently has a community of 13 million photographers across 150 countries.
PetaPixel has a great story by 30-year-old Brendan van Son about how he has been supporting himself for the last 5 years as a travel photographer/journalist. During that time he has visited almost 80 countries. He provides a lot of very valuable detail for anyone thinking about travel photography as a career.