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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.
Are you tired of ads for things you absolutely don’t want of need interrupting your favorite news or entertainment TV shows? Almost one-third of every hour is taken up with ads. When you’re trying to read something online do the pop-up ads that are often very difficult to get rid of interrupt your reading and train of thought? Many in the general population want to get rid of these annoyance, but how is that likely to affect revenue for image producers?
Be sure to read Paul Melcher’s story in his
Kaptur Magazine about where image recognition software is headed.
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.
According to Meredith Kopit Levien, New York Times EVP of Advertising, speaking to OMMA SXSW in Austin, TX recently, “Last year the Times did about $180 million in digital advertising and almost that much in digital subscriptions. That puts us at a digital business that’s in the $350 million range."
Many photographers who thought they were being good Net Citizens when they made their images available with Creative Commons Licenses and allowed anyone to use the images for free have recently received some nasty shocks. Microsoft and Flickr have decided to use those images to enrich themselves. Forget about any benefit to the creator.
Shutterstock has announced a partnership between
WIX and its
Bigstock brand. Wix is a website creation tool designed for small businesses with 56 million users in 190 countries. Wix offers a “drag n' drop website building platform with HTML5 capabilities, 100s of designer made templates, top grade hosting, innovative Apps and tons of features for free.”
Computerworld reports that following a
lawsuit from Getty Images, Microsoft has temporarily removed the beta of the
Bing Image Widget from its website. However, for those people who uploaded the Widget prior to the Getty challenge the Widget still works.
Reuters reports that Getty Images claimed in a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York on Thursday that a new Microsoft product that allows website publishers to embed digital photographs on their sites is a “massive infringement” of copyrighted images.
With its new Image Embed tool
Bing is making free use of photos to promote and advertise its site. See the little Bing logo at the bottom left of each picture display. Bing is now able to advertise its brand, free of charge, on an other site that uses Image Embed.
One Degree, (
www.onedegree.co) (that's .co not .com) a new app designed to help those who need images find a photographer was launched recently. There are some interesting ideas behind this app, but in its current form it is probably something professional photographers will want to avoid.
On July 19, 2014 the TV channel France24 broadcasted a comprehensive 11 minute report on "Why Google is annoying/ Pourquoi Google nous agace." This report has been translated into English and can be found
here.
Back in February European Union antitrust regulators reached a
settlement with Google in an unfair competition investigation that had been going on since 2010.
Fresh, brash and outspoken. With their uninhibited photographic style and unbridled joy of experimentation, food bloggers have conquered a huge fan community on the internet. No wonder even the traditional media are rolling out the red carpet for the new stars. Food bloggers get their own columns, produce cookbook best-sellers and operate cooking shows for an audience of millions. The most interesting among them are now at the center of a new blog where the food image agency
StockFood once again lives up to its reputation as a trendsetter.
In May AdAge reported that the New York based social media agency
Laundry Service has discovered that Instagram photos perform better than more professionally shot photos. The agency found that while regular photos achieved 2.35% click-through rate, Instagram photos achieved an 8% click-through. And even better, Instagram photos led to a 25% increase in conversion rate.
Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins Investor, recently released her 2014 Internet Trends report. Among her findings were that 1.8+ billion photos are uploaded and shared each day. This is up 50% from 1.2 billion in 2013. The biggest numbers are found on WhatsApp and Snapchat. Many uploaders also use Facebook, Instagram and Flickr.
Blend Images and
Danita Delimont Stock Photography have recently joined the
IMGembed community. IMGembed went live in March 2013 and currently has millions of images in its collection. Previously, we have reported on
Getty’s embedding strategy and PressFoto’s
ImageRent. IMGembed offers another approach to the pay-per-view strategy for monetizing images.
Time Warner will spin-off Time Inc. on May 23, 2014. Shareholders of record at 5:00 p.m. on that date will receive one share of Time Inc. common stock for every eight shares of Time Warner common stock. For more details about the new company check out the SEC's
Preliminary Information Statement of Time, Inc.
It’s No Longer About The Image. It’s About The Data That Can Be Mined Using Images. The value of images is declining. The value of data that can be mined by tracking image use is increasing.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker and itself a massive consumer of image content for its products and services, has taken the bold step of promoting the theft of images online. Through its newly revamped Office product, Microsoft is replacing an image search functionality – one that routed the user to vetted sources for searching, transacting and integrating content into their online projects – with a general
Bing search. While Microsoft is certainly free to remove one piece of Office functionality and push users onto the Bing platform, the methods of how it is doing so underscores a blatant disregard of intellectual property.
In business it often helps to try to walk in your customer’s shoes. The following is a situation that developed when a busy designer was trying to give his customer a quality product on a tight deadline (aren’t all deadlines tight these days), and keep the cost of the project reasonable and within the customer’s budget.
BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, has agreed a global five-year partnership with
Getty Images, in which Getty Images will represent BBC Motion Gallery, BBC Worldwide’s prestigious video clip sales business. The agreement will see the world-renowned BBC Motion Gallery brand continue, with Getty Images as the exclusive global distributor.
Does anyone other than photographers think that photographers should be compensated with more than a credit for the use of their images? The response photographer Kristen Pierson received from the publisher of the Warwick, RI Beacon displays a common attitude, not just of the average consumer, but of many professionals and commercial users who should be licensing rights to the images they use.
Frans Lemmens has a problem. One of his clients operates an iPad travel magazine called TRVL Magazine. They use a lot of his images. They encourage readers to share the images found in their app on Facebook. Frankly, readers would probably do this anyway whether they are encouraged to do so, or not. Also, in order to market their app this activity is probably critical for TRVL.
The MAGNA GLOBAL Advertising Forecast released early this year reported that the Global advertising spend in 2012 was $495 billion up 3.8% from $479.9 in 2011. But, in 2013 newspaper and magazine ad revenues are expected to fall. The U.S. was the largest market with $153 billion in revenues in 2012. Japan, China, Germany and the UK complete the top five.