Last week, image-tracking company PicScout announced the appointment of industry analyst Dan Heller as vice president of marketing. The relationship did not last. On Thursday, PicScout chief executive officer Offir Gutelzon said "the fit just isn't right" in a short update posted in the press releases section of the company's Web site.
Keeping up with Jack Hollingsworth is a challenge. In the middle of April, he announced the three-day Photographer Makeover conference, originally scheduled for June 1. This event has since been cancelled due to lack of interest, but never discouraged, Hollingsworth has launched a new series of interactive online conversations called toginars at the much more reasonable price point of $19.99 each.
Stock-industry umbrella group Coordination of European Picture Agencies Press Stock Heritage has become a member of the Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace, an group of organizations and businesses dedicated to promoting sustainable growth of the Internet consistent with the rule of law. CEPIC says the move furthers its campaign for protection of intellectual property online.
Global ImageWorks, a boutique New Jersey stock-footage company, has made its collection available through stock-footage search engine and database aggregator Footage.net.
The Long Tail describes a new way of looking at, and approaching, markets in the Web 2.0 environment. The term was first coined by Chris Anderson in a Wired magazine article in October 2004. It is illustrative of the business strategy of Internet companies like Amazon.com and Netflix which sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities, to a very large base of customers. This buying pattern creates what is called a "power law distribution curve" or long tail.
In addition to credits-based pricing, traditional sellers need to consider several technological adaptations. These include letting customers organize search results, helping photographers with research, providing a more varied offering and speeding up royalty payments.
Jerry Tavin of IC Worldwide and Deborah Free of Picturehouse Marketing have launched an international non-profit educational foundation. The Young Photographers Alliance will focus on bringing disadvantaged students opportunities for advancement in photography.
The third International Photo Metadata Conference will take place on June 4, during the annual gathering of Coordination of European Picture Agencies Press Stock Heritage in Dresden. This year, the scope of discussion extends to multimedia, particularly video metadata.
The second insight came as I was reading the business section of the
Washington Post and noticed that a photo used as part of the lead
illustration was credited to iStockphoto. This got me thinking. In the
past I’ve seen a lot of photos in the Post credited to Photodisc. Now
we may be seeing the beginning of a move from the more pricey Photodisc
images to those of iStockphoto.
The Stock Artists Alliance has unveiled PhotoMetadata.org, the Web site of the SAA Metadata Project financed by a grant from the U.S. Library of Congress. The Web site is supported by the getMETAsmart tour of events, which kick off this week in Dallas and will travel through the country.
Microstock sellers have introduced a number of strategies that traditional agencies and distributors should be considering, if not rushing to adopt. One of these is pricing based on credits, which transfers money to the seller before product delivery, makes it simpler to conduct small transactions, appears simple to the buyer and gives the seller more flexibility in adjusting prices.
Recently I was trying to explain the stock photo business to an investment
analyst and making the point that there comes a time when a
photographer can no longer afford to produce stock images because his
costs are greater than his income. The analyst was under the impression that a “stock
photo” was one that had been produced, and paid for, while the
photographer was on assignment for someone else. Thus the image was
“expense free” to the creator. And, in theory, the only “additional
costs” the photographer might have to make the image available for
secondary licensing would be the cost of packing it up for shipping it
to his stock agency.
As the stock industry changes, traditional stock agencies and distributors are losing ground because they have failed to adopt new technological efficiencies. Granted, constantly keeping up with the latest technological changes can be expensive, and most agencies have already invested huge amounts to get where they are today. But, microstock sellers have introduced a number of strategies that traditional agencies and distributors should be considering – if not rushing to adopt.
Many experienced professional photographers have been watching image prices fall but just cannot bring themselves to license their images for $1. Yet the truth is that at today's microstock prices, it does not take all that many sales to match what a photographer would earn from a single rights-managed sale, and there are a currently a lot more microstock sales than rights-managed ones.
Those who think microstock is under-priced will be chagrined at today's announcement of Fotolia's latest offering. Today, the New York-based microstock announced the launch of PhotoXpress, an online stock-image bank offering visitors a collection of 350,000 images free of charge.
Former Getty Images chief financial officer Lawrence Gould and vice president of e-commerce Tom Donnelly have launched their second venture: microstock business Vivozoom. The duo launched royalty-free stock business ImagePick in 2007. The differentiating factor is that Vivozoom is the only microstock Web site that warrants the use of its imagery---to the tune of committing to cover damages and costs of up to $25,000.
The Washington Post reports that it is taking an average of 18 months for hard-copy copyright-registration applications to be cleared since the U.S. Copyright Office implemented its new electronic application system last July. It takes six months to process an electronic application, despite the fact that the system was supposed to be able to do it in one month.
The Sygma Preservation and Access Facility opened in France last Friday, after more than five years of work by its owner Corbis. Built by management company Locarchives, the facility houses 50 million negatives, printes, transparencies and contact prints.