In celebration of its 20th anniversary, Corbis has launched
Storied, a Web site and collection of culturally and historically significant images presented by notable personalities.
Notable industry analyst Dan Heller has joined technology company PicScout as vice president of marketing.
Pessimism over the future advertising plans of advertisers and media-buying executives appears to have bottomed out, or is at least leveling off, according to the most recent in a series of every-other-month surveys being conducted among ad executives following the economic meltdown.
Many traditional sellers want to believe that all microstock is doing is stealing traditional customers. However, there is a lot of evidence that disproves that theory.
Recently, I wrote an article comparing the advantages and disadvantages of various marketing strategies. I suggested that in terms of the number of images licensed for commercial uses "rights-managed licenses account for 3% of the total number of annual licenses. Traditional royalty-free images make up 6%; 20% goes to subscription services and 71% to microstock.”
How long will it take before traditional prices drop to microstock levels? If Alamy's sales are any indication, microstock sellers might not be cannibalizing traditional sales in terms of number of units licensed, but they certainly are cannibalizing revenue as traditional sellers fight to compete.
NBC Sports has selected Denver-based Thought Equity Motion as exclusive content-licensing agent. The is the second deal for the two companies; Thought Equity has been the exclusive rep NBC News content for the past two years.
It is difficult to estimate the number of image licensed annually using this model due to the lack of solid statistical information, which is more easily available with other licensing models. Nevertheless, I estimate the units licensed by subscription at 20% of the worldwide total. It could be higher. If so, the corresponding percentage that microstock makes up would be lower.
ImageSpan has signed its first international reseller agreement with French company DP SARL, which will offer LicenseStream Creator among the array of services it provides to professional photographers and companies.
Alamy's sales for the first quarter of 2009 were down. Yet despite the drop in revenue, the company actually licensed rights to more images in the first quarter of 2009 than during the same period of the previous year.
In terms of number of images licensed, microstock has been taking the industry by storm in the last few years. About 71% of images currently sold annually are licensed using the microstock model.
Traditional royalty-free images currently account for perhaps 6% of the images licensed worldwide. In relative terms, the number of images licensed using this model is declining most rapidly.
There are four basic strategies to consider when trying to decide how to market stock images. These are rights-managed, royalty-free, microstock and subscription. Most sellers favor one strategy and are often adamantly opposed to the others. Some, however, argue that there is merit in using several of these strategies. Starting with rights-managed licensing, this series of articles will analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each model.
American and French industry leaders have extended their collaboration for another three years, starting June 1. First formed in 2003, the partnership between Getty Images and Agence France-Presse focuses on providing media clients with a comprehensive editorial photography service.
Milan-based CuboImages has become the first independent agency to integrate the Cooliris technology into its Web site.
This week saw Getty Images' first public move to integrate the recently acquired Photos.com and Jupiterimages Unlimited into the proverbial bigger picture. The plan was to augment the inventories of the two Web sites with some iStockphoto content. Despite iStock's atypically great relationship with its community and seemingly reasonable contributor terms, contributors' vehement anti-subscription and anti-Getty Images feelings almost immediately derailed the plan, at least for the moment.
Young New York and Geneva-based stock-footage marketplace Pond5 has reached 150,000 broadcast quality, royalty-free HD and SD clips. It has also added a free weekly HD stock clip offer.