According to the latest figures ZenithOptimedia, global ad spending will decline by 6.9% in 2009 compared to last year. The largest losses will be in emerging Central and Eastern European markets, which will drop by 13.9%. North America is projected to decline by 8.3%, with the United States losing 8.7%, more than both regional and global averages. Western Europe's projected ad-spend decline is 6.7%.
The search leader continued expanding its image-related offerings with Similar Images, an experimental search feature from Google Labs. While Google did not pioneer the underlying image-recognition technology or image-to-image searches, the company’s increasing attention to all things visual offers insight into online image-consumption trends. For stock producers and marketers, this foreshadows both opportunities and challenges.
Injecting a little fun into the upcoming annual BAPLA Picture Buyers' Fair in London, TopFoto has designed its PBF stand to look like a bar. The company will also giving away bottles of William Wilberforce Freedom Ale.
PantherMedia's proposed credits-per-day subscription plan is structured so customers who need larger files for print uses pay more reasonable prices for their images than is the case with existing subscription and microstock plans.
Given the rapidly changing trends in the stock photo industry, photographers need to pay close attention to the duration of new contracts they are being asked to sign.
Cambridge, U.K.-based technology company Imense has launched Annotator, which it says is the first semi-automatic tool that can reduce keywording time by a factor of 4, while providing more commercially relevant keywords.
The number of traditionally priced transactions is declining, as is the average price per image.
Selling Stock estimates that the Americas are responsible for 41% of global stock-licensing revenue, while 49% come from Europe, the Middle East and the Arab world, and the final 10% from the Asia Pacific region.
Munich-based PantherMedia, which has just crossed the 1-millionth-image benchmark, is inviting photographers to participate in its newly introduced microstock and opt-in subscription offerings.
Bill Gates-owned Corbis has announced that it once again represents celebrity photography by Don Flood and Jill Greenberg. The addition strengthens the Corbis Outline celebrity offering.
U.K. technology company Capture will debut its image pre-flight utility Greenlight to the U.S. market at this weekend's PACA Symposium in Chicago. The first version of Greenlight has been designed primarily to enable agencies to quickly analyze image files and generate a report of common errors.
Jack Hollingsworth, one of the most prolific stock shooters of the last couple decades, has announced a three-day educational program called Photographer Makeover. The first of probably many seminars begins on June 1 in Austin, Texas.
How does the total 2008 editorial revenue of $700 million break down among breaking news, editorial features and books? And what portion of this revenue goes to large editorial suppliers operating outside the stock industry?
Commercial stock accounts for 56% of total revenues generated by licensing still images. Editorial, specifically celebrity imagery, is the one traditional growth segment, while the sales of microstock and subscription products now nearly equal revenues generated by traditional royalty-free images.
Appropriation artist Richard Prince has responded to a suit filed by French photographer Patrick Cariou with, unsurprisingly, a fair-use defense.