Traditional photographers argue that it is impossible to make money by licensing their images at microstock prices. They say volumes will never make up the difference. Despite that argument, Getty Images is licensing more and more images at Premium Access prices, which are not all that far away from what microstock sellers charge. Getty's volumes are not making up the difference for traditional photographers, but that is because Getty is selling these images to volume customers who used to pay traditional prices---not reaching the new customer base that microstock addresses.
A look at Alamy revenues gives a clear indication as to why the company felt it had to attempt to do something to recover some of their lost sales in the U.K.
Alamy has informed its contributors that this quarter it is seeing sales declines in sales to newspaper customers, ranging from 30% to 70% since last year. Major U.K. papers are going through a painful transition period exacerbated by the recession.
Previous articles in this series have addressed the long tail as it relates to stock photography, and why it is an increasingly important concept to understand for those who want to maximize earning. Constantly adding to your customer base, rather than earning more from existing customers, is at the core of the long-tail theory.
Since Getty Images announced that the first 4,280 Flickr images have been added to its collection, there has been quite a bit of speculation about how this will benefit the company.
As a result of the publicity surrounding Shepard Fairey's use of an Associated Press photograph, taken by Mannie Garcia, as reference for his very successful Obama Hope poster, a university inquired into standard stock-industry practices for the use of photographs as reference for fine or street art.
The Kelsey Group of BIA Advisory Services forecasts a reduction in local advertising spending in the U.S. through 2013. Kelsey also projects an increasing shift towards digital media.
"I am writing to you today with some unpleasant news," begins an internal email from Getty Images chief executive officer Jonathan Klein. "We have tried very hard to avoid lay offs during the continued turmoil in the world's economy. However, it is now clear that we have no alternative."
Canada's Torstar Syndication Services has launched GetStock.com, claiming that its 10-million-image inventory makes it the largest stock agency in Canada. The imagery comes from Alamy Images, Aurora Photos, TopFoto, IPNstock and Toronto Star Photos, among 21 agency-suppliers and an additional 40 individual photographers.
The long-tail theory is indeed about inventory and not pricing. Andersons theory is based on giving away things that are abundant in order to get customers' attention and draw them back to buy scarce, unique and relatively controlled items. That does not work in stock photography, where there is no way to determine what is abundant and what is scarce in advance. Still, the long tail exists in stock licensing, and it is entirely the domain of microstock companies, making the discussion inextricably tied to how images are priced.
The European Council-funded Metadata Image Library Exploitation Project will hold its final international conference on June 3, during the Dresden-based annual congress of the Coordination of European Picture Agencies. The MILE Project event, "Know Your Rights: How to Cope with Image Rights," will be free to CEPIC attendees and carry a 15 Euro cover charge for others.
"The long tail" is a phrase first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004
Wired magazine article. The concept describes a new way to look at markets and is illustrative of the business strategy of Internet companies, including Amazon.com and Netflix, that 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 this series of articles,
Selling Stock will examine how the long-tail strategy applies to the stock-photo industry.
The Copyright Registry has announced that members in good standing of the American Society of Media Photographers are now eligible for free services. The Registry, which beta-launched in 2008 in anticipation of the passage of an orphan-works legislation in the U.S., offers a set of free services; however, registering as a creator carries annual fees, as do several other services.
Founded in 2006, Quantcast bills itself as "a new breed of audience [measurement] service, focused on helping buyers and sellers quantify the real-time characteristics of digital media consumers." The company's statistics on several leading stock-licensing companies provide a new dimension of information on image buyers.
A survey on current and future media, conducted by The Rosen Group, has revealed that the majority of American readers still read print publications and pay for subscriptions. Nearly half of the survey respondents think this will still be the case in 10 years.
Los Angeles-based Footagehead, a royalty-free division of FootageBank HD that recently launched to focus on the online and mobile markets, has made a commitment to donate a portion of its revenues to hunger relief.
San Francisco-based Cutcaster has augmented its micro-payment pay-as-you-go system with credits and corporate accounts.
The Flickr Collection, which
was first announced by Getty Images and Flickr parent Yahoo! in early July 2009, is now available for commercial licensing exclusively through gettyimages.com.
Microstock subscription leader Shutterstock has extended footage subscriptions from 30 days to full year without raising prices. The company has also announced a new low-resolution video product, confirming recent reports of recessionary pressure on stock footage.
A survey conducted by The British Photographic Council revealed a rise in client requests for copyright or very broad rights-transfers when commissioning or buying images, without a corresponding increase in fees. The pressure on photographers to accept these conditions has also increased, with photographers reporting significant losses of income to this practice. Though this survey was limited to the U.K., the wealth of anecdotal evidence, online discussions and media coverage suggests that the situation is much the same in most markets—and is increasingly prevalent in light of current economic conditions.
"
Getty Sweeps POY" of March 9 misstated the number of awards Getty Images' photographers won at two recent competitions. Getty photographers won not 19 but 17 Pictures of the Year awards and not one but two World Press Photo awards. The original story was revised on March 10.
The Tasini case has not reached a final resolution in 16 years of litigation and negotiations. In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided that a group of publishers infringed on the copyrights of freelance writers by digitizing and redistributing their contributions. However, not all plaintiffs in the Tasini v. New York Times had registered copyrights in their works. For this reason, a New York Court of Appeals declined to approve a negotiated settlement between writers and publishers, moving the case back to the Supreme Court level.