SilverHub Media Group, which has become a vibrant new player in the editorial and assignments space since its launch in 2016, today announces that it has combined its editorial and assignment brand, SilverHub, with
Wonderhatch, a freshly launched photographic and film assignment business.
Blend Image, at one time the leading stock photo production company in North America, has announced to its image creators that it is “winding down” operations, “trying to negotiate deals that might provide members with the option to move their content without having to resubmit it,” and making plans to otherwise return content by October 2018.
Some
Masterfile contributors report that the
BIA restructuring of the company last year hasn’t solved Masterfile’s financial problems. Once again the company is falling behind on paying current royalties on new sales. I asked Steve Pigeon, CEO of Masterfile, for clarification and an explanation of the problems. The following are his answers.
Over a billion searches are conducted annually on Gettyimages.com. Getty often provides information on a few search terms that are being used more frequently this year than in the previous year. Recently, they provided the following list and the percentage increase in 2017 compared to 2016.
Getty Images has announced that it will be retiring Thinkstock.com in mid-2019 and taking steps to transition Thinkstock customers over to Getty Images and iStock. Getty says this move will make way for a newer and overall improved experience for Thinkstock customers on Getty Images and iStock.
The biggest problem for stock photographers today is not what to shoot, but how to get their photos near the top of the search return order. There are way too many images with the same keywords in all the major image collections. If your photo appears at the 4,746th spot in the search return, there is not much chance that any customer will ever see it -- let alone buy it. In fact, it has been determined that very few customers will look at more that 500 thumbnails before doing a different search or going somewhere else.
The major stock agencies seem to have reached a revenue plateau. It is time to consider a major change in marketing strategy. There is a strategy that should be relatively easy to implement which could result in higher, overall revenue from licensing the same number of images.
A visible watermark on your photos distracts from the impact a non-watermarked photo might have and may discourage people from using it. However, the real problem arises when the photo is actually licensed to a customer. Customers are only interested in using un-watermarked photos on their websites. When someone else sees the photo, and decides they would like to use it, they can easily copy and paste it to their own site.
Imatag offers photographers a better way to protect their images.
Dreamstime has filed a sweeping lawsuit against Google in California federal court alleging anticompetitive and discriminatory antitrust law violations as well as on-going breaches of contract, in order to use its monopoly position in online search to benefit its business partners –
Shutterstock, and of late
Getty Images – while leaving other stock photo sellers out in the cold.
Now that 500px has been
sold to VCG it appears that the 500px Marketplace is in transition. Major contributors to Marketplace are receiving notices that their agreements will be terminated effective June 27, 2018. It is not clear that Marketplace will cease all licensing of imagery at that time, but that appears to be the case.
When it comes to pursuing copyright infringements the biggest problem for photographers is not finding unauthorized uses, but finding too many. Photographers can do their own searches using
Google Images or
Tineye. Once a use is found, the photographer must search his/her records to determine if the image has ever been licensed, and if so, the terms of the license.
Given stock imagery oversupply, and ever falling prices, in order to justify continued production of the type of images customers want to buy, professional image creators need to find a way to reduce, or eliminate, some of the middleman cuts.
All photographers and copyright holders in the U.S. are urged to contact their Congressional Representative and ask them to
Vote in Favor of H.R. 3945 – a bill to create a Small Claims Court! The bill is likely to be out of the House Judiciary Committee mark-up and ready for a vote the week of April 9th. Your representative needs to hear from you now! Grass-root support is imperative!
I was talking to a photographer recently who has both RM and RF collections with Getty Images. The question he faces is whether to put new images into the RM or RF collections. Getty is pushing many of its photographers to move many of their images from RM to RF. Certainly, there is a much better chance that an image will get used if it is available for licensing as RF rather than RM. But, if the photographer’s goal is to maximize revenue, will images offered as RF earn as much revenue overall as those offered as RM?
If stock agencies really want to help their customers the most important thing they could do is make it possible for customers to search for just those image that have been previously “Used.” The biggest problems facing customers today is too much choice. Only a very small percentage of the images in the major agency collections are ever licensed, but customers have no way to distinguish the used images from those that have never been used.
One of the issues these videographers face is accurately tagging their video clips so they can be easily discovered by customers.
Microstocksolutions LLC has released its
VRmeta® app for iOS and Android that is designed to make it easier for videographers to accurately tag their digital video and 360°/ VR clips with time and location-based metadata.
I’ve been asked by an iStock exclusive contributor with more than 10,000 images in the collection if he should go non-exclusive and put his images with multiple agencies. This contributor has been regularly adding new images, but his gross revenue has been steadily declining month by month.
In
Aurora Photos latest newsletter to contributors President and Founder José Azel offered insights on the current state of the stock photo industry that are worth every stock photographer considering
The Football Association (FA), the governing body of English Football, has announced that it has awarded
SilverHub Media UK Ltd. (SilverHub) and
Shutterstock, Inc. an exclusive multi-year agreement to cover photography, distribution, and syndication services around key events and activities.
In a joint letter to the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee these trade organizations
CEPIC,
EFJ,
EVA, and
Pyramide Europe are calling European legislators to urgently correct the theory of law used by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) involving the use of framing/embedding technology on the Internet.
Masters of Photography (MoP) has announced the launch of its first online video masterclass with legendary photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Masters of Photography is a new and unique online learning platform which brings together some of the worlds most acclaimed photographers; the Masters. Students can enjoy an unprecedented insight into the way the Masters work during intimate lessons that capture their knowledge, ethos and philosophy.
Marketers are often told that the images they use in their marketing materials should be “unique” – whenever possible unique to their own business. In theory, that is one reason why so many experts claim that stock images are bad.
But, is that true? Do most image user follow this advice?
Shutterstock, has announced the expansion of its leadership team with three hires over the last six months. David Petts as Chief Revenue Officer, Lou Weiss joins the company as Chief Marketing Officer and Lisa Nadler, who joined the company in 2017, as Chief Human Resources Officer.
I have been looking at some of the Visual Trends 2018 reports. I hope they are helping customers because I don’t think they are doing much for image creators. Take
Getty’s trend report which evidently came out of the UK office. They say, “our Creative team analyzed 1 billion searches and 400 million imagery downloads on GettyImages.com, studied advertising trends, and examined pop culture shifts to predict three defining visual trends of 2018.
Trying to decide how much you should charge for your image can be a bit like asking “how long’s a piece of string?” At
Copytrack we help photographers get paid for uses of their work. When using us a photographer receives around 360 EURO ($443) for each one of their images successfully licensed.