Storyblocks, formerly Videoblocks will generate about $30 million from licensing stock imagery in 2017. Currently, they have a little over 200,000 subscription customers who pay $149 a year for unlimited access to about 115,000 video clips. They also offer about 200,000 photos, 200,000 vectors and other illustrations and 100,000 pieces of music for a separate subscription price.
Stocktrek Images has revamped its website with the emphasis on a new appearance to enhance its customer interaction. With the client's approach to licensing images changing significantly in the past years, Stocktrek has developed a new website to incorporate the requirements and demands of today's clients.
Hemis.fr, an independent photography agency founded in France in 2004 has launched a new website with a trendy design. The site has a high speed search engine that is fully responsive to Smartphone and Touch pad search. The site is searchable in both French and English.
20/20 Software, a leading provider of multi-media websites and image/business management software to media libraries, museums, corporations, institutions, and newspapers, has outlined some of the newest tools it offers for working with footage.
Alamy has launched a
Spanish language version of its customer website with additional language sites for Italian, French and Portuguese-speaking countries scheduled to launch at a later date.
The following are links to stories that deal with stock photo pricing trends. Probably the biggest problem the industry has faced in recent years has been the steady decline in prices for the use of stock images. This has led to a dramatic shift in how stock images are produced and who produces them. It is harder to tell how this has affected the quality of the offering, but the huge oversupply (compared to demand) has made it more difficult for customers to find the images they need.
Stock photo customers have a big problem. They need more time and they need to be able to operate more efficiently. Stock photo sellers could help. Check out how.
A bipartisan solution to help artists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, songwriters, authors and other creators protect their life’s work from unauthorized reproduction has been introduced by U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries (NY-08), a Democrat, and U.S. Representative Tom Marino (PA-10), a Republican, both members of the members of the House Judiciary Committee.
Have your images that sold a year or two ago sold again recently? If not, it may be because the images are now buried so deep in the search return order that customers no longer see them.
Photographers placing images with agents that seek to license uses at higher prices ($100 or more), and generate a lot of their sales via distributors, need to think hard about whether such an approach is in their best economic interest.
One of the biggest problems in the photo world today is that we are being buried in photos. InfoTrend estimates that consumers will take 1.2 trillion photos worldwide in 2017. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is 9%. This year 3,934,500,000,000 will be stored on hard drives and other formats worldwide.
In July 2016
Alamy published an infographic with a timeline for the history of stock photography. They have just released an updated version with 10 new milestones based on comments they received from the public. You can find the updated timeline
here.
This story is
FREE. Feel free to pass it along to anyone interested in licensing their work as stock photography. On October 23rd at the DMLA 2017 Conference in New York there will be a panel discussion on Stock Photo Prices and whether there is anything that can be done to raise them -- even slightly. I will moderate the discussion.
In a speech at PhotoPlus Expo in 1998 Jonathan Klein told the stock photography community, “We also know that the stock photography industry has not historically focused on the needs of customers and, frankly, needs to in order to SURVIVE!, That is where we are now.” Getty Images developed a strategy that was totally focuses on "the customer," but it hasn't necessarily worked out.
Both Shutterstock and Adobe Stock have announced that users of
Google Slides can now access their collections directly. This could result in more image uses for photographers with images in both collections.
Adobe has announced that Santiago Lyon has joined
Adobe Stock as the first director of editorial content. In this newly created role, Santiago will lead Adobe Stock’s editorial content strategy and collection, working with world-class photojournalists, documentary photographers, editorial providers and media.
Effective October 1, 2017 a new French law obliges clients who use commercial images in France to disclose whether the body shape of a model has been retouched to make the individual look thinner or larger.
Contributors report that Getty Images believes there is still a demand for RM imagery. However, they are seeing fewer high quality submissions on a consistent basis, despite the fact that they have many more RM contributors than was once the case. The company is trying to encourage more production by posting increasingly frequent shoot briefs on the Getty contributor website.
Videoblock has rebranded itself as
Storyblocks. The existing video and audio libraries are being maintained as separate subsites:
Videoblocks by Storyblocks and
Audioblocks by Storybloacks. (Each offering requires a separate subscription.) The former GraphicStock library is now part of Storyblocks.
Shutterstock, Inc. has launched its
Flashstock business as
Shutterstock Custom, a proprietary platform that provides an efficient and innovative way for its 1.7 million customers to create branded content.
Shutterstock, Inc. has updated its custom-built plugins to more fully integrate with Adobe’s Creative Cloud®, adding compatibility directly within the Adobe Premiere Pro®, Adobe Illustrator®, and Adobe InDesign® applications. This is the first time Shutterstock has made its high quality video collection of 8 million clips available through a plugin, giving amateur filmmakers and veteran film editors another powerful tool at their disposal within Premiere Pro®.
The big question for the industry is, “Why would customers agree to pay slightly higher prices?”
Everyone seems to believe that the only way to get, or keep, customers is to constantly give them lower and lower prices. I think there are a couple other things customers want:
(1) better quality and
(2) the ability to find what they need quickly. The industry is missing out on both these levels.
How much would we have to raise prices to begin improving the pricing situation?
Not all that much. Many image creators would like to see the industry return to the much higher prices of old. While it is easy to justify those former prices based on the cost of production and the value the customer receives from using the image, a return to such prices is not likely to happen. On the other hand, if a strategy could be developed that would increase prices by just a small amount, it could begin to move the industry in the right direction.
According to sources
Getty Images has reduced the royalty share of sales for all commercial RF collections supplied by agencies and distributors to
15% of the gross sale price.
Getty has sent its photographers a new Custom Content assignment for T-Mobile. “T-Mobile is looking for photography shot on mobile phones* that is the total opposite of stock images.” (*The images don’t actually have to shot with a mobile phone, and most of those submitted probably won’t be.)