According to MediaPost’s IoT Daily, the Real Estate industry is moving into Virtual Reality. It may be an opportunity for stock photographers looking for a way to diversify their businesses.
Is Rights Managed(RM) licensing still a viable business model if your goal is to earn the maximum from your image collection? For most image creators the answer is clearly NO, particularly if part of the deal is to place your images exclusively with a single RM distributor.
Many of the non-sellers are very good images and would sell if customers only had a chance to see them. Back in January in as story entitled “
How Can Shutterstock Grow Revenue?” I outlined an idea for a two-tier pricing system that could not only work for Shutterstock, but many other distributors with large collections, and grow their revenue, even if there is no increase in the number of images downloaded.
I wrote about the huge percentage of images being produced by a relatively small number of
large production companies. Let me examine in some detail how one of these companies operates.
Photographee.eu is a microstock production company in Lodz, Poland. It is owned and operated by Kasia and Lech Bialasiewicz. Lodz is Poland’s 3rd largest city located right in the middle of the country. According to the
microstock.top list of Shutterstock suppliers photographee.eu is its 157th largest collection (out of over 190,000) with over 76,000 images at Shutterstock. These same images are marketed through multiple distributors.
Where are the major producers of stock images located? One might expect then to live in New York, London, Los Angeles and Berlin near where the major customers. We also must not forget San Francisco, Seattle and Calgary. Think again.
Adobe Stock has released a new Visual Trends report on
Purpose Over Beauty based on studying images in more than 75 million social engagements. They found that a lack of content that makes a powerful statement cannot be disguised by pretty packaging.
Blend has launched a promotion they call “
Monthly Free Shoot.” Each month they will offer their customers all the images from one entire Premium Royalty Free shoot for unlimited, absolutely FREE use, according to the standard RF license.
On May 9, EyeEm announced the launch of
EyeEm Videography Early Creator program a stock video platform that will use the same artificial intelligence that powers the still-image option to automatically keyword and organize videos. Current EyeEm users can upload clips between 5 and 40 seconds long as the platform prepares to completely integrate video into the EyeEm platform later this year. The company has already tested the system by invitation-only, with selected users submitting video in the aerial, urban, travel, food, and nature categories.
Pearson has begun “a strategic review” of its U.S. school publishing business which has been a drag on growth due to intense competition. Their goal is to speed up the company’s transition to a slimmer, more digital group. They intend to either sell, or seek a joint venture partner, for their schoolbooks division that represents about 8% or £360 ($466) million of the company’s business.
A meeting between Google Germany and the German Association of Picture Agencies,
BVPA is set for May 9, 2017 in Google’s Berlin office. On Thursday, May 11, 2017 the French trade association of "online content publishers",
GESTE, has called their members to a "working meeting" to look into the impact on traffic of the new features of Google Images on the websites of GESTE's members. Reports of both meetings will be available on
CEPIC.org.
Shutterstock makes a big deal about expanding its number of Enterprise customers. The last number they reported for Enterprise customers was 36,000 and just this week they said that Enterprise customers generate 32% of their revenue ($41.6 million for Q1 2017). Getty has an Enterprise program for its best customers which they call Premium Access. We have no idea how many customers fall into this category, but based on examining photographer sales reports my guess is that it is at least as many as Shutterstock, and probably more. A few years ago Getty said that any customer that spent $6,000 a year with them could qualify for Premium Access. I suspect that number is much lower now.
Jim Erickson has adopted a new marketing strategy for selling stock video. Instead of just offering clips he has created powerful, intimate and compelling prepackaged video stories, with narration, on themes related to healthcare and seniors. On his newly
re-launched site he has 15 stories. More stories and themes are expected soon.
Cultura RM is the first RM Collection to join
PantherMedia after the company announced its new
Rights Managed licensing strategy last month.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2017 revenue of $130.2 million. This revenue was up 12% from Q1 2016, but exactly the same as revenue in Q4 2016. Revenue per download increased 7% from $2.77 in Q1 2016 to about $2.96. Revenue per download in Q4 2016 was $3.02. At the end of the quarter there were 132 million images in the collection and 6.9 million video clips. This was up from 116.2 million images at the end of 2016.
The Mega Agency has signed an exclusive syndication partnership with the
New York Post, one of the most famous names in the American publishing world.
Here’s a way to raise prices without too much pain on anyone. Forget about raising prices on the top end sales. Instead, raise them a little bit at the bottom end. I recently examined licenses of some major suppliers to Getty Images and iStock. They received a royalty of less than $10 on 95% for the licenses. The average gross license fee of these lower end transactions was $5.12. Suppose instead of raising prices overall agencies add just a little bit to the gross license fee for their lowest priced licenses.
When most companies enter into negotiations with customers on the price of a product they usually know exactly what it costs them to product. In most cases they tend to not want to give away the product for less than it costs to produce. In the stock photo business usually have no idea what it costs to produce the product they are selling. They only know that they will have to give the creator a small percentage of what they are able to charge the customer. They have no idea if that is enough to cover the creators cost of production.
VideoBlocks is now accepting images for its new artist-friendly stock Photo Marketplace that will reward photo contributors with 100 percent commission from their sales. That 100% is $3.99 per still image download less third-party fees (like credit card charges) incurred when processing the transactions. Seeing this price many photographers may reject the offer out of hand. But, this is a very different business model from traditional stock agency businesses. Instead of paying a percentage royalty, contributors receive the full amount that the customer pays to use their work.
The Natural History Museum is showcasing its award-winning imagery including its
Wildlife of the Year content at fotofringe 2017 in London. NHM has chosen Capture Ltd as its partner in bringing the extraordinary collection to market.
If you think nothing ever happens in Congress, you’re wrong! On April 26th the U.S. House of Representatives passed
H.R. 1695, a bill that proposes making the Register of Copyrights a Presidential appointee, confirmed by the Senate. This is a first step toward modernizing the U.S. Copyright Office.
Panther Media has introduced a new approach to Rights Managed licensing and is opening the door to some really special photography. “We always had a clear position on the subject of rights managed licensing”, says Tomas Speight, CEO of Panther Media GmbH, “we would only ever do it if we could make it so easy it doesn’t need explaining”.
Adobe Stock has added new tools to make the image creation process easier and provide more efficient ways to upload and submit photo, video or other assets to Adobe Stock.
As of April 26, 2017 Alamy has made
contract changes that will be of interest to contributors. Most notably they will now pay contributors monthly whenever the Cleared Funds in the contributor’s account exceeds US $50. Previously, contributors were not paid until their Cleared Funds exceeded $US $75.
Here’s a simple thing every photographer and stock agent can do to protect their copyright.
Tell Congress to Vote “Yes” on H.R. 1695 – a bill to Modernize the U.S. Copyright office. It will take you less than 5 minutes. Go to
http://copyrightalliance.org/get-involved/add-your-voice/ . Click on “Take Action.” The Copyrightalliance will ask for your zip code and then your name and address. Once you’ve input that information your name will be added to a pre-written letter to your Congressperson.
It’s that simple!
Getty Images has been focusing on
growing its subscription business. The theory is that subscriptions will make customers more dependent on the company for their future needs. Currently, subscriptions represent 37% to 38% of Getty’s Creative Revenue and about 50% of Editorial Revenue.