As I pointed out in my
iStock article on Monday more and more of the top image creators are cutting back on production and turning to other ways to earn a living. It’s not only microstock photographers who are pulling back, those selling RM and traditional RF are in even greater retreat. See
this article
A couple weeks ago, I was interviewed by an NPR writer for a story about stock photography. The first question out of the box was “Why aren’t the stock agencies doing a better job of showing diversity?” I wasn’t sure how to answer that question because I felt that for a long time photographers have been pushed to show more diversity and there must be a lot of such pictures in the stock agency collections.
The major agencies talk about how important their DATA is and how it has changed the industry. They argue that the company with the most and best data will be the winner. But I don’t think they are really looking at much of the data they have collected – or looking at it in the right way.
iStock single image downloads appear to have continued to decline in the last half of 2016. Unfortunately, five of the 430 contributors that we tracked in the past have now disappeared. In the last report these contributors represented 544,000 total career downloads. It is unclear whether they have withdrawn their collections, or repurposed them under another brand that I am no longer able to track.
The results of the VisualSteam’s Annual Survey of Art Buyers has just been released. The 19-page report is packed with useful information that image creators and stock photo sellers need to know. Anyone trying to earn a living producing stock images should read this report. It is well worth the $49.95 fee
The Getty Creative collection has grown by 4% in 4 months and now stands at 17,376,859 images. At that rate the collection size will be about 19,462,082 images by the end of 2017. In August 38% of the collection was RM images. Today 36.8% of the images are RM. At this rate of decline less than one-third of the images will be RM by the end of 2017. A huge percentage of these RM images are supplied by
image partner agencies that only, or predominately, represent RM images
iStock photographers may want to use downtime over the Christmas and New Year holidays to prepare and upload images that are in the photographer’s queue for their eventual upload to iStock. The Unification of the upload system for both the Getty Images and iStock sites is now scheduled to go into effect on February 1, 2017. There are plans to change the keyword vocabulary for both sites over to the Getty vocabulary, which might mean that after that time the keywords the photographer submits may no longer be included in the list of words attached to the image.
How many customers make maximum use of their subscriptions? Most businesses that offer subscriptions offer their customers much more than they can ever use for one fixed price. Some customers like this because they know exactly what their monthly costs will be regardless of how much they use the service.
Shutterstock supplies very little information about their Enterprise customers and how Enterprise sales work. Yet it is an extremely important segment of their business and critical to understanding the company’s potential for future growth. At the end of Q3 2016 Shutterstock had 35,000 Enterprise customers up from 24,000 at the beginning of the year, or about a 46% increase in 9 months. How much of that 46% is real growth?
Visual China Group the company that
acquired Corbis in January 2016 has seen a more than 50% decline in value as an investment since the purchase and a 20% decline in the last month. VCG is a publicly traded company on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
A week after announcing that it had
acquired 86.6 percent of Framepool, Broadside Enterprises, Inc. (also known as Emaji) has announced that Frampool AG has entered into an agreement with
ImagineChina, one of the largest photo and video agencies in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
It is almost that time of year (early January) when I publish one of my semi-annual reports on iStock sales trends. A reader asked me recently to explain how I get access to the information in these reports. I'll explain the process I go through in this report.
I was recently asked by an African American stock photo customer why the stock photo industry doesn’t do a better job of showing diversity. I was surprised by the question and didn’t know how to answer.
After my story last week on “
High Level Thoughts On The Stock Industry” John Fowler asked, “Have you found any encouraging information at all from any RM photographers? There must be some folks doing something that works for them.”
Last July, photographer Carol Highsmith filed a
copyright infringement lawsuit against Getty Images for $1 billion after discovering that Getty and its subsidiaries had been charging customers fees to license her images of Americana.
According to a document filed with Companies House in the U.K. (see
here) it appears that Rex Features Limited (owned by Shutterstock) lent
Silverhub Media the money necessary to purchase
Splash. In return Rex Features has received very extensive control over the activities of Silverhub with regard to certain unspecified assets.
I was asked recently if I am optimistic that Shutterstock will maintain its momentum in 2017? The short answer is YES, I believe Shuttrstock’s 2017 growth will continue on the same track as it has in the last two years. In 2014 revenue growth was
39%. In 2015 it was
30% and in 2016 it is expected to be around
18%. I expect the company will continue to maintain its
DOWNWARD trend.
Pond5 has announced the launch of its new
Extended Licenses offering some of the highest levels of coverage, protection, and flexibility in the industry.
An investment portfolio manager recently asked me to spend five minutes giving my “high-level thoughts on the (stock photo)
industry outlook, competitive dynamics and emerging trends.” I couldn’t do it in anywhere near five minutes. Here are my high-level thoughts.
Celebrity photo agency Splash News was sold to Corbis in 2011 and has now been acquired by
SilverHub Media. SilverHub Media recently did an
exclusive deal with Shutterstock for worldwide representation of the images in its collection. Thus, the Splash images should now be available through Shutterstock.
Footage.net, the stock, archival and news footage search engine, has announce that preview clips from the Sherman Grinberg Film Library are available for viewing through Footage.net.
Emaji, Inc. a publicly traded development stage company based in Irvine, CA has announced the acquisition of 86.6 percent of the outstanding shares of Framepool AG (
www.framepool.com), a leading distributor of stock footage with headquarters in Munich, Germany.
Many
Shutterstock investors see the steadily rising number of images in the Shutterstock collection and the number of new content creators being added each quarter and come to the conclusion that there is no problem on the supply side of the stock photo business. But, having more and more product is not enough. It needs to be the right product that fulfills the customer’s needs. And the right images need to be easy for each unique customer to find.
Bridgeman Images is proud and excited to have won the tender for the exclusive representation of the British Library content in the UK. Bridgeman Images has worked for the British Library for many years across all our offices. We are delighted to have been appointed for all commercial and editorial licensing with the exception of branded products and scholarly uses which will remain with the British Library.
Let’s see if we can sell a few images for less. Check out the offers from Deposit Photos, 500px, ImageSource and Dreamstime.