Imaginechina has been acquired by Bytedance, a digital tech company based in Beijing. The stock agency will continue to operate independently as a photo, video and commercial licensing agency serving editorial media, advertisers, creative agencies and brands, in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The needs of stock photo customers are changing. Successful agencies and distributors are adapting to those needs. Increasingly, customers are turning away from the large collections that purport to have everything. They are moving toward smaller, tightly curated collections that have a narrow focus in terms of the subject matter they represent.
Aurora Photos is one such agency.
Photographers who saw ImageBrief’s a recent
blog post about Pamela Olivera’s shot that was used worldwide in a Delta Airlines campaign have been asking why Delta would take such a risk on an unreleased picture. Other ImageBrief photographers have commented lately that ImageBrief does not determined whether or not they have releases on at least some of their accepted pictures. They seem to simply accept that every image submitted has all necessary releases.
Law360 reports that photographer
Carol M. Highsmith has filed a copyright infringement suit in New York against
Getty Images. Damages could be worth $1 billion.
Shutterstock investors often ask my opinion of stock photo industry’s future and the potential for Shutterstock’s growth. I tell them growth will slow significantly. Demand from customers willing to pay for the images they use will decline. Shutterstock has grabbed about all the customers they can from Getty so there is not much potential for growth there. Adobe will take a much bigger share of the market. Recently an investor asked me, “What would you do if you were Shutterstock?” Here’s what I told him.
Alamy has created a
infographic timeline showing the History of Stock Photography. They are actively seeking feedback and interaction on the infographic so that we can gather as much information as possible.
Dreamstime, has implemented a significant improvement to its website security by switching all site pages to "HTTPS" including the dedicated mobile website and the Dreamstime applications for iOS and Android.
Many RM photographers are opposed to Royalty Free because they believe that for a single low fee they would be giving away all future rights to use their images. That’s not quite true. Check out this story to see the real differences and understand how much you might really be giving away if you license your images as RF.
In response to changes in the industry and client requirements
Africa Media Online has introduced a new simplified pricing model. The South Africa based picture library has moved away from the complexities of narrowly defined RM usages and is now offering clients a simple procedure for establishing what an image costs.
Shutterstock has launched a new keyword suggestion tool for iPhone that leverages a combination of metadata (man) and pixel data (machine) to suggest more relevant and accurate keywords for images that are uploaded in the
Shutterstock contributor app.
After reading last week’s article on “
Rights Simplified Pricing” a reader asked if I could expand on why an alternative to Rights Managed pricing is needed. He said that seldom has he found that customers are unwilling to pay
fotoQuote RM rates that are based on how images are used. The following is my response.
Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Congressman Tom Marino (R-PA) have introduced a bipartisan small claims bill, H.R.5757, the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act of 2016. When Congress reconvenes after its upcoming six-week recess Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-CA) plans to introduce a separate version of small claims legislation establishing a small claims tribunal in the Copyright Office.
To deal with increased customer demand for simpler, easier to understand pricing, and the general decline in the use of Rights Managed images industry wide,
plainpicture in Germany has introduced a new pricing model they call
(RS) plainpicture Rights Simplified.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced an API integration with Google. The image licensing deal provides Google’s digital and mobile display advertising products, including Adsense, Adwords, and Admob, with access to Shutterstock’s collection of more than 90 million images for license.
Singapore based,
MotionElements has introduced
VisualSearch and
AudioSearch v2; two improved revolutionary tools that simplifies all creators’ search for that perfect footage or music to use in their projects.
One of the principal reasons for licensing images as Rights Managed rather then Royalty Free is to insure that the customer pays additional fees whenever they reuse an image. With RF, once purchased, the customer can use the image as many times as they want. But how often do such multiple uses occur?
Recently, I asked about 100 medium sized stock agents around the world a series of questions to try to get an understanding of the revenue generated from images supplied to them by other stock agencies as opposed to revenue from images the agent had collected directly from image creators.
A few iStock contributors tell me that since the introduction of subscription sales in March 2015
downloads as reported on the contributor’s portfolio page no longer tell the whole story.
Paul Banwell, Senior Director, Contributor Relations for Getty Images has just sent contributors the following letter regarding Getty’s directions for the future. This information should be of interest to every stock image producer and distributor regardless of their relationships with Getty Images.
Some iStock contributors continue to add significant numbers of images to their collections, despite the decline in the
number of downloads and we presume revenue, since average prices per-image downloaded have also declined.
Downloads from iStock continued to decline in the first half of 2016. Since 2011, I have been tracking the number of downloads and images in the collection of 430 of iStock’s leading contributors. At the end of June 2016 these contributors had between 56,465,000 and 58,967,000 total downloads during their iStock careers. iStock has over 100,000 contributors, but despite the small number in this group we believe the images licensed by this 430 represent almost one-third of all the images iStock has licensed since the company began operations.
A couple weeks ago I wrote an articles asking
“What Is ‘Commercial’ Stock Photography.” I questioned how big the demand is for “candid,” “natural” and “real life” grab shots of what happens in front of the photographer rather than staged shots that look real but are carefully posed with great production values. A reader suggested I contact Jerry Taven who founded Nonstock about a fifteen years ago.
One of the biggest problems with stock photography licensing today is that there is often no clear logic behind why a higher price should be charged for one image and not another. In this article we explore how the industry's marketing strategy might be improved to generate more revenue for creators and distributors, as well as making the image search process more user friendly for customers.
Photographers choose to sell their work as RM for three reasons: (1) They believe that everything they produce should only be licensed for prices higher than those charged for RF, (2) They dream that one, or a few, of their images will eventually be licensed for an extremely broad, major use. Customer who make such uses are willing to pay multi-thousand-dollar prices for exclusive rights to such images, and (3) Such high value sales can only happen if images are always licensed based on use. There are several fallacies to these arguments.
Getty Images has taken action against a serious copyright infringer who was discovered to have improperly accessed, downloaded and distributed Getty Images content through social media.