Shutterstock has put together a
video tribute to 5 great movie directors -- Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Alfonso Cuaron and Terrence Malick – using only clips from their collection of stock video footage.
The Copyright Office has released the official 1,288 page version of the
Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition (the “Third Edition”). It is available on the Office’s website at
http://copyright.gov/comp3/.
For many the end of the year is a time to review past experiences and consider whether it makes sense to chart a new course in the year ahead. Stock photography has changed dramatically for professional image creators in the past few years and in general it looks like it will continue on a downhill slope. The following are links to several stories we’ve published in the last year that provide some prospective on where the business is headed. New readers, or long-term subscribers who might have missed some of what we published, may want to check out some of these stories.
It seems likely that we will see some major shifts in the stock photography business as the three major players – Getty Images, Shutterstock and Adobe/Fotolia – jockey for position in a market that is experiencing very little, if any growth. At the end of 2014
Getty’s total revenue will be somewhere around $870 million, but $260 of that will be editorial. Shutterstocks will be about
$328 million and I estimate Fotolia’s at somewhere in the range of $110 million.
Panoramic Images has been awarded $403,500 in a copyright infringement case against educational publisher John Wiley & Sons. The publisher was found to have used 6 images outside the scope of the license agreement. The case was heard before a jury in the Federal District Court the Northern District of Illinois.
Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") changed the rating outlook of
Getty Images, Inc. to negative from stable due to continuing declines in Midstock revenue. Moody's also revised its forecast indicating very high leverage over the next 12 months with reduced free cash flow. Moody's affirmed the B3 Corporate Family Rating, B3-PD Probability of Default Rating.
Margi Sheard of the Greatstock (
www.greatstock.co.za) agency in South Africa recently published a story that raised an important issue about the world’s perception of Africa and the African people. The news media’s focus on tragedy and problems often provides an inaccurate picture of the real Africa, but it raises the issue of whether there is any way for photographers to do more to show the world the real Africa of the 21st century.
Adobe has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held
Fotolia for approximately $800 million in cash. Fotolia will be integrated into
Adobe Creative Cloud, providing current and future Creative Cloud members with the ability to access and purchase over 34 million images and videos.
Peter Lik, Australian fine art photographer of landscapes, recently sold one of his images entitled “Ghost” for $6.5 million, the highest price ever paid for a single image. To see the photo of the very popular Antelope Canyon, Arizona check out
PetaPixel.
There are widespread rumors that, in an effort to get out from under some of its crushing debt,
Getty hopes to sell its Editorial Division early in 2015. It has been reported that Q3 2014 sales for this segment of their business was about $65 million up 21% year-on-year. Editorial represents about 30% of the company’s gross revenue.
Alamy has added new features to its successful mobile app Stockimo that was
launched last February. To date more than 180,000 images have been submitted through the app and 99,000 have been accepted for marketing. These images can be found among the almost 53 million images on Alamy.com using the keyword “Stockimo.”
The crowdsourcing site
FOAP has raised a fresh $2.3 million in funding from some interesting names like CNN Worldwide President, Jeff Zucker; CEO and Co-Founder of VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk; Upshot Chairman and Protagonist LLC Partner, Jordan Rednor; and CEO of Delivery Hero, Niklas Ostberg, among others. The company raised another
$1.5 million in August. Total funding now stands at roughly $5 million but they’re not quite ready to call this a Series A yet.
iStock contributors have been advised that on January 15, 2014, the accounting operations of Getty Images and iStock will be combined into one unified system. Since Getty acquired iStock in February 2006 the two brands have been operated as separate businesses with separate accounting departments.
If your are a photographer who works hard, but has trouble earning much of a profit then you need to read John Harrington's advice. John is an award-winning Washington, DC based photographer who covers the world of politics as well as doing a wide range of commercial assignments. His success is due in no small part to his excellent business skills.
On Monday I mentioned several
search innovations that Shutterstock is testing at
Shutterstock/Labs. Most of these ideas were developed during company wide hackathons.
You'll never guess what attendees at the annual Self-Publishing in the Digital Age conference in London were told to pay for a photo that would attract readers and help sell their book. You'll be surprised. Check out this story.
Many photographers who thought they were being good Net Citizens when they made their images available with Creative Commons Licenses and allowed anyone to use the images for free have recently received some nasty shocks. Microsoft and Flickr have decided to use those images to enrich themselves. Forget about any benefit to the creator.
One of the biggest problems in the stock photo business is search. As the most popular search engines gobble up more and more images it has become harder and harder for clients to find the best image for their projects. No buyer has the time to review even a fraction of the returns from most keyword searches.
Scoopshot is the latest to jump on the embed bandwagon. When users find an image they want to use they have the option of paying the listed price for a download or “Use For Free.” Get more information about how it works.
Recently, Photoshelter launched
Lattice, a Pinterest like curation and discovery experience designed to show off the best of more than 200,000,000 images from the 80,000 pro photographers that use PhotoShelter.
Currently “boards” are created by in-house staff and “invited curators.” The vision is that eventually anyone will be available to create boards. Photographers can recommend certain of their best images for addition to boards, but for right now they cannot add images to boards directly.
Following a brief illness George Sinclair, founder and executive director of Universal Images Group, Ltd. died from cardiac arrest on Thursday November 20, 2014, at 9:30pm in London.
I am constantly challenged on why I think there is likely to be little or no revenue growth in the stock photo business. Many point out that clearly there is a huge explosion in the use of imagery online. Therefore, why won’t that be reflected in the growth of stock photo revenue? They also point to Shutterstock’s consistent 40% growth per year over for the last three years. Here are 6 reasons why industry revenue growth is and will continue to be in the very low single digits, until it finally turns negative.
Shutterstock has announced a partnership between
WIX and its
Bigstock brand. Wix is a website creation tool designed for small businesses with 56 million users in 190 countries. Wix offers a “drag n' drop website building platform with HTML5 capabilities, 100s of designer made templates, top grade hosting, innovative Apps and tons of features for free.”
At PhotoPlusExpo in New York last month there was tremendous interest among videographers and photographers in the DJI Phantom 2 Vision Quadcopter with Integrated FPV Camera. This piece of equipment seems to offer great potential for a host of commercial photography uses. But, there are two major issues with the use of drones for photography – laws regarding aircraft safety and personal privacy. The air safety rules come under the jurisdiction of the FAA. Privacy laws are traditionally state laws.
Recently Getty Images has started allowing its customers to organize their search returns by the “Most Popular” images as well as the default “Best Match” that has been the only option for years. I thought it would be interesting to see which photographers that shoot people produce the work that is in greatest demand at Getty images. I looked at the first 500 images returned when a customer does a search for “People” and narrowed the search to “Most Popular,” “RF only” and only photography.