With its new Image Embed tool
Bing is making free use of photos to promote and advertise its site. See the little Bing logo at the bottom left of each picture display. Bing is now able to advertise its brand, free of charge, on an other site that uses Image Embed.
Getty Images has pulled together from its many collections a group of images that they call
Getty Images Prestige. They say it is a “carefully curated selection of the world's most powerful imagery. Prestige images are distinguished by their unique aesthetic approach, exceptional craftsmanship and uncompromising quality - all available for use exclusively.”
On September 13th
iStock will “throw-in-the-towel” and adopt the
Shutterstock licensing strategy that all images should be equal in price regardless of the quality of the image or the cost of production. They will discontinue their practice of pricing based on file size delivered, and of having multi-tier price categories.
Footage Net has asked a several footage licensing experts how they deal with the increasing demand for 4K footage. With roughly four times the pixels of standard HD footage (8.3 million versus 2 million), 4K footage offers remarkable sharpness, a great sense of depth and a much subtler color range. It is quickly becoming commonplace in the footage business. The experts asked to weigh in on the ins and outs of working with this new format include: Carol Martin of
FootageBank, Sterling Zunbrunn of
Nature Footage and Peter Carstens of
Framepool.
Be sure to read Getty Images CEO,
Jonathan Klein’s comments in James Estrin’s interview that appeared in the New York Times August 27th. Among the key takeaways are:
Recently Dennis Davis, an experienced Los Angeles corporate, lifestyle, and food photographer (see his
portfolio) posted the following on a blog. “
I am moving out of commercial assignment photography into selling my photography after the fact. I am looking for recommendations on stock agencies and methods for selling fine art images and video.”
After my story on
Bing Image Widget yesterday I decided to do some more searches for photographers and stock agencies to see what I could find. The results are revealing. I started with “John Harrington photography.”
Microsoft's Bing has created the
Bing Image Widget making It possible for any Bing user to imbed, free of charge, on their web site of blog any images found in a Bing Images search. Here's a simple demonstration of how it works.
You may have seen references to the “Monkey Selfie” and Wikimedia’s claim that there can be no copyright on the photo. Wikimedia claims it can use the photo without any licensing because it was the monkey that took the photo. Photographer David Slater supplied the equipment the monkey used and made the image available to the world. (The monkey hasn’t figured out how to use the Internet yet.) Get more information about the copyright debate.
PACA (the Digital Media Licensing Association) has announced some of the panelist and speakers for this years conference that will be held in New York from Sunday, October 19th through October 21st. For more details check this
link.
Over the years Flickr has built a very popular photo site that has attracted over 6 billion images from image creators. Many of these images (probably a very small percentage of the total) are excellent, marketable images. So good, in fact, that since 2008 Getty Images has added almost 900,000 of them to its Creative Stills collections.
Will bloggers with the iPhone 5s and the VSCO Cam Photo App that enables control of focus, exposure and white balance change food photography and reduce the demand for professionally shot food images?
Stocktrek Images has a specialized image collection that is in high demand for wall and poster art. Their subjects include: Healthcare and Biomedical Science, Armed Forces, Military Aviation, Space, Weather, Astronomy and Dinosaur Art
Last week Taylor Davidson published a list of
86 acquisitions and IPOs in the imaging industry from 2004 to today. Included in his report are a lot of social media acquisitions that are probably of minor interest to my reader. In addition he left out a number of stock agency acquisition, many of which I believe are significant.
One Degree, (
www.onedegree.co) (that's .co not .com) a new app designed to help those who need images find a photographer was launched recently. There are some interesting ideas behind this app, but in its current form it is probably something professional photographers will want to avoid.
Every so often I put together a list of the most important stories we’ve published in the recent past. If you are engaged in the business of stock photography the links below are to stories that we’ve published so far in 2014. If you are a subscriber you’ll be taken to the full story when you click the link. If you are a customers who uses “credits” you’ll be taken to a brief description of the story. At that point you will need to decide if you want to use some of your credits to read the full story.
Shutterstock has reported $80.2 million in revenue and total downloads of 31.5 million for Q2 2014. About 28 percent of the revenue was paid out to contributors in royalties. At the end of the quarter the company had 478 employees worldwide.
Dreamstime has opened an office in San Francisco at 180 Sansome Street will provide the company with an expanded presence in Silicon Valley. This connection to the area's top-tier technology talent will prove invaluable as the firm continues to offer innovate tools for its users such as the Dreamstime Companion App and WordPress plugin.
On Monday August 4th, Rohn Engh died of a sudden onset of infection causing serious pneumonia and multiple complications. The doctors and nurses at the VA hospital were excellent and did everything possible for him, never giving up. The infection took Rohn in one week. He was two months shy of his 85th birthday.
Flickr has announced to its community of image creators that it will be offering a licensing option, but it has failed to explain when it will happen or exactly how it will work.
ImageBrief reports that in July they made their highest single image sale ever, a $30,000 fee for a stunning aerial image of
Rio de Janeiro taken by Flavio Veloso of Brazil Photos.
In the near future Tom Zimberoff, Founder and CEO of
PIXterity, will be launching a new portal that proposes to supply member photographers with a huge amount of contemporary data (Big Data) that will enable them to know what image buyers are actually paying top producers for the images they purchase for their projects. Photographers who place their work exclusively with PIXterity are expected to get much better prices for their stock and assignment work. Currently there is a very interesting, long discussion on the LinkedIn Group of
American Photographic Artists, APA that readers may find interesting.
Can usage fees continue to drop? Most videographers think that
Shutterstock’s prices for video clips at $19 for web use, $49 for an SD file, $79 for HD and $299 for 4K are about as low as prices could go. Any lower and videographers would no longer go to the trouble of creating new clips.
Pearson’s conference call updating investment analysts on the company’s financial results for the first half of 2014, offered some interesting insights into where the education business is headed. By the end of 2014 Pearson will have cut its physical infrastructure and warehousing capacity in half compared to what it was 2 years ago. They will have cut 4,000 jobs, around 10% of the their workforce, primarily in print-related activities in mature markets.
Last week we published a story about
AudioBlocks a new platform licensing royalty-free music by subscription. Today, I want to examine the parent company,
VideoBlocks, that was launched in 2010 and licenses royalty-free video clips by subscription.