Fotolia has moved to expand its service in Latin American and Australia just two months after private equity firm
KKR took a 50% stake in the company.
John Lund is one of the world’s most successful stock photographers. His images have a clean, graphic, conceptual style and generally illustrate business concepts. His images are often humorous. Using photoshop and digital tools he creates images that put people and animals in impossible situations, but they are done so skillfully that viewers often ask, “Did that really happen?” The following are five tips for succeeding in stock photography.
On July 12, 2012, the dapd media holding AG, via its French subsidiary Sipa News, took over the French service of Associated Press (AP). After Sipa Press and Diora News, this is the third company dapd has taken over in France. This takeover makes dapd the largest agency partner of AP worldwide. The parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price.
We are rapidly moving toward a time when consumers will get more of their news via YouTube rather than from commercial television. On average 22 million people watch the evening news on the three U.S. broadcast channels each night. But, when there is a major event YouTube views regularly eclipse that number. During Japan’s tsumani disaster in March 2011 the 20 most viewed news-related videos on YouTube that focused on the tragedy were viewed more than 96 million times.
The summer heat in Washington has got me thinking about air conditioning. That brought to mind a story I did back in 2006 about air conditioning photos and microstock. It all started when a customer asked for a stock picture of an
air conditioning repairman working on a home system to use in a small yellow pages ad.
In late March In the case of Tom Bean vs. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona Judge Frederick J. Martone
GRANTED partial summary judgment to the plaintiff on the issue of defendant's liability for copyright infringement of 26 images used in seven titles.
Thousands of images from the National Geographic Stock: Vintage Collection are now available at
The Granger Collection. The rare historical catalogue, part of the National Geographic Image Collection, documents the world and its inhabitants, including indigenous people, their cultures, the environment, and the natural world from the 1880s through the 1970s.
Jacksonville, FL based
SuperStock has acquired Seattle based
Science Faction Images. The 40,000 tightly edited high-end science and high technology images in the Science Faction collection will allow SuperStock to “better serve our clients in publishing and advertising,” according to Lanny Ziering, CEO of SuperStock.
ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) has published a free guide designed to assist photographers in unilizing social media to market their businesses. The guide can be downloaded at
http://asmp.org/free/guide-mdeb
At least five private equity firms are bidding to buy
Getty Images from Hellman & Freedman (H&F) in a leveraged buyout worth an estimated $4 billion.
Based on our recent analysis of sales made by 193 of iStockphoto’s top sellers, total company downloads may have declined by as much as
22% in the first 6 months of 2012 compared to the same period in 2011. This story will walk you through how we collected the data, arrived at this number and explain why such a small sample of contributors is representative.
Professional photographers shooting travel photos have another new competitor. Foap.com is collecting iPhone photos from tourists and selling them for $10 each. To get started uploading pictures all the photographer needs to do is go to iTunes and download the
app.or go to
foap.com. The photographer receives a 50% royalty, payable through PayPal monthly.
ABC News VideoSource has upgraded and expanded its website to provide greater and easier access to ABC News’ vast archival footage online. Producers and researchers will now be able to browse, license and, in some cases, immediately access tens of thousands of video assets from ABC News’ expansive archives with the click of a mouse. It offers customers, including documentary filmmakers, educators or anyone with an interest in archival video footage, historically-rich news video from a vast collection spanning from 1896 to the present.
Following its acquisition of
Specialist Stock and its move into the footage side of the stock image business
Robert Harding World Imagery has created its Comprehensive Research Facility (CRF) which not only offers research of its own collections but will also research a range of satellite suppliers including BBC Motion Gallery, NHNZ, Footage Search and SKYWORKS amongst others.
Alamy has published an 11-page
white paper that examines the challenges current pricing and licensing models face. The paper summarizes a round table discussion where key industry decision makers, including picture buyers, photographers, journalists, commentators and stock image providers, examined the issue.
T3Media, Inc. (formerly Thought Equity Motion), a leading provider of cloud-based video management and licensing services, has announced the launch of a new licensing offering—
Paya ™ (Pay-ya), the world's index of licensable content™. To watch a short video that explains how Paya works, click
here.
Universal Images Group (UIG), owned by industry veteran George Sinclair (also the founder of the Virtual Picture Desk in 2002 and co-author of Britannica’s Image Quest), has acquired the business rights and digital library of the
MyLoupe and the
Ad Stock Images picture agencies.
In November 2010 the UK government called for an independent review of
the Intellectual Property laws and practices and assigned Professor Ian
Hargreaves and a panel of experts to prepare a report. The report,
submitted in May 2011, made 10 recommendations designed to ensure that
the UK has an IP framework “best suited to supporting innovation and
promoting economic growth in the digital age.” I'd like to recommend a different approach.
Since 2005 MediaStorm has produced 30 powerful,
issue-driven video stories about real life people and problems. All this work has been available for free on their
website. Most of these stories have been viewed a million or more times and they tend to draw large audiences outside the photo industry.
In the near future photographers can expect to see are some dramatic
changes in the way subscriptions are defined. Until now, most
subscriptions have allowed customers to download 25 images per day for
the duration of the subscription ranging from 1
month to 1 year. Now a number of new options are being introduced.
Stock photographers regularly complain about the “Race To The Bottom” in
terms of pricing and they look for someone to blame. Favorite whipping
boys are Getty Images, Alamy and microstock. But, these distributors are
not really the problem. The problem is technology.
Anyone thinking about setting up their own fully functional search engine to license images should read
Yuri Arcurs article about the trials and tribulations he went through in creating
PeopleImages.com.
Universal Images Group (UIG) has now opened an office in New York. This
is in addition to its offices in Chicago, USA; Rome, Italy and
Chelmsford in the UK. The business has achieved triple digit revenue
growth through distribution and electronic publishing in the past year
and it has become essential to provide a further production &
editing center in USA.
Every few months I put together a summary of some of our most important
recently published stories. This selection is designed to help investors
who are trying to understand the industry as well as image creators
just beginning to explore the idea of licensing their images. Regular
readers will have seen these stories. Please refer friends interested in
licensing images to this series of articles.
Evolve Images (
www.evolveimages.com) has announced that Lewis Blackwell has joined the company as Chief Creative Officer. Blackwell brings to Evolve an impressive array of credentials with leading experience in the image creation and licensing industry, as well as deep knowledge and active membership of the image-buying community.