For new readers, or those who may have missed some of what I have written over the last few months, the following are a list of stories worth looking at to get a sense of where the industry is headed.
The new Adobe Digital Publishing Solution (DPS), the next generation in its groundbreaking Digital Publishing Suite, pioneers new ways for brands to deliver high-impact content to mobile apps and is likely to result in more images appearing in apps. It will also become increasingly difficult for image creators to know if their images are being used in apps, or not.
Is Shutterstock in Serious Trouble? On August 5th the SSTK stock price closed at $50.75. On August 6th the company announced its
second quarter results and missed the projected revenue for the quarter by 1.5%. On August 7th the stock closed at $33.65, a 34% decline in 2 days.
NO! The company is not in trouble. Rather, financial analysts that closely watch Shutterstock are finally waking up to the realities of the stock photo business.
Today,
Shutterstock reported $104.4 million in revenue for Q2 2015, a 30% increase over Q2 2014. However, they missed their projected revenue estimate by $960,000. Investors were disappointed and the stock that had been trading at $50.75 per share the day before dropped 32.20% to $34.41 before the market closed. The average price per download during the quarter was $2.85 down from $2.87 in the previous quarter, and compared to $2.52 in Q2 2014. There were 35.9 million downloads in the quarter and they paid out about 28% of gross revenue in royalties to contributors.
In the subscription environment customers pay for -- and the image creators receive a royalty for -- many images that are never used in any type of deliverable product. Nobody knows how many. Adobe Stock has changed all that. Now Adobe gives users
free use to any images considered during the users design and creative processes. Users only pay for the images that actually end up in a deliverable product. As a result, creators may begin to see a significant decline in the number of images licensed.
If you’re a videographer and have been discouraged by low prices and low royalties for your work it’s time to check out
Videoblocks. In April at the National Association of Broadcasters conference the company added a new feature when they launched the Marketplace section of their site. Customers must have an annual subscription in order to access Marketplace. When they choose any of the Marketplace clips they pay an additional $49 if it is HD or $199 for 4K.
Responding to an increasing demand for reliable insights on the stock photography market three top stock photography industry experts, Lee Torrens, Paul Melcher and Amos Struck, have officially launched
Stock Photo Insight, a consulting service providing calls with all three experts simultaneously.
If you’re trying to decide whether to get into video, or what to shoot, you may want to take a look at the
Corbis Motion Trends Study. This information should be of great value to anyone producing stock video regardless of whether they license their work through Corbis, or not.
The
Associated Press and British Movietone, one of the world's most comprehensive newsreel archives, are together bringing more than
1 million minutes of digitized film footage to YouTube. Showcasing the moments, people and events that have shaped the world, it will be the largest upload of historical news content on the video-sharing platform to date.
What’s the difference between User Generated Content (UGC) and stock photography?
Maybe nothing! When people talk about UGC they are usually referring to pictures that can be found on the web (mostly on social media sites) that “someone else” may want to use. If that someone else wants to use the image (and doesn’t want to steal it) then technically it becomes a stock photograph.
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This stock photography news site focuses on the business side of photography with a special emphasis on stock photography. Our goal is to help photographers maximize their earnings based on the quality of their work and the commitment they are prepared to make to the trade. The information provided will be applicable to part-timers as well as full time professional photographers. We’ll leave it to others to teach photographers how to take better pictures.
Jim Pickerell launched his career as a photographer in 1963. In 1990 he began publishing a regular newsletter on stock photography. In 1995 the information was made available online as well as in print and was gradually expanded to a daily service.
Click here for Pickerell's full biography.
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