Recently, I asked Geoff Tompkinson to share a little about his 35-year career in stock photography and where he thinks the business is headed. Before reading his story I suggest you take a look at Geoff’s amazing work –
still photography,
timelapse and
hyperlapse -- and then begin reading.
Aurora Photos has launched a highly curated
Premium RF collection that places some of the company’s best images into a simple and easy to understand pricing model. The $250 for a small: 3mb/72 dpi image file and $500 for a 50mb/300 dpi file is a direct copy of the pricing used by
Shutterstock for its
Offset.com collection.
Shutterstock has reported $91.2 million in revenue for Q4 2014, a 34% increase over Q4 2013. There were 33.5 million downloads for the quarter. About 28 percent of revenue for the quarter was paid out to contributors in royalties. The average price per download was $2.68 up from $2.65 in the previous quarter and a 10% increase compared to Q4 2013. There were 46.8 million images in the collection at the end of 2014 plus 2 million video clips. At the end of the quarter the company had 513 employees worldwide.
The oldest photo on record is of a man on a Paris street getting his shoes shined. It was taken in 1838. In the first 170 years of photography up to the year 2000 it is estimated that 85 billion photos were taken. In 2014 alone, thanks to selfies, almost 1 trillion photos were taken and the number is expected to grow in 2015.
Getting new customers can be difficult. During Q3 2014
Shutterstock spent about 25% of its gross revenue on sales and marketing. At that rate sales and marketing costs for all of 2014 could be in the range of $80 million.
Photographers with a limited number of images that they market directly from a single online site may want to check out the Australian company
Searchmyimages.com. For a reasonable monthly fee photographers can upload their images to this site. Searchmyimages will then constantly search the web for these images and informs the photographer when and where uses are found.
More and more photographers are looking to drones as a cheap way to do aerial photography and a look at subjects from new perspectives. But it is entirely possible that there will be severe restrictions on the private use of drones – at least in the U.S.
Popular photo services platform
LightRocket is accepting submissions for a photojournalism competition with prizes worth US$10,500, including US$4,000 for the Photographer of the Year.
Early-bird registration discounts for the
CEPIC Congress 2015 in Warsaw, Poland will end on February 8, 2015. Always a highlight of the year for stock photo distributors, the Congress itself will take place at the 5-star
Sofitel Warsaw Victoria Hotel beginning on June 3, 2015 and continuing through June 6th.
After 44 years as owner and CEO of
mauritius images GmbH Hans-Jörg Zwez has retired. Stefan Ploghaus has taken over as new owner and CEO of the photo agency. The purchase price was not disclosed.