Every year CEPIC brings together picture agencies from all over the world and becomes, for a few days, the Center of the Picture Industry. This year's Congress had over 500 participants from 35 countries and 280 agencies. It was held in the heart of Berlin, a few blocks away from the Brandenburger Tor.
A lot of attention is being given to finding a better way to search for photos. Those who believe technology can solve all the world’s problems are trying to build algorithms that will instantly find exactly the right image to meet the needs of each paying customer. With 1.8 billion photos being uploaded to the web each day and even professional sites like Shutterstock uploading more than 260,000 new photos each week there are more good pictures on any given subject than any professional user has time to look at.
PACA has just released a summary of it Sales Webinar that was conducted in May. The panel consisted of Leslie Hughes from Visual Steam, Candice Murray for Condé Nast and Sonia Wasco from Grant Heilman Photography. You can see the notes and view the power point presentation from the webinar
here.
The wonderful world of electronic tracking can have some downsides. It is great to know the exact GPS location where a picture was taken. This information can also be useful in searching for images that were taken in a particular city, country or other location.
In general, prices and revenue have been declining in the stock photo industry. To a large extent this has been due to oversupply and more and more customers finding the images they need at lower price points. Based on the information I’ve been able to collect, I have made estimates of the average 2013 gross license fee for images in the five major price categories – RM, traditional RF, Midstock, Microstock and Subscription. I want to find out if my readers think these prices are high or low.
Booking opened on June 10 to prospective exhibitors at
Visual Connections New York Image Expo 2014, which will take place on Wednesday, October 22nd.
In early October 2014 the UK government is expected to change its copyright legislation and introduce an
Extended Collective Licensing (ECL) scheme that will enable collecting societies to authorize use of any image within the UK. Please respond to this survey
(
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ECL-Opt-out) before 12pm 23 June 2014.
Every once in a while someone asks me if Corbis is a place to put their images? Corbis has a nice looking website and I assume they are still making a reasonable number of sales, but I never hear much about them. Photographers never tell me the are happy with Corbis sales, either in volume or price.
It may be time to retire Rights Managed as a licensing model. RM pricing doesn’t work for most customers anymore.
Moreover, it no longer really maximizes the potential earnings of photographers. There used to be a time when all image uses were in print. In those day when an art director purchased an image for a magazine ad, a book or a brochure she knew exactly how the image would be used in the layout and how many copies would be printed. Those days are mostly gone forever.
Launched in March 2013,
Stocksy continues to grow dramatically. The company is paying out almost $200,000 a month in royalties and is on tract to generate something in the neighborhood of $5 million in gross revenue in 2014.