Earlier this week I wrote about the
average price per image licensed at Getty. This article will examine some of the publicly available and widely reported numbers related to the number of images licensed.
On March 10, 1014 Getty Images plans to close down
Photos.com and move virtually all the content and operations to
Thinkstock. Thinkstock currently offers more than 14 million images. Added to Photo.com’s 5.5 million image that will put Thinkstock in the 20 million image range.
Recently, I had the opportunity to examine the 2013 sales of a few of Getty Images’ major contributors. They licensed images as both RM and RF. While these contributors represent a very small sample of all the people represented by Getty, I believe their experience is reasonably representative of what is happening in the entire collection. Their figures may provide some useful insights.
Shutterstock has reported a record 28 million downloads and $68 million in revenue for Q4 2013. The company’s revenue for all of 2013 was $235.5 million, up from $169.6 in 2012. About 28% of the revenue was paid out to contributors in royalties.
Alamy has jumped into the mobile photography business with
Stockimo, a new iPhone app that lets photographers upload pictures taken from their iPhone. Stockimo is open to anyone. Alamy contributors who were with the company before the Stockimo launch will receive a 50% royalty. Contributors who are new to Alamy and just submitting iPhone photos will receive a 20% royalty.
Over the weekend I reported that there were
71 live briefs on
ImageBrief worth a combined total of over $150,000.
Allyson Scott, who has been responding to briefs and submitting images for more than six months, points out that actually making a sale is not as easy as I might have made it sound. Here’s what she had to say.
Getty Images’ photojournalists Brent Stirton, Sara Lewkowicz, Chris McGrath, Ezra Shaw, Al Bello and Quinn Rooney have been awarded top honors at
World Press Photo, the world’s largest and most prestigious annual press photography contest.
Currrently there are 71 image requests worth a combined total of over $150,000 on
ImageBrief. Clients looking for photos include: BBH (UK), Conde Nast, Huge Inc, Weiden+Kennedy, Story Worldwide, Expedia Inc, Grey Advertising, Penguin Books, Random House, Hearst, TriBeCa Film Festival, Proximity, Visa, McGarry Bowen, Harper Collins, Young & Rubicam.
Recently PACA published a letter from Past President Robert Henson about how Microsoft “has taken the bold step of promoting the theft of images online. Through its newly revamped
Office product.” Through its “Office Help” function Microsoft advised users looking for images to “Use Bing to get images.” Bing made finding images easy and implied that anything found was free to use.
In January Pearson provided a regular trading update and on February 28, 2014 it will announce preliminary results for 2013. While overall the company expects an operating profit of approximately £865m they had “lower underlying margins in North American Higher Education, particularly in the important fourth quarter.”