Stocksy has reported another year of impressive growth with gross sales of
$7,928,745 million in 2015. That is up 126% from $3.5 million in 2014. The great news for image creators is that Stocksy paid out
$4,323,735 in royalties. That’s 55% of gross revenue collected. In addition, because the company is a Co-Op, they were able to pay out an additional $200,000 in dividends to members who sold images during the year.
Since October 2013
Getty Images has been collecting money from Pinterest for images in its collection that have been pinned on Pinterest. The transactions appear on photographer sales reports as $0.03 gross sale and a photographer royalty of
$0.01. Indications are that this is a one-time payment no matter how long the image stays on Pinterest.
Shutterstock has notificed its Offset contributors that it has decided to make Offset content available to its Enterprise clients (over 24,000 of them) at a price point between $50 and $100. The current Offset price for a 72dpi web use image is $250.
Most photographers use two different figures to track revenue trends – revenue
Per-Image-Licensed and revenue
Per-Image-In-Collection. It’s easy for a photographer to figure his own per-image-licensed figure, but it is very difficult to determine how that might stack up with all photographers because the specifics of the number of images are usually not available even when you know (or have some idea of) the gross revenue collected during the period.
In a Photo District New interview entitled
“Too Big To Sue” Getty Images General Counsel Yoko Miyashita and VP and General Counsel Lisa Willmer explain why Getty Images is not suing Google Inc. in the US for copyright infringement. This is a must read for everyone engaged in the image licensing business.
Dissolve has announced it will add over 50,000 premium rights-managed (RM) commercial photographs to its site at
dissolve.com. The photos will be live on the site on June 1.
In order to safeguard its users,
500px Marketplace has modified its submission requirements by asking for extra details to confirm the identity of its contributors. As of May 16, 2016 contributors must confirm their contact information and provide a copy of their government ID before any new images they submit to Marketplace can be sold.
If you’ve got quality digital image files that have been sitting around for a while and earning little or no money, there may be a way to get some cash for them.
GraphicStock, owned by
VideoBlocks, is paying a small one-time fee for non-exclusive rights to image collections. For this one-time fee they receive the right to license the images to customers non-exclusively, in perpetuity. No additional royalty will be paid to the creator for such sales.
Microsoft has teamed up with
Shutterstock to add integration within PowerPoint in order to offer access to the vast collection of images for use in presentations.
In a
previous story we talked about five aspects of the image licensing business where serious modification to standard practices are needed, if the industry is move ahead and grow revenue. In that story I dealt with three of the five: (1) Pricing Floor For Certain Imagery, (2) Simplified Pricing and (3) Better Actionable Data For Contributors That Relates To What’s Selling. In this story we’ll examine the issues of (4) Curation and, (5) a Central Database For Small Collections.