Macrostock
Bridgeman Images is very excited to announce that, thanks to the partnership between Mondadori Portfolio and the Ambrosiana, Bridgeman now represent the amazing
Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana collection, which is comprised of over 6,000 images and contains some of the most important works of literature and fine art in the world.
I was asked recently for my predictions on where the stock photo industry is headed in 2019. There will continue to be massive growth in the number of images added to the major stock photo collections. An increasing percentage will be
produced by amateurs not professionals who might be trying to earn a portion of their living from the images they produce.
Image Source has completed its second move this year to its now permanent residence at 66 Old Compton Street – the former home of a cardinal London creative icon, Rushes Post-Production House - right in the heart of Soho. The move to a larger and more modern creative space is the first of many new initiatives for the premium agency which was bought back by its Founder, Christina Vaughan together with professional Investor and successful businessman, Michael Jackson at the beginning of 2018.
Alamy has announced that early next year they will be lowering the royalty rate from 50% to 40%. Early in January they will send all contributors an official announcement signaling the beginning of the standard 45-day notice period before a new contract change goes into effect. The new royalty rate is expected to take effect in February 2019.
According to photographers
Masterfile has been unable to make any royalty payments to photographers since January 2018. The company
filed for bankruptcy in 2017. Payments to the bankruptcy lawyer are prioritized ahead of payments to photographers. It appears the company has not been generating enough revenue to cover fixed expenses and still pay royalties.
Alamy.com and 360Cities.net have announced that the 360Cities’ collection of thousands of stunning, immersive 360° spherical images will now be available to Alamy customers through Alamy’s online worldwide marketplace. The 360Cities database will launch on Alamy.com on 5 November 2018 with an initial collection of approximately 150K images, to be supplemented with a regular stream of new content.
Over the weekend on
Stockphoto@yahoogroups.com Rick Boden said, “I was getting serious about (putting my images with) Adobe Stock Images and then I realized they sell images via subscription. I have a very bad feeling about getting into an arrangement like that based on experience where my present agency (that) has a tie in with Getty where I am getting many royalties of less than a dollar because of subscription sales.”
Recently, in a discussion with a stock photo agent the subject came up as to what it would take for Getty Images to repair its relationships with the Creator Community. I raised the issue late last year in “
Why Creators Are Dissatisfied With Getty.”
Getty Images has just done a deal with
www.animoto.com to provide unlimited video clips to Animoto video producers. Animoto says, “Now when you create marketing videos in Animoto, you'll have unlimited access to our stunning collection of stock photos and video clips at no extra cost beyond your subscription.”
Copytrack and
WENN Media Group (WMG) have announced their future exclusive collaboration. WMG specialized in providing up-to-the-minute entertainment news content with production based in Los Angeles, New York, London and Berlin. Copytrack will provide WMG with the tracking and worldwide legal enforcement of copyright infringement.
Action Press, one of Germany's leading press photo agencies based in Hamburg since 1970, is again independent and privately owned. Ulli Michel, longtime managing director, used the management buy-out option and bought action press out of the
SilverHub UK bankruptcy estate.
Getty Images has just sent out a promotion – probably mostly to photographers – to show
Conceptual Realism. The implication is that customers want more of this type of imagery and photographers should be shooting more of it and supplying it to the agency.
Is Such Imagery Really What Customers Want? I can’t believe that most of what is being shown in this gallery are images that customers are actually licensing for use.
In today’s stock photo environment, the concept of “survival rights” in a contractual agreement between photographer and stock agency no longer makes sense. Many stock photo agencies have clauses in their photographer contracts that allow the Agency to continue to license rights to the photographer’s images for years after either the photographer or the agency terminate the agreement. If the agreement is “exclusive” then the photographer cannot do anything to try to generate revenue from the images, even if the Agency has not been generating much, or any, revenue from them for the photographer.
Vimeo has announced the launch of
Vimeo Stock, a new global, royalty-free stock marketplace featuring an exclusive collection of high-quality video footage sourced directly from Vimeo’s community of iconic creators. Vimeo Stock unlocks content from Vimeo’s world-renowned community of storytellers, redefining what stock footage can and should look like. Vimeo Stock contributors keep 60-70 percent of revenue generated from their licensed clips (versus the average industry cut of ~35 percent), while subscribers to Vimeo’s paid membership plans always save 20 percent on all stock purchases.
The Getty family has taken full control of
Getty Images Inc. from The Carlyle Group ("Carlyle"). Through the transaction, the Getty family will acquire all of Carlyle's equity interests in Getty Images for cash plus units that provide Carlyle with an ongoing financial interest in the future growth of the Company. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of the third quarter of 2018.
Blend Images photographers have been notified that
Tetra Images has acquired the Contributor Contracts, Distribution agreements and the Blend trademark. Tetra has securely obtained all banking data from Blend and will be mailing the first pdf royalty statements for August sales by email at the end of September. Payment for August sales will be made October 1, 2018. Blend has invoiced all licenses through July 2018 and will be paying out royalties until October, or presumably until all the licenses have been collected.
Alamy has announced that current CEO Andy Harding will leave the business by mutual consent. Alamy Chairman, James West will resume accountability as CEO with immediate effect. James West commented “We would like to thank Andy for his significant contribution to the business since his arrival last year and we wish him every success in his future endeavors.”
Will part-time photographers be able to supply all the future needs of professional photo users? This is one of the most interesting questions facing the stock photo industry today. There is no question that part-time photographers occasionally produce beautiful, creative, exciting images. Sometimes these images are better than anything produced by full-time professionals.
A key to success of any business is supplying customer what they need and want. Sometimes you can sell them things they don’t need, but there is a limit as to how long you can survive with that strategy. Image user don’t want more images. They want to find exactly the right image quickly. They don’t want to be editors. They want someone to do the editing for them. Most don’t have a lot of time to waste.
Getty is contacting its RM photographers with non-exclusive or co-exclusive agreements and asking them to convert all their images in the Getty collection to exclusive so Getty will be the only organization that can license rights to use the images. This may be a particularly difficult decision for photographers with co-exclusive arrangements if they typically license a fair number of uses directly to clients annually. All those future sales will be lost.
If you’ve been a Getty contributor for a long time you might want to check to see if all the images they have accepted over the years are still in the collection. Jonathan Nourok (
www.jonathannourok.com ) has been contributing his botanical images to Getty Images since it was Tony Stone Images almost 30 years ago. He also posts some of the same images on his own website, but since he has an exclusive agreement for licensing with Getty he notes on his website that the images are only available for licensing through
gettyimages.com.
Recently I’ve done three stories examining various aspects of the collections at
Getty and
iStock and
Shutterstock. The chart below provides easy comparisons of these three collections.
I’ve examined the number of images in certain keyword categories at
Getty and
iStock. Today, I’ve done a count of the number of Shutterstock images with the same keywords as the other two agencies to see if it is possible to draw any comparisons. I'll take a look at the comparisons of collection size between Getty and Shutterstock. In addition there are some interesting things to be learned when comparing the number of photos with the number of illustrations on the Shutterstock site.
If the major stock distributors want to sell more pictures it might be a good idea to give photographers more information about the relative demand for certain subjects in terms of number of images licensed and revenue generated by images with certain keywords. If occurred to me that the fastest growing collection on Gettyimages.com is EyeEm. Currently there are 26,024,940 images in the Getty Creative collection and 4,620,578 or
18% of them have been supplied by EyeEm. A little less than two years ago EyeEM only had 256,152 image in the collection.
This story provides some comparative figures of the 205 brands represented in the
Getty Images Creative collection between August 2016 and June 2018. There were 15,001,453 images in the collection in 2016 and 23,922,471 today, a 37% increase overall in two years.