After publishing our article
“Getty’s RF ‘Market Freeze’: Expensive Customer Mess?" I received the following clarifying message from Matthew McKibben, Getty Images, PR Manager in The Americas. He said:
Getty Images offers customers anything they want, but their decisions don't always seem well thought out. In November 2019, Getty Images ended the "right managed" license model, with which image buyers were able to buy, among other things, exclusive image rights for certain regions, industries, etc., which they called the "Market Freeze" feature.
ustomers need a better way to quickly review a selection of images than most stock photo sites offer. They don’t need more images. They need to be able to review the best images quickly. Twenty-five years ago this was possible by reviewing the images that had been placed in tightly edited major agency print catalogs. Now that editing is gone. The current marketing goal seems to be to throw as many images as possible at customers and force them to spend their time doing the editing. Historical trends indicate that most customers have found the mages used by other customers to be most useful for their purposes as well. Most customers are not looking for an image that has never been used.
I define Professional Photographers as individuals who are earning a significant portion of the money they need to support themselves and live comfortably from licensing use to the images they produce. The number of such individuals is disappearing rapidly. All indications are that the number will continue to decline.
I can remember when I was primarily an assignment photographer and occasionally sold outtakes from assignments on the side. Most of the income I needed to support my family came from assignments. Stock sales gave us a little extra. Demand for stock started to grow and it became harder for me to get assignments as I was working in an area where the competition was stiff from a lot of top quality experienced photographers. Buyers wanted to pay a little less than it cost to do an assignment. They liked having instant access to the stock image they needed and not having to spend a lot of their time organizing assignment shoots.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2020 revenue of
$159.2 million down 2% compared to $161.7 million in Q2 2019 and down from $161.3 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download was
$3.61 per-image compared to $3.44 in Q2 2019 and $3.42 the previous quarter. Total image and video downloads for Q2 were
44 million compared to 46.6 million a year earlier and down from 46.8 million from the previous quarter. At the end of the quarter Shutterstock had over
340 million images and
19 million video clips in its collection,
Shutterstock has entered into a partnership with Microsoft to give brands access to the stock photography company’s library of images for use in ads. The API integration with Microsoft Advertising will give advertisers on the Microsoft Audience Network
FREE ACCESS to millions of commercially licensed images.
Shutterstock’s gross revenue in 2019 was
$648,500,000. Total royalties paid out to all contributors in 2019 was about
$181,730,000. Total Shutterstock stock owned by Jon Oringer is worth over $650,000,000.
A
Getty Images photographer reports that he gets a lot of sales to a Scottsdale, Arizona company called
Design Pickle that offers full design services to businesses. Getty licenses these photo uses for
$0.17. The photographer gets a
$0.03 royalty for his work.
Now that all of
Getty Images’ Creative Image offering is Royalty Free the company seems to be trying go occasionally get a somewhat higher price for certain uses by offering a
Market Freeze. They tell customers, “With Market-freeze, you can rest easy knowing we'll remove this image from our site for as long as you need it, with custom durations and total buyouts available.”