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Articles from March 2016
Last fall, BVPA, the German association of picture agencies, asked me a series of questions about the U.S. market for stock photography and where I think it is headed. The following is what I told them along with links to a few relevant stories.
The Mega Agency, a new global media business, focused on delivering editorial images, is pleased to announce that David Ellis has been recruited as UK Sales Director.
Agencies need to think hard about supplying contributors with more detailed information about exactly what is being requested and what is really selling. It used to be enough to provide general information about the broad categories of subject matter in demand. At that point they would leave it up to the individual creator to guess at what buyers -- with whom they have no contact whatsoever -- might want. That is no longer enough. Shooting based on gut feelings no longer works.
After reading my
previous story investors in stock photo companies as well as image buyers may ask, “Why should we care if professional photographers stop producing stock images?”
A Korean subscriber recently asked the following questions. “I notice you say that many photographers are unable to earn enough money and end up leaving the market. Is there any specific number that you can prove? How many photographers/contributors were there in the past and now?
A videographer wrote recently complaining that two of his video clips had been sold by Getty Images to Viacom for a broadcast show on Comedy Central. This show also appears on the web. These two sales were made through a Premium Access deal and netted the videographer a whopping $8.46 for the two sales.
There is a huge amount of focus on Visual Search and its potential for the stock photo industry. In my opinion Visual Search Will Not Solve The Problems Stock Photo Customers Face. Visual search can be very useful in finding an image that the customer has a copy of in hand. It can find all the uses on the Internet of a particular image, but that’s not what most customers want.
Recently, a photographer ask the following questions: Is stock photography a growing industry. I have read some analysis that say it is growing significantly, but others argue that free stock photography and microstock photography are leading photographers to leave the market. What is your opinion on that argument? Should a photographer upload the same pictures to as many other agencies as possible?
Over the past year, one of
Shutterstock’s engineering teams has spearheaded and modified computer vision technology to introduce more innovative search and discovery features and to improve the customer’s overall site experience.
Stock footage and photography company
Dissolve will be introducing its popular Liftoff program to filmmakers at NAB 2016, April 16-21 in Las Vegas.
It is getting harder and harder for photographers to protect their copyright. With PicScout, TinEye, Google Image Search and other reverse image search solutions it is easy enough to locate uses of specific images online. But, it can be very laborious to search one-by-one for particular images in a large collection, and it can be costly to have someone like PicScout do it for you.
Adobe Stock has announced that it now has over 50 million high-res photos, vectors, illustrations, HD videos including some 4K videos to its collection.
The annual
CEPIC Congress, the world’s largest event where licensors of still still and footage get to together to discuss issues facing their industry, will be held from 25 to 27 May 2016 in Zagreb, Croatia at the Sheraton Zagreb Hotel.
I want to call your attention to a couple of comments to my recent story “
Curated Collections: The Future.” It is important to recognize that there are some great images on most of the stock photo sites with tens of millions of images. But as we shove everything that meets certain technical standards onto these sites, it becomes harder and harder to sort through all the mediocre shots and find the few great ones.
As revenues have declined in recent years due to declining sales for the use of images in print, and increasing use of images on the web at much lower prices, many French editorial agencies have found it necessary to reorganize. Jean Michel Psaila, CEO and owner of
Abaca Press says, “The market has changed. We used to get €200 for print use. Now we get €5 for online use.”
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced a three-year deal with The Associated Press (AP) to distribute AP's daily global photo and packaged video output for license to customers based in the United States. This milestone will also give U.S. Shutterstock editorial customers access to over 30 million photos and nearly 2 million video clips from, respectively, AP Images and AP Archive.
Dreamstime has made changes to its Extended License policy allowing users to produce unlimited copies of purchased media. Previously, customers purchased extended licenses for print or web usage of an image and were restricted by limits on the number of copies they could reproduce, for example for t-shirts, on-demand printed items, or e-cards.
If you’re a Getty contributor and your sales and revenue have been declining, it may be time to do some searches on Gettyimages.com as a customer would search. Input some of the generic keywords that a customer might use to find your images. See where your images fall in the search return order.
If you’re in the editorial photography business keep your eye on
The Mega Agency. This company is a new editorial stock agency founded by the people who started Splash. Splash later became a key part of the Corbis editorial offering.
It seems to me that all VCG bought when they acquired Corbis was: (1) The right to put out a press release saying, “We are the largest stock photo source in China,” (2) The removal of Corbis content from ImagineChina, which many believe was previously the largest stock photo agency in China, and (3) We bought a company from Bill Gates. Rumor has it that Bill Gates was paid $225 million for Corbis.
While there has been a great deal of discussion recently about the possibility of Congress creating a small claims process for visual arts, several visual artist groups, representing hundreds of thousands of creators, have joined forces to propose key components of potentially forthcoming small claims legislation. Collectively, the groups represent photographers, photojournalists, videographers, illustrators, graphic designers, artists, and other visual artists as well as their licensing representatives.
Getty Images has contacted Veer contributors to explain what will happen to their imagery as a result of the
sale of Corbis to VCG. Their imagery will not be integrated into the Getty Images collection. Veer contributors may apply to iStock for possible upload of their content there. The memo says: