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Articles from March 2018
Now that 500px has been
sold to VCG it appears that the 500px Marketplace is in transition. Major contributors to Marketplace are receiving notices that their agreements will be terminated effective June 27, 2018. It is not clear that Marketplace will cease all licensing of imagery at that time, but that appears to be the case.
When it comes to pursuing copyright infringements the biggest problem for photographers is not finding unauthorized uses, but finding too many. Photographers can do their own searches using
Google Images or
Tineye. Once a use is found, the photographer must search his/her records to determine if the image has ever been licensed, and if so, the terms of the license.
Given stock imagery oversupply, and ever falling prices, in order to justify continued production of the type of images customers want to buy, professional image creators need to find a way to reduce, or eliminate, some of the middleman cuts.
All photographers and copyright holders in the U.S. are urged to contact their Congressional Representative and ask them to
Vote in Favor of H.R. 3945 – a bill to create a Small Claims Court! The bill is likely to be out of the House Judiciary Committee mark-up and ready for a vote the week of April 9th. Your representative needs to hear from you now! Grass-root support is imperative!
I was talking to a photographer recently who has both RM and RF collections with Getty Images. The question he faces is whether to put new images into the RM or RF collections. Getty is pushing many of its photographers to move many of their images from RM to RF. Certainly, there is a much better chance that an image will get used if it is available for licensing as RF rather than RM. But, if the photographer’s goal is to maximize revenue, will images offered as RF earn as much revenue overall as those offered as RM?
If stock agencies really want to help their customers the most important thing they could do is make it possible for customers to search for just those image that have been previously “Used.” The biggest problems facing customers today is too much choice. Only a very small percentage of the images in the major agency collections are ever licensed, but customers have no way to distinguish the used images from those that have never been used.
One of the issues these videographers face is accurately tagging their video clips so they can be easily discovered by customers.
Microstocksolutions LLC has released its
VRmeta® app for iOS and Android that is designed to make it easier for videographers to accurately tag their digital video and 360°/ VR clips with time and location-based metadata.
I’ve been asked by an iStock exclusive contributor with more than 10,000 images in the collection if he should go non-exclusive and put his images with multiple agencies. This contributor has been regularly adding new images, but his gross revenue has been steadily declining month by month.
In
Aurora Photos latest newsletter to contributors President and Founder José Azel offered insights on the current state of the stock photo industry that are worth every stock photographer considering
The Football Association (FA), the governing body of English Football, has announced that it has awarded
SilverHub Media UK Ltd. (SilverHub) and
Shutterstock, Inc. an exclusive multi-year agreement to cover photography, distribution, and syndication services around key events and activities.
In a joint letter to the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee these trade organizations
CEPIC,
EFJ,
EVA, and
Pyramide Europe are calling European legislators to urgently correct the theory of law used by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) involving the use of framing/embedding technology on the Internet.
Masters of Photography (MoP) has announced the launch of its first online video masterclass with legendary photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Masters of Photography is a new and unique online learning platform which brings together some of the worlds most acclaimed photographers; the Masters. Students can enjoy an unprecedented insight into the way the Masters work during intimate lessons that capture their knowledge, ethos and philosophy.
Marketers are often told that the images they use in their marketing materials should be “unique” – whenever possible unique to their own business. In theory, that is one reason why so many experts claim that stock images are bad.
But, is that true? Do most image user follow this advice?
Shutterstock, has announced the expansion of its leadership team with three hires over the last six months. David Petts as Chief Revenue Officer, Lou Weiss joins the company as Chief Marketing Officer and Lisa Nadler, who joined the company in 2017, as Chief Human Resources Officer.
I have been looking at some of the Visual Trends 2018 reports. I hope they are helping customers because I don’t think they are doing much for image creators. Take
Getty’s trend report which evidently came out of the UK office. They say, “our Creative team analyzed 1 billion searches and 400 million imagery downloads on GettyImages.com, studied advertising trends, and examined pop culture shifts to predict three defining visual trends of 2018.
Trying to decide how much you should charge for your image can be a bit like asking “how long’s a piece of string?” At
Copytrack we help photographers get paid for uses of their work. When using us a photographer receives around 360 EURO ($443) for each one of their images successfully licensed.
Over 60 years ago I decided that because I enjoyed taking pictures I wanted to pursue photography as a way of earning my living. I’ve had a great career, but as a profession things have changed dramatically. For anyone starting out today it is much more difficult to get a foothold – and much less likely that you will ever earn reasonable money – taking pictures for a living.
Every six months Dimmy Ran, Creative Content Director of HelloRF, a subsidiary of ZCOOL, prepares a detailed analysis of the search behaviors and sales trends of their Chinese customers. This information is sent to HelloRF contributors with the hope that it will help then create more competitive stock image content. While this information is specific to Chinese customer demand, it may also have relevance to customer demand in other countries around the world.
After six years of connecting advertising agencies and brands with image creators ImageBrief has announced that they are closing down their marketing services. Effective March 1, 2018 when photographers who have subscribed to the service login the only page available to them is the one where they may download information about their licenses. No other website pages are operational. No new “Briefs” will be offered.
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This stock photography news site focuses on the business side of photography with a special emphasis on stock photography. Our goal is to help photographers maximize their earnings based on the quality of their work and the commitment they are prepared to make to the trade. The information provided will be applicable to part-timers as well as full time professional photographers. We’ll leave it to others to teach photographers how to take better pictures.
Jim Pickerell launched his career as a photographer in 1963. In 1990 he began publishing a regular newsletter on stock photography. In 1995 the information was made available online as well as in print and was gradually expanded to a daily service.
Click here for Pickerell's full biography.
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