Change View Options:
Articles from May 2017
As prices for the use of stock photos decline it becomes important to find ways to cut overhead and production costs in order to earn a profit from your efforts. If you’re a photographer, living in New York or Western Europe, and looking to for ways to reduce the costs of studio production shoots with multiple models you might want to consider flying to Kiev, Ukraine.
In a comment to my
previous story, Sarah Fix of Blend Images pointed out that technology solutions alone may not provide photographers with the information they need to make the most productive use of their time and resources.
A fundamental flaw with stock photography as a business is that producers have little or no access to the data necessary to understand demand. In most any other business the producer has some idea of what is selling and how much demand there is for the particular product.
PantherMedia announces the launch of its Premium Collection to potential contributors around the world. Inspired by the Panther DNA their Premium Collection aspires to have an identifiable unique spirit that combines elegance and strength with a touch of danger.
In one of its recent promotions directed to customers,
Getty Images has identified three trending search terms, Mismatch, Heroines and Internet of Things. See what images you find using these terms.
Shutterstock, Inc. has released its 2017
Contributor Earnings report, which features it’s milestone of having paid out over $500 million in the 13 years since 2004 to the Company's global community of over 225,000 photographers, illustrators, digital artists, and videographers.
Depositphotos has opened
Lightfield Studios the biggest photography studio in Eastern Europe. With this launch, Depositphotos expands its services to include a first-class photography studio, available for rent, for creative professionals from all over the world.
According to a survey conducted by the European CEPIC industry association, 85% of the images found by visual search systems are illegal copies. 80% of these illegal images were distributed through search engines like the Google image search.
According to MediaPost’s IoT Daily, the Real Estate industry is moving into Virtual Reality. It may be an opportunity for stock photographers looking for a way to diversify their businesses.
Is Rights Managed(RM) licensing still a viable business model if your goal is to earn the maximum from your image collection? For most image creators the answer is clearly NO, particularly if part of the deal is to place your images exclusively with a single RM distributor.
Many of the non-sellers are very good images and would sell if customers only had a chance to see them. Back in January in as story entitled “
How Can Shutterstock Grow Revenue?” I outlined an idea for a two-tier pricing system that could not only work for Shutterstock, but many other distributors with large collections, and grow their revenue, even if there is no increase in the number of images downloaded.
I wrote about the huge percentage of images being produced by a relatively small number of
large production companies. Let me examine in some detail how one of these companies operates.
Photographee.eu is a microstock production company in Lodz, Poland. It is owned and operated by Kasia and Lech Bialasiewicz. Lodz is Poland’s 3rd largest city located right in the middle of the country. According to the
microstock.top list of Shutterstock suppliers photographee.eu is its 157th largest collection (out of over 190,000) with over 76,000 images at Shutterstock. These same images are marketed through multiple distributors.
Where are the major producers of stock images located? One might expect then to live in New York, London, Los Angeles and Berlin near where the major customers. We also must not forget San Francisco, Seattle and Calgary. Think again.
Adobe Stock has released a new Visual Trends report on
Purpose Over Beauty based on studying images in more than 75 million social engagements. They found that a lack of content that makes a powerful statement cannot be disguised by pretty packaging.
Blend has launched a promotion they call “
Monthly Free Shoot.” Each month they will offer their customers all the images from one entire Premium Royalty Free shoot for unlimited, absolutely FREE use, according to the standard RF license.
On May 9, EyeEm announced the launch of
EyeEm Videography Early Creator program a stock video platform that will use the same artificial intelligence that powers the still-image option to automatically keyword and organize videos. Current EyeEm users can upload clips between 5 and 40 seconds long as the platform prepares to completely integrate video into the EyeEm platform later this year. The company has already tested the system by invitation-only, with selected users submitting video in the aerial, urban, travel, food, and nature categories.
Pearson has begun “a strategic review” of its U.S. school publishing business which has been a drag on growth due to intense competition. Their goal is to speed up the company’s transition to a slimmer, more digital group. They intend to either sell, or seek a joint venture partner, for their schoolbooks division that represents about 8% or £360 ($466) million of the company’s business.
A meeting between Google Germany and the German Association of Picture Agencies,
BVPA is set for May 9, 2017 in Google’s Berlin office. On Thursday, May 11, 2017 the French trade association of "online content publishers",
GESTE, has called their members to a "working meeting" to look into the impact on traffic of the new features of Google Images on the websites of GESTE's members. Reports of both meetings will be available on
CEPIC.org.
Shutterstock makes a big deal about expanding its number of Enterprise customers. The last number they reported for Enterprise customers was 36,000 and just this week they said that Enterprise customers generate 32% of their revenue ($41.6 million for Q1 2017). Getty has an Enterprise program for its best customers which they call Premium Access. We have no idea how many customers fall into this category, but based on examining photographer sales reports my guess is that it is at least as many as Shutterstock, and probably more. A few years ago Getty said that any customer that spent $6,000 a year with them could qualify for Premium Access. I suspect that number is much lower now.
Jim Erickson has adopted a new marketing strategy for selling stock video. Instead of just offering clips he has created powerful, intimate and compelling prepackaged video stories, with narration, on themes related to healthcare and seniors. On his newly
re-launched site he has 15 stories. More stories and themes are expected soon.
Cultura RM is the first RM Collection to join
PantherMedia after the company announced its new
Rights Managed licensing strategy last month.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2017 revenue of $130.2 million. This revenue was up 12% from Q1 2016, but exactly the same as revenue in Q4 2016. Revenue per download increased 7% from $2.77 in Q1 2016 to about $2.96. Revenue per download in Q4 2016 was $3.02. At the end of the quarter there were 132 million images in the collection and 6.9 million video clips. This was up from 116.2 million images at the end of 2016.
The Mega Agency has signed an exclusive syndication partnership with the
New York Post, one of the most famous names in the American publishing world.