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Articles from June 2014
Fresh, brash and outspoken. With their uninhibited photographic style and unbridled joy of experimentation, food bloggers have conquered a huge fan community on the internet. No wonder even the traditional media are rolling out the red carpet for the new stars. Food bloggers get their own columns, produce cookbook best-sellers and operate cooking shows for an audience of millions. The most interesting among them are now at the center of a new blog where the food image agency
StockFood once again lives up to its reputation as a trendsetter.
In May AdAge reported that the New York based social media agency
Laundry Service has discovered that Instagram photos perform better than more professionally shot photos. The agency found that while regular photos achieved 2.35% click-through rate, Instagram photos achieved an 8% click-through. And even better, Instagram photos led to a 25% increase in conversion rate.
Scoopshot, reports that over 500,000 photographers and videographers from 177 countries contribute images to its service and that more than 70 leading media companies and brands including USA Today, News Corp Australia, Apple Daily, WAZ, Fiat, Finnair, Oxfam and many others use Scoopshot to gain instant access to a global pool of Scoopshooters. In the US, the Scoopshot user base has increased from 14,000 to nearly 50,000 in just six weeks.
Customers are becoming increasingly unhappy with being asked to search through tons of images and still not finding what they want. In many cases it is not that great images are unavailable, it is just that they are buried under tons of less desirable images. Curation is the answer.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a 2012 decision from the Southern District of New York absolving
Photobucket.com, an internet photo-sharing service, from violating Sheila Wolk’s copyright in her fantasy images paintings.
Paul Melcher’s latest on the “
New Photo Agencies” is worth reading. He discusses the Community Builders, the Scrapers, the On Demanders and the Hybrids, and notes that “the barriers between pros and casual photographers are going to completely vanish.”
Everyone agrees there is an oversupply of images. In spite of this fact many professional image buyers claim they can’t find good images or at least the images they need. As I look at what is available online today I think there are more good and great images than there ever have been, but often they are buried under piles of mundane images and images that are irrelevant to buyers needs. The problem is curation.
Footage.net recently asked David Peck, President of
Reelin' in the Years Productions (RITY), the world's largest library of music footage and the exclusive representative of all footage from the Merv Griffin Show, to walk us through the basic steps involved in licensing entertainment and performance related footage.
Is stock photography about making money or just about learning how to take better pictures? There are different ideas on the subject and a variety reasons why photographers take pictures. As editor of Selling Stock, I thought I should make my position on the subject perfectly clear to my readers. The business of photography is changing dramatically. Part of the reason is that money is not a primary driver for many very good photographers that have easy access to image users.
Every year CEPIC brings together picture agencies from all over the world and becomes, for a few days, the Center of the Picture Industry. This year's Congress had over 500 participants from 35 countries and 280 agencies. It was held in the heart of Berlin, a few blocks away from the Brandenburger Tor.
A lot of attention is being given to finding a better way to search for photos. Those who believe technology can solve all the world’s problems are trying to build algorithms that will instantly find exactly the right image to meet the needs of each paying customer. With 1.8 billion photos being uploaded to the web each day and even professional sites like Shutterstock uploading more than 260,000 new photos each week there are more good pictures on any given subject than any professional user has time to look at.
PACA has just released a summary of it Sales Webinar that was conducted in May. The panel consisted of Leslie Hughes from Visual Steam, Candice Murray for Condé Nast and Sonia Wasco from Grant Heilman Photography. You can see the notes and view the power point presentation from the webinar
here.
The wonderful world of electronic tracking can have some downsides. It is great to know the exact GPS location where a picture was taken. This information can also be useful in searching for images that were taken in a particular city, country or other location.
In general, prices and revenue have been declining in the stock photo industry. To a large extent this has been due to oversupply and more and more customers finding the images they need at lower price points. Based on the information I’ve been able to collect, I have made estimates of the average 2013 gross license fee for images in the five major price categories – RM, traditional RF, Midstock, Microstock and Subscription. I want to find out if my readers think these prices are high or low.
Booking opened on June 10 to prospective exhibitors at
Visual Connections New York Image Expo 2014, which will take place on Wednesday, October 22nd.
In early October 2014 the UK government is expected to change its copyright legislation and introduce an
Extended Collective Licensing (ECL) scheme that will enable collecting societies to authorize use of any image within the UK. Please respond to this survey
(
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ECL-Opt-out) before 12pm 23 June 2014.
Every once in a while someone asks me if Corbis is a place to put their images? Corbis has a nice looking website and I assume they are still making a reasonable number of sales, but I never hear much about them. Photographers never tell me the are happy with Corbis sales, either in volume or price.
It may be time to retire Rights Managed as a licensing model. RM pricing doesn’t work for most customers anymore.
Moreover, it no longer really maximizes the potential earnings of photographers. There used to be a time when all image uses were in print. In those day when an art director purchased an image for a magazine ad, a book or a brochure she knew exactly how the image would be used in the layout and how many copies would be printed. Those days are mostly gone forever.
Launched in March 2013,
Stocksy continues to grow dramatically. The company is paying out almost $200,000 a month in royalties and is on tract to generate something in the neighborhood of $5 million in gross revenue in 2014.
PantherMedia has added a handpicked collection of fancy images to its archive of more than 28 million images. The
Premium Collection is composed of special interest images like architecture, food, ecology and sustainability as well as people and lifestlye.
May was another record month for
Image Brief with 128 photographers receiving awards for an average image sale price of $1,238. (That’s $158,464 in total sales.) Three photographers --
Matthew Doggett,
Rainer Waelder and
Slobodan Blagojevic -- each had sales for $10,000 each.
iStock’s sales seem to have been declining over the last few quarters. About 75% of iStock sales are at Midstock prices totaling roughly $180 million in 2013. There are indications that customers and creators are increasingly dissatisfied. One big questions is whether the decline is due to a generally higher priced offering, poor customer service including a less than optimal performing website, or both.
PACA, the Digital Media Licensing Association, has announced that Steve Spelman, incoming PACA President for the 2014 to 2016 term, has made the decision to resign from his position after leaving Corbis. Sarah Fix who has been serving as Vice President will take over the President's duties.
Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins Investor, recently released her 2014 Internet Trends report. Among her findings were that 1.8+ billion photos are uploaded and shared each day. This is up 50% from 1.2 billion in 2013. The biggest numbers are found on WhatsApp and Snapchat. Many uploaders also use Facebook, Instagram and Flickr.