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Articles from June 2018
Other than Shutterstock’s quarterly reports and occasional bits of information from Getty concerning iStock there is virtually no solid information available regarding the annual gross revenue generated by the microstock companies. I decided to take a look at the Poll information that can be found on
Microstockgroup.com of 10 of the leading microstock agencies to see if I could draw any reasonable conclusions about the annual revenue of these companies.
The Mega Agency has signed a deal with American Media, Inc. (AMI), the leading publisher of celebrity journalism and health and fitness magazines in the United States, that makes it AMI’s premium content partner. Mega already globally syndicates exclusive content for AMI, which owns and operates the leading print and digital celebrity and active lifestyle media brands in the United States.
Lohian Networks a keywording agency in India reports that Paris based
Photononstop has not been paying its bills and may be in financial difficulty.
Rashi Jain, Project Coordinator for Lohian Networks reports that in 2016 his company keyworded 3788 images for Photononstop at a rate of $1.25 per image for a total cost of
$4,735.00. Invoices were sent in June and July 2016 via Photosindia in the U.S. Almost two years later these invoices have not been paid after repeated followup requests.
Olycom, a major Italian photographic agency headquartered in Milan and founded in 1958 by Walfrido Chiarini as Olimpia Fotocronache has filed for bankruptcy. Everything regarding debts is in the hands of a judge. LaPresse, the Italian multimedia news agency led by Marco Durante, has acquired the analog and digital libraries of Olycom including the Publifoto brand, the historical archives Olimpia and Olycom and related brands covering the whole of the twentieth century, with a collection of over 15 million images.
Last week, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs approved amendments to the
EU’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. EU’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Among the amendments approved was Article 13.
Scope Features in the UK has gone into voluntary liquidation with nearly £400,000 in unpaid debts and nearly £13,000 in royalties still owed photographers. According to its
statement of affairs filed at Companies House on 17 May, individual photographers are owed sums ranging from £30 to more than £2,000.
One has to wonder if Getty does any analysis of their Creative Collection in terms of what sells and what doesn’t. Clearly, as we
reported yesterday, the largest and fastest growing segment of the Getty collection is EyeEM with 4,558,201 RF images. Back in
August 2016 EyeEm had only recently started contributing to Getty Images and had 256,152 images in the collection. They have 17.79 times as many images now as in 2016. At that time Getty had a total of 16,687,710 images in the Creative Collection. That collection has grown 43% in size in two years, but nothing like EyeEm’s 1779% growth.
In this report I have searched each of the different RM and RF collections on the Creative section of
www.GettyImages.com to determine the number of images in each collection. Collection sizes vary greatly from EyeEm with 4,558,201 RF images to Silkroad Images, PictureIndia, Chic Sketch and Corbis Historical, all with fewer than 200 images each.
Sources tell me that in an all-staff conference call on Wednesday, June 13, 2018, Nick Evans-Lombe and Adrian Murrell informed the
SilverHub.Media staff that the company would be going into administration, the UK version of bankruptcy protection.
Tom Zimberoff has written a very long and detailed story on
Distrupting Stock Photography which makes some strong points about how the industry got to where it is today. Toward the end of his report he outlines a new business model which he calls “Business Made Easy For Photographers.”
The U.S. Copyright Office is proposing changes to fees for copyright registration. The Office has issued a statement outlining the proposed changes in detail, but on average, fees will increase by as much as 41%. According to
the statement, the Office analyzed potential changes to fees and wants to ensure that they are “fair and equitable and give due consideration to the objectives of the copyright system,” as required by the statute.
Shutterstock has announced the launch of its Dublin office with the intent to initially hire 40 professionals including engineering roles, and to potentially grow the team further over the coming years. This project is supported by the Irish Government through IDA Ireland.
One of the big mysteries in the stock photo agency business is the percentage of “
Unique images” licensed annually. Some agencies, like Shutterstock, report the total number of images licensed, but many of those licensed are used by multiple customers so the actual number of
different, unique images used is much smaller.
Imatag has analyzed over 120,000 images on the websites of 23 major news organizations in Europe and North America and determined that
only 3% of those published have credit or copyright metadata. Photographers will be surprised to learn the names of publications stripping data compared to those that credit photographers and leave metadata.
If you’re a photographer that counts on the licensing of stock images to provide a portion of your annual income the following are a few stories you should read. In the past decade stock photography as a business has declined dramatically. There is little hope that the situation will improve.
Back in 2016 Tony and Chelsea Northrup discovered that their image, originally published on the cover of their
Adobe Lightroom 6/CC for Photographers book, had been used by an Australian company on the packaging of a smartphone case, and the product sold in Australia and New Zealand without their permission.
Shutterstock is expanding its aerial footage collection in a new distribution deal that will deliver hundreds of high-quality 4K videos produced by the largest global drone operations company,
DroneBase. From a soaring bird’s-eye view of the biggest cities in the world to incredible coastline vistas, all of this immersive content is now available to license for commercial use on Shutterstock.
In two recent stories
Know Your Return-Per-Image and
Stock Photo Production Costs I discussed two very important issues for anyone trying to earn a portion of their living from stock image production. The issues boil down to
(1) clearly understanding the cost of producing your images and
(2) the return you’re receiving from sales of those images. No business can survive if it spends more to produce its products than it earns from sales.
One of the hardest things for stock photographers to calculate is their actual costs of stock image production. As in any business it is critical to understand your costs if you hope to eventually earn a profit from their production. This story will provide an outline of some of the things that need to be considered when determining costs. It will also provide some average costs figures that some leading professionals work toward.
Stocksy United, the artist-owned photography + cinematography co-op that has tightly limited its membership since its founding in 2012, has made a decision to open its doors to new contributors. Stocksy has seen continued strong growth since its founding due to careful selection of new contributors, tight editing and licensing fees considered reasonable by customers, but still fair to contributors. In 2015 revenue was
$7,928,745, up 126% from $3.5 million in 2014. By the end of 2017 revenue had grown another 26% in two-years to roughly
$10.7 million.