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Articles from July 2019
Forbes Magazine has a story entitled “
Move Over Stock Photos, It’s Time For User Generated Content.” There certainly is an increasing demand for User Generated Content (UGC) and the market is being flooded with it, but there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding how much it is likely to take over the stock photo market.
Photographers trying to license their images as
Rights Managed (RM) need to give some serious though about whether this strategy is still in their best interests. In theory, licensing based on usage should enable a photographer to occasionally get higher prices for certain uses, rather than giving away all future rights and allowing multiple re-uses for a low
Royalty Free (RF) license. The following are some reasons why this “theory” no longer works.
Free Images may not always be FREE. There are not only big legal risks for the users, but also potential time demands on users, creators and lawyers. Most users of Free images don’t recognize the risks they may be taking. One of the big questions for professional photographers is how to help those looking for free images to understand these risks.
Recently, I received a press release from
Freepik.com. The name is a misnomer because not all the pictures on the site are free. They do have about
1,750,000 free vectors, icons and photos, all created or wholly owned by Freepik. In addition, they have over
4,185,000 Premium photos and illustrations supplied by about 8,000 individual creators and distributors of microstock. A little under half of the pieces of content are photos. The rest are illustrations, vectors and icons.
The Internet is a great place for selling things if the finished product must be delivered by FedEx or UPS. But if you’re trying to sell is a digital version of what you’re showing,
then long range your business model doesn’t have much future. It’s too easy to “steal,” “appropriate” or whatever you want to call it.
Shutterstock, has announced its new footage offering—
Shutterstock Elements. Over 3,000 elements captured on cinema-grade cameras and lenses have been added to the site, including transitions, lens flares, VFX (visual effects), video kits, film overlays, HUD (head-up display) and UI (user interface) elements. Compatible with all major video editing programs, Elements also includes detailed tutorials on how to optimize effects.
In the last decade we have all watched the decline of stock photography as more and more photographers got into the game, the total revenue spent by buyers grew very little if at all and even the best photographers have seen significant declines in their annual income.
I suppose this benefited the buyers. Now they are able to get the images they need for much less than they had to pay before – and in most cases much less than their real costs of production.
In olden days when stock photographers were trying to produce images that might be used as covers or full page inside magazines it was advised that they turn the camera on its side and shoot verticals of as many situations as possible. But times have changed. Are verticals really selling today? Recently Robert Kneschke reported on his
web site that he had reviewed 100 of his best selling images and not a single vertical was among the group.
All the people who love to grab photos they find on the Internet and use them however they please are now mobilizing to stop the U.S. Congress from passing the CASE Act that would establish a small claims court system. These
millions of photo users believe they should not be restricted in any way from doing whatever they want with the property of others. Photographers need to
ACT NOW.
Getty Images is moving rapidly to eliminate RM images from its Creative collection. As of July 3rd, there were only
2,387,383 RM images representing about 8% of the total collection of
28,624,340 images. However, it gets worse. There are 54 independent distributors listed as having RM image collections on the site. But, if you search those collections individually you find that only 4 of them have any images for a total of 129,241 images. In most cases the searcher is told “zero results.” The vast majority of images still being licensed as RM are in the Getty wholly owned collections.
It is interesting to note that when we searched the 210 individual collections and recorded the numbers in each the total came to
28,591,367. However, if you go to the site and search for all images you are only shown
26,240,654 images. For those who haven’t tried this you can simply go to
gettyimages.com, enter any keywords and hit return. When the return come up with the “Filter” option on the left hand side of the screen remove the keyword, leave the search bar blank and click again. Now, you will be shown all the images for the “License Type” you have requested. Be sure the “License Type” is set on RF or RM. Then you can go to “Collections,” choose the one you want and see all the images in that collection.
A number of iStock contributors interact on the Facebook “private” group for iStock. In reviewing comments and complaints for the last couple years there seems to be general agreement that sales started to decline in late 2018 and the decline has continued into 2019. This is compared to what sales were in 2017 and early 2018.
One of the big questions about Enterprise sales at Shutterstock is “Why do big customers want an Enterprise deal?” On average Enterprise customers are paying more per quarter than E-commerce customers. What additional services do they get? In 2018 Enterprise customers generated about 40.9% of Shutterstock’s total revenue, or about
$254.8 million. The average Enterprise customer pays Shutterstock $6,370 per year, but they could be getting 750 images per month for $2,388 a year. Maybe they are using a lot of video at $63.16 per clip, but there must be other benefits justifying the paying of the much higher fees.
On the iStock contributor forum Brenda Bazylewski of iStock contributor relations recently reported the following. “We (iStock) were recently made aware of the Chinese website, “
Xiaba” which was offering iStock imagery for personal educational use only, free of charge. According to the terms of their license, the imagery could not be used for commercial or editorial purposes."