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Articles from August 2016
The Mega Agency is launching with an archive of 30 million images after signing a ground-breaking agreement with
Newscom, the world’s largest multi-agency archive of digital images.
The 2016 DMLA Annual Conference (
http://digitalmedialicensing.org/conference.shtml) will return to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Jersey City, October 27-29. Registration fees are due to go up on September 1st, but the deadline for the discounted rate has been extended to September 9th for those who use the promo code
DMLA16.
If you’ve been shooting all summer and haven’t had time to keep up with your reading here are links to a few stories you might want to check out as we move into the fall. To begin, be sure to complete the recent
Stock Photo Revenue Trends Survey. Initial results show that two-thirds of the respondents have seen their annual revenue decline since 2010 with the most significant declines in the 2013 to 2015 period. However, 19% of respondents saw revenue growth of 20% or more between 2013 and 2015.
Recently, I decided to take a look at the number of images in the various Creative collections on
Gettyimages.com. The numbers are very revealing and in some ways surprising. Getty has 16,687,710 million images in its Creative collection, 10,341,296 of them or 62% are RF and the rest are RM. (Obviously, these numbers grow slightly every day.)
Of the millions of stock images which ones are actually being purchased and used by customers? Photographers trying to earn a living need better information about exactly what images are selling so they don’t waste time shooting things no one is interested in buying.
I have been told that there are at least 650 million images available for easy licensing in various databases around the world. This doesn’t include all the images that can be found by searching Google, Bing and the social media web sites where other images can be found, but not easily licensed. Only between 1% and 4% of these are ever licensed. Do photographers need better information so they don't waste so much time shooting all those images no one wants to use?
Selling-Stock is conducting a worldwide, blind
Stock Photo Revenue Trends survey and is asking all photographers who earn money through licensing rights to some of their images to respond. Individuals can respond to the short, 8 question survey by going to this
link. A full report of the results will be available to each respondent.
According to
Reuters China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin, is stepping up his push to take over one of the major Hollywood studios.
Seattle based
Blend Images workflow team is seeking an innovative, results-oriented, stock video professional to oversee content editing, quality control, distribution and support of its fast building stock clip library. The ideal candidate will have experience in stock video production, solid technical skills, sound business judgment and work well in a team environment.
Today, Peter James made comments on my
Facebook page to several of the stories listed there. I can understand his frustration. Here are links to the stories he looked at, his comments and my reactions to those comments.
Darrell Perry has been named Executive Director of
ASPP (American Society of Picture Professionals) and has written to members and friends informing them of recent changes and asking for help in recruiting new members.
Do photographer’s care if their name is attached to their images, or just that the images generate some revenue for them? While doing some recent searches, I discovered it can sometimes be very difficult to determine who created an image.
Three senior news executives have joined Kevin Smith’s new media company,
The Mega Agency. Smith is delighted to announce that Paul Tetley, David Leigh and Karlo Pastrovic have joined the Mega team.
Picfair, a London-based image licensing startup launched two years ago, has announced that it now has more than three million images in its collection. “Our three millionth image was uploaded by a photographer in China, of a family playing ping pong in a Beijing park,” says Picfair founder Benji Lanyado.
Alamy reports that a current visual trend seems to take advantage of “instagram – like” filtering that pulls up the black point of the image and reduces the contrast.
Brooks Institute, possibly the premier photography trade school in the U.S., has announced that after 70 years of training media and visual arts students it will close its doors on October 31. Students, faculty, and staff were informed of the closing at a meeting with school representatives on the morning of August 12, 2016.
A US-based celebrity photo agency is currently looking for a buyer interested in taking over its operations or acquiring its archives. Founded in 2003 by a music photographer, the company has established reputable and strong relationships with publications, artists and publicists. With just one highly motivated owner who wishes to retire, it is profitable, has no debt and is reasonably priced. A buyer could either manage the company as an independent archive or integrate the archive (1.4 Million images, fully captioned in English) to its own collection.
If you’re curious as to why Shutterstock’s stock price keeps rising while from the perspective of many in in our industry Shutterstock’s long term growth prospects don’t appear to be that favorable, David Trainer offers some interesting insights. See
here. Trainer is CEO of New Constructs (
www.newconstructs.com), an independent research firm that leverages proprietary technology to find key insights from the Financial Footnotes of 10Ks and 10Qs. After studying his analysis here are a few of my thoughts.
It is that time of year when students are getting ready to head off to college. Most will go there because it sounds like more fun than going out and getting a job and because they have been told that a “higher education” will give them a better chance at future career advancement and eventually earning more money.
Some European photographers, particularly in France, think many of our industry’s problems could be solved with a Photographer’s Union. Unfortunately, a Union of Professional Photographers would probably only make the situation worse for most union members.
Pond5, the world’s largest provider of royalty-free stock videos, music tracks and sound effects, as well as millions of photos, has announced the appointment of
Jason Teichman as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer and Board Director. In this role, Teichman will help the company continue to accelerate its growth by scaling its creative marketplace, leveraging its unique relationship with the artist community, and furthering its investments in emerging media such as drone footage and 360-degree video.
Blend Images, the world's leading multicultural stock photography agency, has recently announced the launch of a new website with a focus on world-class curated royalty free imagery
and motion clips. The new
Blendimages.com offers an improved user interface, a simplified pricing model, large image previews, and is the only place to search the entire Blend Images collection.
RM photographer working with the major stock production companies may have some very difficult decisions to make in the near future.
With the rise of
Offset,
Stocksy,
AdobeStock Premium and
iStock Signature it seems that RM photographers that are not also owners or shareholders of production companies, like
Blend Images,
Image Source and
Tetra Images, may find that they can earn more by moving their collections to RF.
A reader sent me a note recently indicating that after seeing an
Offset promotion he had asked
Shutterstock the following question: “Do you think, clients - professional or not - are expecting this level of imagery from a high end collection?” The images shown in the promotion were taken in Thailand by Brooklyn-based photographer
Lucy Schaeffer. The Offset tagline said “her images mix refined, understated luxury with the country’s beautiful and dramatic scenery. Be Transported.” The following are links
here and
here show the two images that were shown in the promotion.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2016 revenue of $124.4 million up from $104.4 million compared to Q2 2015. The growth is due mainly to new customers and increased activity by enterprise clients.
This is an update on the story we
published last week concerning Carol Highsmith’s
copyright infringement suit against Getty Images and other defendants.
Imaginechina has been acquired by Bytedance, a digital tech company based in Beijing. The stock agency will continue to operate independently as a photo, video and commercial licensing agency serving editorial media, advertisers, creative agencies and brands, in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.