Getty Images has announced to its contributors that as part of its initiative to streamline and simplify its collections structure and improve customer experience it will be retiring Jupiterimages.com and Punchstock.com over the course of February and March.
A review of activity on
Jupiterimages.com and
Punchstock.com has confirmed that the majority of customers using these two sites are also
Gettyimages.com customers.
Collections that are only on Jupiterimages and Punchstock will republish in RF collections on
gettyimages.com in early March and the sites will close shortly thereafter. Content already appearing on gettyimages.com and on Jupiter and Punchstock will remain published as it is on gettyimages.com, after the Jupiter and Punchstock platforms are retired.
Currently, there are 105 RF collections on Jupiterimages. Many of them also appear on gettyimages.com and Punchstock. The usage prices on Jupiter are the same as on Getty Image, but when the same image can be found on Punchstock the price is discounted by 10%. Customers looking for the best deal have probably searched on Punchstock before moving to Getty Images to see if they could find something different.
I searched the Creative Images section of
www.gettyimage.com for images with an orientation – horizontal, vertical, panoramic or square – as a keyword. Based on this search Getty has a total of 7,363,072 images on the site. If some of the images were not keyworded with an orientation, it is possible that there are more than this number. Of the total 3,940,238, or 53%, are Royalty Free.
It is unclear how many collections are on Punchstock, but on the home page Getty says that there are “more than 80 collections” that can’t be found on either GettyImages of Jupiterimages.
I did searches for “People” on all three sites and found 2,055,105 RF images on GettyImages; 2,707,300 on Jupiterimages and 2,299,142 on Punchstock. While many of the same images are currently on all three sites, after March there will certainly be a substantial increase in the number of Royalty Free images on
www.gettyimages.com.
Another interesting fact is that of the 2,055,105 RF on gettyimages.com 764,793, or 38% of the total, are from Flickr submissions. There are also 116,670 images from the Vetta collection in iStock.
Vetta images are significantly more expensive when purchased on gettyimages.com than when they are purchase on the iStock site. It is hard to do exact price comparisons because iStock customers get discounts based on the number of credits they purchase, but assuming that a customer purchases 360 credits for $558.00 here are a few examples of price comparisons.
| |
iStock |
Gettyimages |
| 464x756px, 72dpi |
$69.75 |
$239.00 |
| 1357x2213px, 300dpi |
$108.50 |
$449.00 |
| 2472x4031px, 300dpi |
$170.50 |
$639.00 |
| 3444x5616px, 300dpi |
$248.00 |
$699.00 |
Customers can get up to a 172x280px, 72dpi file on Getty for $25 while on iStock if they want the smallest possible 72dpi file they would have to pay $69.75, but they would get a much larger file (approximately 565x849).
Getty says, “We think that contributors and customers will benefit from the consolidation of these platforms on
gettyimages.com.” Since the RF collection will grow significantly we suspect many contributors will find that their images appear much lower in the search-return-order than was the case with Jupiterimages or Punchstock. Given that on most popular searches customers are already shown many more images than they have time to review, it seems likely that the images of many contributors will be seen less often than in the past.