9
RANDOM THOUGHTS 95
January 21, 2005
Editorial Prices At Getty
In an effort to expand its volume of sales to editorial customers Getty is offering some very attractive pricing.
Recently, Selling Stock received a copy of an internal memo being distributed by IPC Media in the London. IPC is probably one of the largest magazine publishers in the UK with at least 85 titles and selling over 330 million copies each year. IPC is owned by Time Inc, the publishing division of Time Warner and the company is more that 150 years old. You can learn more about the company at its website www.ipcmedia.com. Pertinent parts of memo are as follows:
IMAGES TEAM SECURES IMPROVED GETTY AGREEMENT
IPC Images, part of the IPC+ business, announces a new and much improved price agreement with Getty Images. Following on from the successful IPC-wide agreement implemented last year, the new greatly-reduced rates will give our magazines access to a much wider range of content and virtually all of Getty Images' vast collections. Getty Images is the world's leading image provider to communication professionals with collections covering news, sport, entertainment, lifestyle and stock imagery.
Intellectual property manager Mark Winterton said: "Getty is implementing extremely competitive prices for all our titles, giving us access to a huge amount of high quality images. With prices starting at £25 for up to a quarter page for celebrity content, and £60 for news, sport and all other rights managed content, this agreement will be good news for everyone." The new agreement will not affect any existing subscription agreements that any title has in place with Getty Images.
£25 is equivalent to $46.51 at today's rates and £60 is equivalent to $111.62. Agencies trying to sell to these publications should be aware that this is what the competition is offering. Photographers should note that these prices are for "all other rights managed content" as well as news content. This means that if one of these publications goes to the Creative section of Getty Images and chooses images from any of the Getty brands or the 3rd Party RM suppliers these are the prices they will be paying to use that image.
The note about "existing subscription agreements" refers to agreements many publications have that allow them, for a monthly fee, to make unlimited use of sports, news and entertainment images found at the Editorial section of Getty's web site. It seems likely that in most cases the subscription rate would work out to be less than the per-image rates cited above, or otherwise the editors would be encouraged to switch from subscriptions to paying on a per-use basis.
Nothing is said in the memo about the use of Royalty Free images. Since RF rates are usually higher than these price RF images may not be included in this agreement. On the other hand Getty may have arrangements with its RF suppliers that allows them to discount RF prices for bulk purchasers.
We suspect that Time Warner in New York is paying similar rates.
Corbis Moves Into Rights Representation
Corbis has announced a new multi-year license agreement with Marvel Enterprises to handle licensing and rights clearances of their trademarked brands for editorial and commercial use on a global basis.
Corbis will represent the rights to thousands of images featuring Marvel's expansive library of more than 5,000 characters -- including such ever?popular figures as Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Elektra, and Captain America -- and makes them available for use in print and broadcast media. The arrangement provides creatives with simple access to Marvel character art and the rights clearance services necessary to use them in editorial and commercial advertising projects.
"Marvel's character brands are recognized around the world. Their vast library of Super Heroes offers advertisers an inspiring new way to tell their stories with iconic characters and images," said Gary Shenk, Corbis senior vice president, editorial image licensing and rights services. "Marvel's characters are a great example of the innovative properties and services that Corbis brings to creatives around the world."
"This agreement reflects our strategy to prudently 'mine' our character portfolio by teaming with industry leaders in each area of commercial opportunity," said Tim Rothwell, Marvel president, worldwide consumer products group. "Corbis global reach and rights expertise make them the ideal partner to lead this initiative. Through this relationship, we will be able to leverage the potential of the entire library of Marvel characters, maximizing the media exposure our characters receive and the financial contribution."
Corbis' Zefa Collection Size
The zefa collection of images acquired by Corbis consists of about 385,000 digital images. Zefa photographers produced about 100,000 of these images. The remaining 285,000 were supplied by other agencies with Masterfile being the largest single supplier.
Based on these figures the average annual sales for images in the collection would be about $107 per-image. This per-image average is much higher than the Corbis file currently generates given that over 3 million images produce about $145 million in sales. The difference is probably explained by the proportion of sales each company makes to the lower priced editorial market, and not by any general difference in pricing strategy.
The revenue zefa currently generates from the U.S. market is less than 1% of its total. It is unclear whether that is due to a lack of demand in the U.S. for European style imagery or whether it has more to do with how the collection has been marketed in the U.S. It seems certain that Corbis' will aggressively market the zefa collection in the U.S. in the coming year and zefa photographers should begin to get some idea of the U.S. market's demand for their work.
A Good Year For Goodshoot
Goodshoot had sales of approximately 2 million Euros ($2.59 million) in 2004 from their collection of approximately 15,000 images. 60% of that revenue came from their network of about 80 distributors in 40 countries and the remainder from direct sales. Recently, Corbis became one of their distributors.
Philippe Bigard, manager of Goodshoot, told me that since their founding about seven years ago everything they have produced is wholly owned. Two or three times a year they will do a production shoot of approximately ten days. They hire photographers on a project basis to do the shooting and pay all the other costs. Such productions cost about 60,000 Euros, not counting the after shoot production costs which may be another 60,000 Euros. On the last shoot they produced about 13,000 images and after editing approximately 1,000 went into distribution.
All this is accomplished with a staff of seven.
Getty In India
Getty Images has established a relationship with Visage Media Services in Mumbai, India a seven-month-old company that works with the India's top advertising agencies.
Visage Media's chief operating officer Srini Klambi says, "The partnership is an initiative on the part of Getty Images to serve its Indian clients better. Indian agencies had to source pictures from Singapore earlier."
Visage also plans to develop India based image content in line with Getty's international standards. According to Kilambi pictures of India icons like the Taj Mahal are plentiful, "but everyday pictures for an Indian product are difficult to find."
For instance, when a famous Indian hospital in the south wanted to advertise, agencies could not locate a picture of an Indian doctor operating on an Indian patient; the available pictures featured foreign doctors only, he recalls.