Agencies/Distributors
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that on January 4, 2018, the Company invested $15.0 million in convertible preferred shares issued by Zcool Network Technology Limited ("Zcoolto”). Zcool's primary business is the operation of an e-commerce platform in China whereby customers can pay to license content contributed by creative professionals. The platform has nearly six million registered users. Zcool has been the exclusive distributor of Shutterstock creative content in China since 2014.
Getty Images and Google have announced an agreement that includes a multi-year global licensing partnership, enabling Google to use Getty Images’ content within its various products and services. “This agreement between Getty Images and Google sets the stage for a very productive, collaborative relationship between our companies,” said Dawn Airey, CEO, Getty Images. “We will license our market leading content to Google, working closely with them to improve attribution of our contributors’ work and thereby growing the ecosystem.”
As of January 31st Anthony Harris has stepped down as CEO of Image Source and Christina Vaughan has returned to the CEO position. In 2015 Christina turned over her leadership of Image Source to Mr. Harris, but remained a small shareholder. She moved to the position of CEO at
CueSongs, and oversaw the initial deployment and beta testing of the new CuePro platform, which won the Technology Strategy Board competition in 2014 and received a substantial grant to develop its “Frictionless Music Licensing for Online Broadcast”.
IPA,
Independent Photo Agency, one of the most important Italian photo agencies, has announced the acquisition of
Photofoyer, which specializes in interior design and architecture photography. The purpose of the acquisition is to start a strategic project for the expansion of IPA’s creative sector, increasing its operations both at the European and extra-European context.
If you’re interested in news about the stock footage industry you ought to be reading the
Stock Footage Newsroom blog.
In a recent edition David Seevers of
Footage.net has provided a very detailed report on the highlights of what happened in the stock footage business in 2017. Footage.net If provides serious footage researchers with the opportunity to search across 30 of the world’s top stock footage archives with a single search, enabling researchers to find better content and save time. Footage.net also offers powerful tools for locating hard-to-find stock footage and simplifying the footage search process.
The Barcelona-based photolibrary
www.album-online.com has upgraded its website, designed & powered by its own internal team, with some improvements which will benefit photobuyers, including reverse image search, and bigger thumbnails so users can see if the picture meets their needs more quickly.
Shutterstock has announced that in its 14-year history it has licensed more than 1 billion royalty free images, videos and music tracks across all of its businesses. Currently the company has more than 170 million commercial images, 40 million editorial images and 9 million video clips in its collections.
It used to be when a major corporation like British Petroleum (BP) went looking new images their art department would come up with a rather specific concept for what they needed. Then they would review photographer portfolios and hire a photographer to do the job. They would pay $1,500 per day, plus expenses for the shoot. Leading, experienced photographers often received significantly higher day rates.
Shutterstock has released its
2018 Creative Trends Report. Every year, Shutterstock customers across the world make billions of searches for images, footage, and music. Shutterstock creative teams analyze this search and download data to discover the biggest year-over-year increases and identify the trends they believe will continue to grow throughout 2018.
One Shutterstock photographer who has resided in various countries at different times reports that the Shutterstock search engine seems to use the contributor’s IP address as part of the algorithm to rank images higher or lower in the search return order based on location.
After publishing the
story on IPStock on Friday I had some further questions particularly in regard to how customers actually pay for the use of images and how the photographers would receive payment. Askold Romanov, answered my questions.
Kodak and
WENN Digital, in a licensing partnership, have announced the launch of the KODAKOne image rights management platform utilizing blockchain technology and KODAKCoin, a photo-centric cryptocurrency to empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management.
Copytrack, the German organization that tracks use of images on the Internet and then pursues infringers when an unauthorized use is discovered has announced that its “blockchain powered copyright registry and enforcement platform is preparing the enter the second round of the crowdsale” as a way of raising revenue for future expansion.
Broadly, there are two different categories of photographer who produce stock images. I believe way less than 7% of Shutterstock contributors are earning enough annually to view stock photography as a career. A contributor probably needs a collection of at least 20,000 images to earn a reasonable amount of money by U.S. standards. At least 93% of Shutterstock contributors have fewer than 1,000 images in the collection and their average income is less than $200 annually. See the breakdowns.
At the end of 2016 Shutterstock had 190,000 contributors. By May 2017 that number was up to 225,000 and in September when they launched
Shutterstock Custom Content they said they had 250,000 contributors. Presumably the number was even higher at the end of the year.
Following its
Visual Trends predictions for 2018, Adobe recently released a deep analysis of its first trend –
Silence and Solitude. In this chaotic, always-on world where people are bombarded with constant speeds and feeds, the Adobe is seeing a growing demand for images that convey comfort and regeneration.
Last week Shutterstock notified its editorial shooters that they had begun showcasing all of their Premier Editorial content on Shutterstock.com. Previously this content has only been accessible through the Shutterstock Premier website. “The new editorial tab will include our historic Rex collection, images from strategic partners, including AP, BFA, epa, and live coverage of breaking news, entertainment and sports events,” they said.
After
PETA (People For Ethical Treatment Of Animals) pointed out that monkeys and great apes suffer immensely when used for photo shoots—and that images of these animals in unnatural settings can harm conservation efforts and bolster the illegal wildlife trade—Shutterstock agreed to remove and ban all such photographs and videos of these species from its collection as well as from those of its subsidiary Bigstock.
Storyblocks has published a
2018 Trends Guide that features predictions for the year ahead based on 64M searches and 38M downloads across their sites in the last year (365 days). The results suggest that creators are increasingly globally aware and creating a strong increase in demand for diverse and global content.
A three-year-old specialist stock agency in France call
HOsiHO (meaning High So High, in French) is finding strong demand for aerial stock photography. The agency has a collection of 3000 aerial videos and stills shot by a pool of more than 40 talented contributors based at the four corners of France.
Recently, a
Microstockgroup post by
Hochmann asked, “Why all the hate towards Getty Images?” He went on to say, “Yes, I know that they give 20% as a commission while a bunch of other companies start at 35% and many of them go above 50%.
But the thing is that in Getty you're getting 20% of photographs sold for $100 or $1000 instead of 50% of 1 dollar.”
Getty Images has sent out a promotion inviting customers to
“Stretch Your 2017 Budget Into 2018 With Ultrapacks” and giving them 31% off if they purchase before the end of the year the right to download a certain number of images in 2018.
Tim Hinchliffe has reported on the
Sociable blog that Swedish stock image startup Pickit has announces its entry into the US market by establishing an office in Redmond, Washington to be closer to Microsoft.
Given the low prices, royalty cuts and delayed payments, experienced entertainment shooter are finding they no longer need stock agencies – particularly microstock agencies. When a photographer shoots red carpet or other entertainment events all sales pretty much come the next morning, or not at all. Red carpet event photos have a VERY SHORT shelf life. The trick is getting your photos on the editor’s desk the next morning.
“Must all Royalty Free photos be model released?” This question came from a stock agent who is considering converting his collection from RM to RF.
The answer is NO. An increasing number of images are being offered under a Royalty Free License for
Editorial Use Only. What the Editorial Use Only means is that “we don’t have a model release for this image,” and thus it can not be used for commercial purposes.