Agencies/Distributors
Masterfile has filed a formal Proposal to Creditors under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act of Canada ("BIA"). This is not a bankruptcy. The Proposal process will provide Masterfile the opportunity to restructure its business with the objective of returning to profitability. This process is similar to a Chapter 11 filing in the USA.
Shutterstock, Inc. announced today that it will again offer comprehensive coverage at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Benefit, more commonly known as The Met Gala. This premier annual event of the fashion industry will be held on Monday, May 1st at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Among the attendees will be prominent and prestigious names in entertainment, fashion, sports, and business.
Technavio, a leading global market research company headquartered in London, has released its annual report on the
Global Still Image Market, looking ahead five years to 2021. They say: “Technavio analysts forecast the global still images market to grow to
USD 4.46 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of close to 8% over the forecast period."
Andy Sitt, the Malaysian founder of
123RF, is seeking to raise the profile of his Chicago-headquartered stock image and design business among funds and investors in hopes of launching an initial public offering (IPO) within the next 12 to 18 months. "We're at that stage where we have to think of the next stage of the company and I believe that the next stage would be some form of exit. So (profiling the company) is more towards building it for a potential IPO," Sitt told DEALSTREETASIA.
PIXTA Inc. in Japan has acquired 80% of the outstanding stock of Topic Images Inc. of Korea from its parent companies, NEWSIS Co., Ltd. and NEWS1 Co., Ltd. for 130 million JPY ($1,164,780). The transaction took place on Feb 24, 2017. Topic has been selling high-priced stock images mainly in Korea, producing many of them by itself. Topic is now a subsidiary of PIXTA and will receive PIXTA’s strong support for its business operation. However, Topic is continuously conducting its own business as an existing company.
Shutterstock may have decided the loading up of their collection with “Similar Content” may have gotten out of hand and may not be benefiting customers. They have recently changed their editing strategy and issued a
notice to contributors saying, “Submitting subtle variations of the same image can be considered content spamming and is not permitted. We continuously evaluate our collection and remove images that do not meet our policies.”
RightSmith Group, specialists in the licensing and management of high-value media archives, has partnered with
Profiles Television, creator of The Amazing Race, to commercialize its enormous archive of stunning stock footage from the world-renowned TV series. Hundreds of hours of pristine footage covering more than 85 countries is now exclusively available for licensing by creative professionals via the
RightSmith content licensing portal.
Dreamstime, has announced the implementation of a proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) system that uses sophisticated algorithms to screen submitted images. The machine learning tool is designed to examine how human editors at Dreamstime review images, and then adjust its parameters to best match the editors' various criteria
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that it has signed an exclusive global distribution deal with World Surf League (WSL) to market and license imagery from WSL’s Championship Tour and Big Wave Tour Events. The deal also includes WSL’s extensive archive, showcasing thousands of pivotal moments from competitive surfing history.
Shutterstock has announced the availability of a curated collection of images within Amazon's newly launched Posters & Prints program. A dedicated Shutterstock storefront on Amazon will give customers access to thousands of images that they can select to have printed and delivered - all without leaving Amazon.
The Mega Agency, a provider of news, sports and entertainment content, has announced the launch of a revolutionary payment system that allows content providers to ‘cash-out’ on their media sales the moment content has been licensed to select customers.
Dissolve has provided its contributors with information about a special marketing campaign - Dissolve for a Cause - it has launched. Under this program, agencies and studios working on pro bono projects may apply to receive up to $2,500 in royalty-free footage or photography.
Getty’s ESP system for supplying information about their sales to iStock contributors certainly offers much more information than was previously available. Unfortunately, this information may point to an overpayments problem. It all revolves around cancelled sales.
In the article “
Understanding Editorial At Shutterstock” I reported on a London photographer had to find uses of his images and report the uses to Shutterstock in order to be paid. Shutterstock provided a clarification pointing out that they use the same procedures as other editorial agencies to track usages of their images.
It is worth looking at recent
Shutterstock statistics. In the conference call yesterday Shutterstock said they had over 190,000 contributors at the end of 2016. In 2016 Shutterstock paid out about $138.400,000 to contributors. If we divide the total number of images in the collection (116,200,000) into contributor royalties on average contributors received $1.19 per-image in the collection for the full year.
Back in February 2016
microstock.top began using archive.org/web/ to search thousands of creator portfolio pages at
www.shutterstock.com and record the data. This is not hacking, fishing, use of an API or insider information. These pages are accessible to everyone.
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2016 revenue of $130.2 million and a total of $494.3 million in revenue for all of 2016. The full year revenue was up about 16% from $425.1 million in 2015. There were a total of 167.9 million downloads for the year up from 147.2 million in 2015. While revenue grew 16% the collection size grew 63% to 116.2 million up from 71.4 million at the end of 2015.
An editorial photographer in London pointed out to me today that he has to notify Shutterstock when his pictures are used in order to get paid. Evidently Shutterstock doesn’t know that it is standard practice of many publications in the UK
not to notify the agency when they use an image. Instead, they wait for the agency or the photographer to call them or send them an invoice.
ImagineChina (IC), a leading photo and video agency on the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, has signed a three-year exclusive agreement with the Chinese Super League (CSL), the country's most prestigious football league.
Back in November iStock contributors were told that “Due to the complexity of the work required (in the iStock Royalties and Unification Project) we are pushing back most of the changes by about a month.” Given the new system for calculating subscription royalties that was being introduced, January statement would
not be available until February 20th and royalties would be paid on February 25th. February 20th has passed. Still no statements.
A top 2017 priority for the major image distributors should be to reverse existing pricing trends and find a way to begin to increase usage fees to some extent. Usage fees have been steadily declining for a number of years. The industry must find a way to turn the corner.
Is there a future for editorial photographers in France? France used to be one of the most vibrant markets in the world for editorial photography. That seems to be rapidly dying, not because of a lack of French publications (See
chart) that want to use editorial pictures. Some just don’t want to pay for the images they use.
I was recently asked if I had any statistics on the number of unique RM/RF images available for commercial licensing. Last September Justin Brinson said he had more than 500,000,000 unique RM and traditional RF images (no microstock) on his
PicturEngine platform. These images were provided by 64 different agencies and a number of individual photographers.
One things that surprised me about the research I did for the
Alamy Measures article was the small number of sales that were recorded.
I Made A Mistake. In last week’s story on
Alamy Image Manager I said that “contributors have no idea how frequently customers use a particular word to search for images.” That turns out to be totally wrong.