Agencies/Distributors
More and more frequently RM photographers are receiving notes from their agencies, or the production companies representing their work, suggesting that they move some of their older images to RF. This make sense for images that might have been good seller at one time, but haven’t made any sales in the last year or so.
As image databases get larger and larger, keywording becomes more and more important as photographers try to get their work high enough in the search-return-order for the images to be seen. Often creators must spend more time keywording than they spend taking pictures. In addition, image distributors are constantly coming up with new strategies that often necessitate going back and re-keywording images that have already been uploaded.
As of January 19, 2017
Shutterstock had 119,292,457 royalty free stock images in its collection according to www.microstock.top. They had added 1,352,852 new stock images during the week. I recently discovered microstock.top which provides some very detailed breakdowns of Shutterstock contributors. It is unclear how frequently they will update this information, but it is the kind of information that can help everyone in the industry – Shutterstock contributor or not – have better understanding of Shutterstock’s business.
Based on the number of downloads Shutterstock had in the
first three quarters it looks like they will report about 167,000,000 total downloads for 2016 when they report their full year numbers on February 27, 2017. Last year
they reported 147,200,000 downloads for 2015.
500px has also announced a collaboration with Adobe to introduce a select set of 500px images to Adobe Stock users within the
Adobe Stock Premium Collection.
Some Getty Images RF contributors have begun to share sales data with iStock Signature contributors and are coming to the conclusion that they can earn more money from images in the iStock Signature collection than from images on Gettyimages.com.
Twenty-five to 30 years ago there was a large demand for stock images relative to supply. Prices to use a stock image -- while reasonable when compared to what it cost to hire a photographer for an assignment -- were much higher than they are today. It was possible for a professional photographer to produce a lot of images that no one wanted to buy, and still earn a decent living from the few that did sell.
Jon Oringer, Founder/CEO of Shutterstock Images has sent the following letter to staff and contributors outlining Shutterstock’s position on the recent immigration decision.
Getty is adding Programmatic Advertising content to its site. In June 2016 CEO Dawn Avery
pointed out, that “Over 97 per cent of visitors come to our websites to look at – not purchase – amazing imagery.” Getty is trying to find a way to earn some money from this 97% of users.
Shutterstock has released its annual
Creative Trends report, which is developed from analyzing the information from millions of searches and downloads.
Recently, I was asked my opinion of what
Shutterstock could do to grow revenue? The questioner had come to the conclusion that there will be very little growth in coming years in the number of stock photo customer or the quantity of still images or illustration that each will use. He also feels that
iStock,
AdobeStock and even
Getty Images have priced their products very competitively with Shutterstock making it difficult for Shutterstock to simply raise prices.
It is that time when everyone talks about “trends” for the coming year. Getty offered an hour-long seminar on January 19, 2017 that can be reviewed in this
youtube video.
500px has launched a new, easy-to-use global
photographer directory with over 50,000 photographers from 11,000 searchable locations across 191 countries. Customers may search for a photographer in a specific city or town who specializes in one of 18 different categories of photography.
Dreamstime editors and CEO Serban Enache recently released a promotion of
250 “authentic” images from the Dreamstime collection. While this collection of images certainly shows customers that Dreamstime has some very impressive and beautiful images, it may not be very representative of what Dreamstime is actually selling. Thus, when planning future shoots image creators may not want to use this collection as a guide.
Erickson Stock has recently launched an
RF collection that is now available on
PantherMedia. For over 30 years Jim Erickson has been one of the US's preeminent commercial photographers and has created timeless imagery for hundreds of blue chip clients, including AT&T, American Express, Wells Fargo, Cisco, Pinnacle Entertainment, General Motors, HBO, Pfizer, Merrill Lynch, United Airlines and Home Depot.
If in the last 30 years you’ve seen an image taken in India there is a good chance it was supplied by Dinodia Photo Library. For years Dinodia images have been represented by many other image distributors around the world and those images have found their way into countless books, newspaper and magazine articles.
Getty Images has been granted a temporary restraining order against it former VP of Global Entertainment, Roxanne Motamedi. Motamedi held the post at Getty from June 2009 to November 2016 and was based in Los Angeles.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that it has expanded its milestone
multi-year deal with The Associated Press (AP). Beginning this week, Shutterstock will distribute AP’s daily global photo output for license to customers based in the United Kingdom. Shutterstock’s enterprise customers in the United Kingdom will have access to over 30 million photos from AP Images.
The major agencies talk about how important their DATA is and how it has changed the industry. They argue that the company with the most and best data will be the winner. But I don’t think they are really looking at much of the data they have collected – or looking at it in the right way.
iStock single image downloads appear to have continued to decline in the last half of 2016. Unfortunately, five of the 430 contributors that we tracked in the past have now disappeared. In the last report these contributors represented 544,000 total career downloads. It is unclear whether they have withdrawn their collections, or repurposed them under another brand that I am no longer able to track.
The Getty Creative collection has grown by 4% in 4 months and now stands at 17,376,859 images. At that rate the collection size will be about 19,462,082 images by the end of 2017. In August 38% of the collection was RM images. Today 36.8% of the images are RM. At this rate of decline less than one-third of the images will be RM by the end of 2017. A huge percentage of these RM images are supplied by
image partner agencies that only, or predominately, represent RM images
iStock photographers may want to use downtime over the Christmas and New Year holidays to prepare and upload images that are in the photographer’s queue for their eventual upload to iStock. The Unification of the upload system for both the Getty Images and iStock sites is now scheduled to go into effect on February 1, 2017. There are plans to change the keyword vocabulary for both sites over to the Getty vocabulary, which might mean that after that time the keywords the photographer submits may no longer be included in the list of words attached to the image.
Shutterstock supplies very little information about their Enterprise customers and how Enterprise sales work. Yet it is an extremely important segment of their business and critical to understanding the company’s potential for future growth. At the end of Q3 2016 Shutterstock had 35,000 Enterprise customers up from 24,000 at the beginning of the year, or about a 46% increase in 9 months. How much of that 46% is real growth?
Visual China Group the company that
acquired Corbis in January 2016 has seen a more than 50% decline in value as an investment since the purchase and a 20% decline in the last month. VCG is a publicly traded company on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
A week after announcing that it had
acquired 86.6 percent of Framepool, Broadside Enterprises, Inc. (also known as Emaji) has announced that Frampool AG has entered into an agreement with
ImagineChina, one of the largest photo and video agencies in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.