Agencies/Distributors
Shutterstock has announced
Shutterstock Select, a premium tier of royalty-free video content. The diverse collection of video clips includes exclusive content with everything from everyday moments to blockbuster action scenes, all captured by industry professionals using cinema-grade cameras and selected by our expert curators.
The Mega Agency is adding 2.5 million iconic and historic entertainment images to its rapidly expanding archive. The media company, a leading provider of news, sports and entertainment content, will now represent and license the Phil Ramey photo archive to its global customer base.?
Koch Equity Development is expected to make a $500 million, non-controlling investment in Getty Images. Getty says the equity investment is expected to close by the end of this year.
Recently I was told by a stock agency that my
Photographer Income Survey Results were not relevant to Specialist Agencies because the results are “rather negative and don’t offer a possible positive call to action.” In the following series of stories I will outline a “Positive Call to Action” for stock agencies.
Once the data has been collected then it will be time to talk to Getty – as a group. For years they have shown they are unwilling to pay attention to suggestions from individual agencies. The more Specialist Agencies that participate in the analysis the better.
In May I
analyzed the sales of a few photographers who are major, direct suppliers to Getty. A major issue that all Specialist Agencies need to consider is whether the breakdown in the various price ranges in this analysis are representative of Getty’s total sales? Specialist agencies need to check their own figures against this baseline to determine if this is an accurate representation of Getty as a whole.
In July 2018 I did an
analysis of the more than 200 Getty Creative collections to determine how many images had been added to each collection in the almost two years between
August 2016 and June 2018. Overall there was a 37% increase in the number of images added, but there were wide variations in the sources of the growth.
Shutterstock has announced a partnership with rights and clearance agency,
Greenlight, a part of Branded Entertainment Network. Greenlight clears content with rights holders for use in commercial advertising and corporate campaigns. Greenlight also represents the rights for some of the biggest icons, including Albert Einstein, Steve McQueen, Whitney Houston, Sophia Loren, Thomas Edison, and more.
According to photographers
Masterfile has been unable to make any royalty payments to photographers since January 2018. The company
filed for bankruptcy in 2017. Payments to the bankruptcy lawyer are prioritized ahead of payments to photographers. It appears the company has not been generating enough revenue to cover fixed expenses and still pay royalties.
Shutterstock has announced a new content integration within Final Cut Pro X. The Shutterstock extension is the only stock footage extension to be integrated with the release of Final Cut Pro X and will enable seamless access to video, still image and music collections.
Adobe has given photographers notice that on November 5, 2019, almost a year way, the
Fotolia website will close and all customers will need to use Adobe Stock from that time on to find the images they need.
In their reports to investors
Shutterstock has always emphasized their steadily growing
Revenue Per Download as well as their growth in the number of images offered to customers. But there is another figure that is extremely important to image creators. That is the
Revenue Per Image In The Collection (RPIIC). That has been steadily declining since Q2 2014.
Alamy.com and 360Cities.net have announced that the 360Cities’ collection of thousands of stunning, immersive 360° spherical images will now be available to Alamy customers through Alamy’s online worldwide marketplace. The 360Cities database will launch on Alamy.com on 5 November 2018 with an initial collection of approximately 150K images, to be supplemented with a regular stream of new content.
Storyblocks has analyzed a total of 60 million searches on
its site in 2018 to find the
50 most popular landmarks featured in creative works.
The European stock photography and video agency PantherMedia, based in Munich, has announced the introduction of a new 10 photo downloads subscription. All PantherMedia’s subscriptions now include access for up to 3 team members.
Shutterstock has reported Q3 2018 revenue of
$151.6 million up $7.5% million compared to Q3 2017. (The comparison excludes the 2017 revenue from
Webdam which was divested in Q1 2018.) Gross revenue was and down from $156.6 million in Q2 2018. Revenue per download averaged
$3.40 per image, compared to $3.23 in Q3 2017. (Much of this growth is probably due to increased sales of video content offered at much higher prices than still image content.)
A few former Fotolia employees have joined forces to launch a new microstock site called
Onepixel.com. While at Fotolia these people were able to learn the type of pictures that customers are most interested in buying and build relationships with many of the photographers who have been most successful in producing such images.
The CEO of Agence France-Presse Fabrice Fries has announced a "transformation plan" which will cut the number of employees by 5% at the end of 2017 in order to bring net profit of the company into equilibrium by 2021.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that Editorial content is now available for license on its eCommerce Platform. Shutterstock Editorial offers images that capture the world around us, including a live feed of curated news, sports, entertainment and royal family images, along with access to a multi-decade archive of iconic images. Previously available only to Enterprise customers with Shutterstock Premier accounts, this collection is now available to all Shutterstock customers through
Shutterstock.com/editorial.
To incentivize
Adobe Stock image and video contributors Adobe intends to provide the
Creative Cloud Photography Plan (worth $120/£120), to 20,000 to them for free in 2019. You must already be an Adobe Stock contributor and either have had 300 or more photographs accepted, or made $500/£375 or more from sales.
Shutterstock has announced that they will be testing some new pricing and promotions for their
Offset.com brand in the next few months. Initially, they will only offer these prices to their Enterprise customers (customers who purchase through their Premier Platform). Their posted rates on the website of $249 and $499 will not change. Sources tell us that their tend to be more at the lower price than the higher.
Recently, in a discussion with a stock photo agent the subject came up as to what it would take for Getty Images to repair its relationships with the Creator Community. I raised the issue late last year in “
Why Creators Are Dissatisfied With Getty.”
Getty Images has just done a deal with
www.animoto.com to provide unlimited video clips to Animoto video producers. Animoto says, “Now when you create marketing videos in Animoto, you'll have unlimited access to our stunning collection of stock photos and video clips at no extra cost beyond your subscription.”
Stock agencies do a very poor job of advising photographers what to shoot. Most successful businesses try to keep the people producing their products well informed about what is selling and what isn’t. They don’t want their workers wasting time (and costing them money) producing products no one wants to buy.
The Mega Agency has launched an innovative new service to fight widespread copyright infringement – Mega Image Police (MIP).
The company, a leading provider of news, sports and entertainment content, has beta launched an initiative to quickly identify stolen content and actively pursue damages on behalf of its growing global contributor base.