Agencies/Distributors
Getty Images has just sent out a promotion – probably mostly to photographers – to show
Conceptual Realism. The implication is that customers want more of this type of imagery and photographers should be shooting more of it and supplying it to the agency.
Is Such Imagery Really What Customers Want? I can’t believe that most of what is being shown in this gallery are images that customers are actually licensing for use.
Many in the industry are concerned about the level of Getty Images debt and what that might mean for the future of the company. The following is some general information about the financial status of the company. It is not clear how the debt might affect the future. Getty Images has about $2.367 billion in debt. About $1.8 billion of that is in Term Loans at 4.37%. Back in 2012 they had about $2 billion in Term Loans so in the past six years it appears they have paid down about $200 million of the principal in addition to the annual interest. The terms of these loans is unclear and may vary.
Getty Images, has agreed to make Getty’s award-winning collection of sports, news, entertainment, archival and creative images available to enhance the voice responses from Alexa on all Echo devices with a screen. Exactly how image creators will be compensated for this use of their images has not been explained.
Specialist marine photo library,
Image Quest Marine, is re-launching with the appointment of a new library team. Eleanor Novick is joining the archive as Library Manager, bringing 10 years of industry experience, including over six years working as Senior Picture Researcher at Lebrecht Photo Library.
Vimeo has announced the launch of
Vimeo Stock, a new global, royalty-free stock marketplace featuring an exclusive collection of high-quality video footage sourced directly from Vimeo’s community of iconic creators. Vimeo Stock unlocks content from Vimeo’s world-renowned community of storytellers, redefining what stock footage can and should look like. Vimeo Stock contributors keep 60-70 percent of revenue generated from their licensed clips (versus the average industry cut of ~35 percent), while subscribers to Vimeo’s paid membership plans always save 20 percent on all stock purchases.
The Getty family has taken full control of
Getty Images Inc. from The Carlyle Group ("Carlyle"). Through the transaction, the Getty family will acquire all of Carlyle's equity interests in Getty Images for cash plus units that provide Carlyle with an ongoing financial interest in the future growth of the Company. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of the third quarter of 2018.
The Getty family is acquiring all of the Carlyle Groups 51% equity stake in Getty Images for about $250 million and rolling over about $2.35 billion of outstanding debt. The deal gives Getty Images an enterprise value of under $3 billion compared to $3.3 billion in 2012 when Carlyle acquired a majority stake in Getty. At that time Carlyle invested about $500 million in the company. It is believed that the Getty family has ended up owning a significant portion of the debt.
I saw a story recently that said
Dreamstime had identified Kiev as the 15th most photographed city in the world. That surprised me. as I had expected a lot of other cities to be much higher in terms of tourist destinations than Kiev. I couldn’t find the original Dreamstime story in order to see who they had as number 1, but I found a lot of other lists of top cities and top travel destinations. They were all differed depending on who put together the list. I found one list of “25 Most Photographed Cities in Europe” and Kiev wasn’t on it. I decided to search
Shutterstock’s collection of 216,094,727 images to see which were the top cities with the most photos.
Imaginechina, has recently won 38 copyright infringement lawsuits against Nasdaq-listed Baidu Inc., the largest search engine and one of the biggest Internet companies in China. The Haidian People’s Court in Beijing adjudicates in the first-instance verdicts that Baidu and its affiliates have pirated a total of 150 images from 20 contracted photographers and that Baidu ought to compensate the plaintiffs RMB 415,000 yuan ($60,940) for the violations and the related costs.
Blend Images photographers have been notified that
Tetra Images has acquired the Contributor Contracts, Distribution agreements and the Blend trademark. Tetra has securely obtained all banking data from Blend and will be mailing the first pdf royalty statements for August sales by email at the end of September. Payment for August sales will be made October 1, 2018. Blend has invoiced all licenses through July 2018 and will be paying out royalties until October, or presumably until all the licenses have been collected.
A multi-year review of Shutterstock download trends going back to Q3 2010 provides some interesting insights into how adding more images to the collection relates to sales growth. (See chart) Back in 2010 Shutterstock had 12.3 million images in its collection and 11.1 total downloads for that quarter. In theory the more choice you offer your customers the more sales you are likely to make. That pretty much held true through 2012 as Shutterstock almost doubled the size of its collection.
At the end of 2017 Shutterstock had about 300,000 “active contributors.” In the press release put out on August 1, 2018 they said, “Since the launch of Shutterstock, more than 450,000 photographers, artists and designers have become contributors to our platform.” Since it is hard to believe that they added 150,000 new contributors in just six months, I suspect they make a distinction between “active contributors” and “all people who have ever contributed” in their 15-year history. We asked their PR department, but got no clarification.
Alamy has announced that current CEO Andy Harding will leave the business by mutual consent. Alamy Chairman, James West will resume accountability as CEO with immediate effect. James West commented “We would like to thank Andy for his significant contribution to the business since his arrival last year and we wish him every success in his future endeavors.”
Aller Media a leading publisher of celebrity, human touch and women’s magazines in Denmark, has announced it has partnered with
The Mega Agency, who will become a preferred content partner. The deal, signed earlier this month, gives Aller Media access to The Mega Agency's breaking news content and rich archive of news, sport and entertainment photographs and videos, and further enhances the close relationship between the two media companies.
Will part-time photographers be able to supply all the future needs of professional photo users? This is one of the most interesting questions facing the stock photo industry today. There is no question that part-time photographers occasionally produce beautiful, creative, exciting images. Sometimes these images are better than anything produced by full-time professionals.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2018 revenue of
$156.6 million up $22.6 million or 16.9% compared to Q2 2017. (The comparison excludes the 2017
revenue from Webdam which was divested in Q1 2018.) Revenue per download averaged
$3.41 per image, an increase of 12% over Q2 2017. (Much of this growth is probably due to increased sales of video content offered at much higher prices than still image content.)
Getty is contacting its RM photographers with non-exclusive or co-exclusive agreements and asking them to convert all their images in the Getty collection to exclusive so Getty will be the only organization that can license rights to use the images. This may be a particularly difficult decision for photographers with co-exclusive arrangements if they typically license a fair number of uses directly to clients annually. All those future sales will be lost.
Adobe just released its latest 2018 visual trend, “Creative Reality,” exploring surreal utopias and vibrant color palettes as well as the ways artists are reflecting this new day-glow-infused reality in their work. From art exhibits on
Burning Man to immersive projects like
Summerland, artists are creating new worlds filled with eccentric textures and hyper-sensorial experiences.
If you’ve been a Getty contributor for a long time you might want to check to see if all the images they have accepted over the years are still in the collection. Jonathan Nourok (
www.jonathannourok.com ) has been contributing his botanical images to Getty Images since it was Tony Stone Images almost 30 years ago. He also posts some of the same images on his own website, but since he has an exclusive agreement for licensing with Getty he notes on his website that the images are only available for licensing through
gettyimages.com.
Recently I’ve done three stories examining various aspects of the collections at
Getty and
iStock and
Shutterstock. The chart below provides easy comparisons of these three collections.
I’ve examined the number of images in certain keyword categories at
Getty and
iStock. Today, I’ve done a count of the number of Shutterstock images with the same keywords as the other two agencies to see if it is possible to draw any comparisons. I'll take a look at the comparisons of collection size between Getty and Shutterstock. In addition there are some interesting things to be learned when comparing the number of photos with the number of illustrations on the Shutterstock site.
In the
previous story I examined the Getty Image Creative collection, and in particular EyeEm’s contribution to that collection, in and effort to determine what subject matter might be in greatest demand, and thus most needed. iStock offers some interesting insights into the subject because it basically has two separate collections – Signature and Essentials – with imagery at different price points.
If the major stock distributors want to sell more pictures it might be a good idea to give photographers more information about the relative demand for certain subjects in terms of number of images licensed and revenue generated by images with certain keywords. If occurred to me that the fastest growing collection on Gettyimages.com is EyeEm. Currently there are 26,024,940 images in the Getty Creative collection and 4,620,578 or
18% of them have been supplied by EyeEm. A little less than two years ago EyeEM only had 256,152 image in the collection.
This story provides some comparative figures of the 205 brands represented in the
Getty Images Creative collection between August 2016 and June 2018. There were 15,001,453 images in the collection in 2016 and 23,922,471 today, a 37% increase overall in two years.
NBC News has reported that “
News media paid Melania Trump thousands for use of photos in ‘positive stories only.’” President Donald Trump’s most recent financial disclosures revel that the first lady earned between $100,000 and $1,000,000 in photo royalties in 2017 from
Getty Images. (Federal officials are only required to give an income range in their filings.