Microstock

Is Shutterstock Ready To Take On Getty In The Editorial Space?

By Jim Pickerell | 324 Words | Posted 1/16/2015 | Comments
Yesterday, Shutterstock paid $33 million in cash to acquire London-based Rex Features.  
In the technology section of its website Crain’s New York Business says, “The purchase of Rex puts Shutterstock in direct competition with Getty Images for a share of the editorial stock photography market, and ends long-held speculation that Shutterstock was looking to knock off its London rival.”

Will Adobe Introduce An Image Search Tool To Its 3.4 Million Customers

By Jim Pickerell | 485 Words | Posted 1/14/2015 | Comments
Will Adobe offer a tool that makes it possible for its Illustrator and InDesign customers to discover if the images they find on microstock sites (particularly Shutterstock or iStock) are also available at Fotolia where they can be purchased for much less?

Is Image On Demand Pricing About To Decline?

By Jim Pickerell | 735 Words | Posted 1/13/2015 | Comments
When Adobe takes over Fotolia will Shutterstock and iStock be forced to lower their Image On Demand (IOD) prices? Basically, since Getty lowered iStock prices last September non-exclusives images on iStock and Shutterstock images are priced about the same – roughly $10 per image for any file size. However, Fotolia images are priced 25% to 60% lower than Shutterstock on a yearly basis, and 60% to 75% lower if the customer purchases a Fotolia image pack on a monthly basis.

Where Do Microstock Producers Come From?

By Jim Pickerell | 5140 Words | Posted 1/12/2015 | Comments
After last week, readers probably feel they have more information about iStock than they ever wanted to know. But an analysis of where contributors who produce microstock images live provides some additional insights into the future of stock photography. I promise this will be the last analysis of iStock data until July.

iStock Downloads Down Significantly In 2014

By Jim Pickerell | 773 Words | Posted 1/5/2015 | Comments
Getty’s simplification and dramatic lowering of iStock prices in September in an effort to better complete with Shutterstock doesn’t seem to be working. The number of images downloaded in the last half of 2014 for 431 of iStock’s top producers was down about 34% compared to the first half of 2014.

Profit/Loss Calculations For Stock Photography

By Jim Pickerell | 1202 Words | Posted 1/2/2015 | Comments
Should the price paid to use a photo cover the cost to produce it? Most stock photographers recognize it is highly unlikely that they will regularly recover the cost of producing an image from a single sale. The profit and loss calculation is much more complicated.

Adobe To Acquire Fotolia

By Jim Pickerell | 610 Words | Posted 12/12/2014 | Comments
Adobe has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Fotolia for approximately $800 million in cash. Fotolia will be integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud, providing current and future Creative Cloud members with the ability to access and purchase over 34 million images and videos.

New Features Added To Alamy’s Stockimo App

By Jim Pickerell | 418 Words | Posted 12/10/2014 | Comments
Alamy has added new features to its successful mobile app Stockimo that was launched last February. To date more than 180,000 images have been submitted through the app and 99,000 have been accepted for marketing. These images can be found among the almost 53 million images on Alamy.com using the keyword “Stockimo.”

Bigstock Partners With WIX Website Builder

By Jim Pickerell | 349 Words | Posted 11/20/2014 | Comments
Shutterstock has announced a partnership between WIX and its Bigstock brand. Wix is a website creation tool designed for small businesses with 56 million users in 190 countries. Wix offers a “drag n' drop website building platform with HTML5 capabilities, 100s of designer made templates, top grade hosting, innovative Apps and tons of features for free.”

ImageBrief: The RF vs RM Question

By Jim Pickerell | 1139 Words | Posted 11/12/2014 | Comments
ImageBrief has updated its rules regarding RF and provided a long explanation here.  Evidentally, many ImageBrief (IB) contributors have been asking “Why is ImageBrief adding so many RF briefs?” IB’s answer is, “We’re responding to client demands and listening to the market.”

Shutterstock Reports $83.7 Million For Q3 2014

By Jim Pickerell | 1125 Words | Posted 11/7/2014 | Comments
Shutterstock has reported $83.7 million in revenue and total downloads of 31.2 million for Q3 2014. About 30 percent of the revenue was paid out to contributors in royalties. At the end of the quarter the company had 491 employees worldwide. The average price per download was $2.65 up from $2.35 in the previous quarter and an 13% increase compared to Q2 2013. This increase in the average price was due primarily to a growing number of Enterprise and Video sales.

Improving The RF Option

By Jim Pickerell | 1116 Words | Posted 11/5/2014 | Comments
There is a segment of the photographic community that insists on arguing that in order to get more reasonable prices for image use we must eliminate RF. Forget it; it’s impossible; it won’t happen. But there are other options.

Dreamstime App Brings In Thousands Of Images

By Jim Pickerell | 179 Words | Posted 10/28/2014 | Comments
Dreamstime, Inc. is experiencing massive growth via their newly released app, Dreamstime Companion  launched in July on iOS and Google Play. The app allows smartphone users to access the Dreamstime community and upload their mobile photos via their mobile devices. In about three months approximately 30,000 mobile images have been added to Dreamstime’s 25 million image collection.

Textbook Prices Climbing, But Not Image Use Fees

By Jim Pickerell | 826 Words | Posted 10/15/2014 | Comments
For those licensing images to textbooks National Public Radio published an interesting report recently that is worth a listen. It was pointed out that prices for college textbooks are often over $300 and climbing faster than the cost of food, clothing, cars and even health care.

Stop! Can An Image Of That Subject Be Licensed?

By Jim Pickerell | 456 Words | Posted 10/8/2014 | Comments
Did you know that it is illegal to license for commercial use pictures of hundreds of the most popular, beautiful and interesting venues around the world? In many cases it is also illegal to use such pictures for editorial purposes.

Press Release Use Of Images

By Jim Pickerell | 624 Words | Posted 10/7/2014 | Comments
Recently, Tyler Olson discovered by searching Google that one of his images (http://netropolitanclub.com/) had been used on over 1,640 web sites. However, all these uses were not the result of multiple sales, but of a single sale to the Netropolitan Club.

Getty Images Drives It's Customers To Use iStock

By Jim Pickerell | 391 Words | Posted 9/25/2014 | Comments
Getty Images appears to be trying to drive its www.gettyimages.com customers to iStock where the customers can get images for a fraction of what they would cost on Gettyimages.com.

Dreamstime Creates More Personalized Search For Users

By Jim Pickerell | 445 Words | Posted 9/23/2014 | Comments
Dreamstime has announced the release of a new personalization feature, as well as a new social media function.

GDI: New Publicly Traded Stock Photo Company

By Jim Pickerell | 2316 Words | Posted 9/22/2014 | Comments
At the International Photojournalism Festival in Perpignan earlier this month and in a later press announcement GDI Media Limited announced the aim to consolidate many smaller independent picture agencies into a single publicly traded company that will be traded on the AIM stock exchange in the UK.

Microstock Photography Survey Results

By Jim Pickerell | 651 Words | Posted 9/19/2014 | Comments
A few months ago Basar Hatirnaz surveyed microstock image producers for his doctorial thesis at Yeditepe University in Instanbul, Turkey. He got 400 responses from contributors with a wide range of experience in the microstock business. The results of his research provide some interesting insights into the microstock industry.

How Will iStock Prices Affect Gettyimages.com Sales?

By Jim Pickerell | 1103 Words | Posted 9/16/2014 | Comments
Yesterday, I outlined how iStock’s new pricing strategy may affect contributors. But, the bigger worry for iStock exclusive contributors and Getty Images may be what happens on gettyimages.com. Here’s why.

New iStock Prices Released

By Jim Pickerell | 1088 Words | Posted 9/15/2014 | Comments
Over the weekend iStock launched its new prices to compete with Shutterstock. The following chart shows the credit packages available at both iStock and Shutterstock and the average price per credit.

iStock Adopts Shutterstock Licensing Strategy

By Jim Pickerell | 1640 Words | Posted 9/3/2014 | Comments
On September 13th iStock will “throw-in-the-towel” and adopt the Shutterstock licensing strategy that all images should be equal in price regardless of the quality of the image or the cost of production. They will discontinue their practice of pricing based on file size delivered, and of having multi-tier price categories.

So You Want To Be A Stock Photographer

By Jim Pickerell | 1248 Words | Posted 8/27/2014 | Comments
Recently Dennis Davis, an experienced Los Angeles corporate, lifestyle, and food photographer (see his portfolio) posted the following on a blog. “I am moving out of commercial assignment photography into selling my photography after the fact. I am looking for recommendations on stock agencies and methods for selling fine art images and video.

How Does iStock Define “Most Popular”?

By Jim Pickerell | 918 Words | Posted 7/28/2014 | Comments
At iStock the “Most Popular” search option used to show images in order of popularity based on the number of times each image had been downloaded during its life of on the site. The first image shown was the one with the most downloads; the 2nd image was the image with the second highest number of downloads, 3rd had the third highest number of downloads and so on. This was true as late as the end of June 2014.