Microstock
In response to the new trends in Smartphone use, social media and mobile phone Fotolia is launching a new app and collection, uniquely designed for Smartphone photos. Created for iPhone 4 and up,
Fotolia Instant offers fresh, new “in-the-moment” images taken using the new app, which allows users to shoot and upload to Fotolia directly from their Smartphone.
Getty Images is finally declaring iStock a “Midstock” brand given how high they have pushed the prices of iStock’s exclusive imagery. I estimate that about 35% of the images on iStock are exclusive. Getty has told debt investors that 70% of iStock revenue is generated from exclusive images and that the gross revenue for the last 4 quarters was about $300 million. In Q2 2013 iStock revenue was down 9% compared to the revenue in Q2 2012.
Getty Images’ visual trends publication
Curve released their most comprehensive assessment of diversity in advertising to date. The Curve is designed to highlight the latest trends and research into the changing use of visual imagery that depicts social variety. It is also a resource for brands that are looking to create exclusive and progressive communications.
Getty Images has rebranded iStockphoto to just
.iStock. with of sub-head of by Getty Images. The new logo is white on black instead of the former red iStockphoto. The rest of the site looks pretty similar to what was offered before.
Getty is telling debt investors (people who buy corporate bonds and corporate debt) that 70% of iStockphoto revenue is generated by exclusive images. They also say that total iStock revenue annually is around $300 million. iStock revenue declined 9% in Q2 2013 compared with Q2 2012. Thus, about $90 million of Getty’s revenue comes from non-exclusive images and $210 million from exclusive
After the announcement of the
Shutterstock/Facebook agreement that makes images available FREE of charge to businesses that advertise on Facebook, I contacted Shutterstock for additional clarification.
Getty Images has made a number of strategic decisions in the past few years that have resulted in declines in both its “Creative” (RM and RF) and microstock lines of business. These decisions have also aided Shutterstock in its rise to a commanding position in the market with its subscription licensing model. I want to emphasize that when I talk about declines I am not referring to Getty’s other lines of business - Editorial, Footage, Other or B2B music – which as far as I can tell are still growing.
Getty Images has made the OJO Images available on
iStockphoto. The images are now “exclusively” available on the Getty Images network of sites and select partners. The full collection boasts nearly 31,000 premium files, which will grow to nearly 45,000 by the end of October.
Many expect users of mobile phones with decent cameras with constant connectivity to the world to be the next disruptors of the stock photography business.
Crowd sources photojournalism is expected to cut into the business of the long-suffering professional news photographers. Here are some thoughts as to why crowd-sourced mobile photography may not be the boom angel investors are hoping for.
Shutterstock has reported a record 24.3 million downloads and $56.8 million in revenue in Q2 2013. Revenue per download grew 5% year-over-year to $2.33. This was driven by a continued shift toward on demand, direct sales and footage downloads, all of which carry a higher effective price-per-download. The Shutterstock collection has grown to more than 28 million images and over 1 million video clips.
Yuri Arcurs has written a
long post entitled “
Microstock sees its first major setback in 6 years and here’s why.” In it he explains (1) why he is pulling his images out of all microstock agencies except iStockphoto and his own Peopleimages.com, (2) why he decided to go exclusive with Getty, (3) why mobile, crowd sourced photography is “a serious threat to stock photography” and (4) why he has invested $1.4 million in Scoopshot. This article is a must read for everyone in the industry.
In the last 18 months I have been tracking the collection sizes of 421 of
iStock’s leading contributors. These creators have had combined total downloads of 49,141,000 out of an estimated 150 million for iStock since its founding. Thus, they are very representative of iStock’s total collection and sales.
iStockphoto has announced today that
1/2 of its imagery is now 1/2 of its former price. Prices for non-exclusive images used to be: 1, 4, 7, 10, 12, 15, 18 credits based on file size. Now those prices have dropped to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 credits with the price for the largest file size being only 39% of what was formerly charged.
Over the weekend, Seeking Alpha (SA) published an article aimed at the investment community entitled, “
Shutterstock Valuation Makes Me Shudder.” The points made in this article are well worth considering, not only for investors, but for anyone interested in earning a living in the business of stock photography.
Since early in 2009 I have been
tracking downloads of 192 of iStockphoto’s most productive contributors. All of them have more than 48,000 downloads and 130 of them have more than 100,000. There are others with high numbers of downloads that I have not tracked for as long a period, and I’m sure there are a few I have not identified. Nevertheless, I believe this group is very representative.
Shutterstock’s
Offset brand that was announced in April is moving forward. Currently the site has more than 27,000 images with more images and artists added every day. Customers are already licensing images, but Offset is currently in an invite-only beta. If you would like to take a look at what’s on the site go to
http://www.offset.com/ and request access.
The stock photography business has its first billionaire. Bloomberg news reported that last week Jonathan Oringer, the founder of
Shutterstock Inc. (SSTK) became a billionaire. Oringer owns 18.5 million shares of Shutterstock, or 55 percent of the outstanding shares. Last week shares of the company reached a record high of $56.44. Today, shares are trading at around $56 per share which makes Oringer’s holding worth in excess of one billion dollars.
Yesterday we talked about the search by image feature on the
CIR. Today, we discovered that Getty has added a search by image feature to
Thinkstock. Go to the Thinkstock web site and look for the “search by image” button under the search box.
Getty has announced that it will be retiring The Agency Collection (TAC)
on iStockphoto in the next few weeks and creating a new collection
called Signature+. The company says the main driver for this move is to
simplify their offer to customers. It is unclear how this will
“simplify” the offer.
Since he started producing microstock images in 2005 Yuri Arcurs, the world’s top selling microstock shooter with over 1,500,000 downloads from iStockphoto alone, has been a strong advocate of non-exclusive representation and not putting “all his eggs in one basket”. Recently he signed an exclusive deal with Getty Images.
The stock photography business has changed dramatically from what it was five or ten years ago and the future does and the future does not look promising. In this article we’ve provided links to a number of previously published articles that provide a good overview of the industry and where we believe it is headed. If the reader wants to get a basic grounding in what stock photography is all about this is the place to start.
Dreamstime just released the following to the press cautioning image user to be careful about grabbing images off the Internet because they could be “violating someone’s copyright.” To aid users in protecting themselves Dreamstime offers a collection of images at
Stockfreeimages.com.
With Stocksy (
http://www.stocksy.com/) Bruce Livingstone has set out to produce a collection of “authentic” stock images unlike anything customers will be able to find anywhere else. When he uses the work authentic he means a photograph that doesn’t look staged, pretend, forced or unrealistic. Images can be processed, but the processing must match the content. It’s not Instagram. Bruce took time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions for us.
Shutterstock has reported a record 22.3 million downloads and $51.5 million in revenue in Q1 2013. Revenue per download grew 8% year-over-year to $2.29. The Shutterstock collection has grown to more than 25 million images and over 1 million video clips. Revenue is expected to grow in Q2 to between $53 million and $55 million. For all of 2013 revenue is now projected to be between $221 million and $226 million. EBITDA is projected to be between $46 million and $48 million.
Since the fall of 2012 iStockphoto had been accepting pictures taken with mobile devices. Currently they have 7433 images on the site. So far, they do not allow contributors to upload their photos directly from their mobile devices. It is not clear whether they are accepting images from contributors who only shoot with a camera phone, or whether they are just encouraging their regular contributors to also submit some images they shoot with their phones.