Microstock
At the PACA International Conference in October, Christie Silver of McGraw Hill School Education Group provided details on where her team found images for a major reading program they have been working on this year. She also provided insights as to how educational publishers will be sourcing images in the future and pointed out that the main focus of all educational efforts these days is digital.
What are the photographic and illustration subjects that clients look for most often? Recently, iStockphoto surveyed its customers and asked them to identify the subject categories that they searched for most frequently in 2012. See the
iStockphoto infographic.
Shutterstock has reported revenue of $42.3 million for the third quarter, a 36% increase over Q3 2011. The company expects to generate revenue of $44 to $45 million in the fourth quarter. Based on that projection revenue for 2012 will be between $164 and $168 million, up $44.7 million compared to the 2011 revenue of $120.3 million. This will be a 37% increase in revenue for the year.
A photographer recently asked if I could point her to a chart that shows what royalty percentage each stock distributors pays its photographers so she could better determine which offered the best deal. She added, “I recognize that there were a number of factors involved -- home territories, partner agents, image collections, number of photographer’s images licensed, rights managed, traditional royalty free, microstock – so hopefully the chart would take all these factors into consideration.”
Alamy has launched Alamy iQ, a service designed to help customers better manage all the visual assets they own or have licensed rights to use. Alamy iQ will be particularly beneficial to global organizations that have people sourcing visual assets from many locations for a variety of uses. It will complement or replace existing asset management systems, help speed decision making and eliminate risk.
Bigstock, a subsidiary of Shutterstock, has announced a new API program along with two world-class partners:
CafePress Inc., The World's Customization Engine™, and
Emma an email marketing provider. These partners will utilize Bigstock's recently released API to provide their customers with access to Bigstock's expansive library of professional, commercially licensable
photographs and illustrations.
Today more than a quarter of all photos taken are taken on smartphones. No longer is the mobile phone just a communication device. Now users can take pictures with their phones anywhere, anytime without worrying about heavy equipment or camera settings. As of this month
Dreamstime has started accepting both editorial and commercial pictures that are shot using a mobile phone.
Foap, the site that licenses crowdsourced travel images taken by iPhone user, has received an additional $500,000 in funding from Jade Global Investments. David Los, co-founder of Foap, attributes the company’s growth to a first-mover advantage in offering iPhone users an opportunity to monetize photos already stored on their phones.
Shutterstock has introduced a new
Portfolio Page feature that allows contributors to organize their collection into sets they want to feature. Once a significant number of contributors have taken advantage of this opportunity Shutterstock will encourage their customers to check out the galleries and image sets that their contributors have created.
Bigstock, a division of Shutterstock, has introduced a new
partner program that will allow companies like email service providers, website design services and online ad builders to offer Bigstock photos to their customers through their portals.
Dreamstime has become the latest professional photography service to resolve its legal issues regarding the pinning of copyright-protected, watermarked images shared on
Pinterest. The solution incorporates an attribution line, which now appears beneath the photo in question and links back to the photo’s page on Dreamstime.com. This is the same solution that Pinterest offers to other members of its “attribution program,” including Flickr, YouTube, 500px, Etsy, and others.
Shutterstock has raised $76.5 million by selling 4.5 million shares at $17 each. This was above the expected price range of between $13 and $15 per share. Today, the stock is trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “SSTK” at $22 per share.
Masterfile has launched a Super Value collection of 1.7 million photos, illustrations and vectors available through a $50 subscription allowing 50 downloads per month (all file sizes). The images are not restricted to a daily quota: they can be downloaded at any point, as needed, during the term of the subscription. 3-month and 12-month options are also available.
Image Source and
Cultura Creative today announced the merger of their businesses, two of the most respected brands in premium quality stock photography in the world. The new business which will operate under the Image Source Group umbrella come together in an exciting deal that on day one will have over a quarter of a million premium images under their collective management and a production power house capable of generating both quality and volume of content going forward.
Need a stock picture of a guy doing almost anything strange, actor Patrick Wilson is your man. Professional photographers have paid him to pose as “A guy in a tiger costume playing an inflatable guitar in a foggy room full of military personnel” and “A detective examining a jar of peanut butter in a room filled with mousetraps.”
Dreamstime has introduced a new corporate account system that streamlines administration of file downloads and enhances purchase and invoice tracking for large firms with multiple users. The new system enables multi-user firms to designate a Corporate Administrator, create multiple sub-accounts, and administer systems for purchasing images and track invoices.
Shutterstock Inc has announced that it plans to sell 4.5 million shares in its initial public offering at between $13 and $15 each. This block of shares would represent about 14% of its total shares outstanding.
iStockphoto has introduced a new
Shopping Cart Checkout option that allows customers to pay for just the images they need without having to purchase credits.
Dreamstime now offers almost 15 million downloadable images to a user base of 5.1 million. With over 100,000 new users joining each month, Dreamstime now has the fastest-growing user base in the industry and is one of the web's most popular sites. The company's rapid growth is fueled by a unique, community-focused business model that crowdsources creativity.
Yuri Arcurs, probably the world’s most prolific stock photographer, has written a
blog post outlining how the demand for stock imagery has changed and identified a few subjects to shoot and ones to avoid given the oversupply and declining demand.
More than 1,000 designers responded to
Graphic Design USA (GDUSA) annual survey designed to determine how stock imagery is being used. The survey indicates that use of stock imagery has grown nearly three times in 25 years since the first survey, starting at 39 percent in 1986 and reaching 98 percent in 2012. The survey also shows that 31 percent of designers are in a full-blown love affair, using stock images over 100 times a year, which is up 11 percent from last year.
As a way of motivating and educating graphic artists, for the past 10 months Fotolia has showcased the work of a single artist each month. Each artist was given a specific theme and was required to use some images from the Fotolia collection in the work. The themes included: business, family, travel, food, lifestyle, street art, mobile, money, drinks and abstract.
iStock has made it official. They are encouraging contributors to shoot with cell phones and accepting those images into the general collection. The next generation of stock photography – from RM to RF to Microstock to Cell Phones -- is upon us. See iStock’s
Creative Brief.
Pocketstock has created a new pricing strategy call Bidder that enables each customer to establish the price he or she is willing to pay for a royalty free image.
On its
Google Drive cloud storage service Google has added a feature that will allow its customers to use
Thinkstock photos for FREE. They are currently asking their customers to suggest photos that they would like to see included in this gallery of free photos.