Microstock
Sometimes companies get so anxious to promote themselves that they announce new programs before they are actually functioning properly or ready for release. Last week
Dreamstime announced its “New Reverse Image Search” and said it “makes finding the perfect stock image a snap.”
I was asked recently for my predictions on where the stock photo industry is headed in 2019. There will continue to be massive growth in the number of images added to the major stock photo collections. An increasing percentage will be
produced by amateurs not professionals who might be trying to earn a portion of their living from the images they produce.
We’re entering that period when stock agencies publish assessments of future creative trends for the coming year. Adobe has recently published its
2019 Creative Trend Report. Such reports are designed to provide image creators with the agency’s best guess as to the new types of imagery that may be needed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Over the weekend on
Stockphoto@yahoogroups.com Rick Boden said, “I was getting serious about (putting my images with) Adobe Stock Images and then I realized they sell images via subscription. I have a very bad feeling about getting into an arrangement like that based on experience where my present agency (that) has a tie in with Getty where I am getting many royalties of less than a dollar because of subscription sales.”
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.
In an effort to drive more Marketplace sales
Storyblocks has lowered its commission to 50%. When the company (then known as Videoblocks) launched its Marketplace offering in 2015 the company offered still images and video clips at dramatically, discounted prices compared to its competitors. However, they paid creators 100% of the money received from the licensing of their work. As a result creators ended up earning more for each image licensed than they would if the image was licensed by one of the other stock agencies that paid royalties that were a small percentage of the total license fee.
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.
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.
A key to success of any business is supplying customer what they need and want. Sometimes you can sell them things they don’t need, but there is a limit as to how long you can survive with that strategy. Image user don’t want more images. They want to find exactly the right image quickly. They don’t want to be editors. They want someone to do the editing for them. Most don’t have a lot of time to waste.
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.)
According to
The Takeout Anheuser-Busch has launched two Royalty Free collections of stock images featuring properly served beer, with diverse consumers and brewers, and myriad beer styles all found in contemporary settings on the free sites
Pexels and
Unsplash.
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.
Other than Shutterstock’s quarterly reports and occasional bits of information from Getty concerning iStock there is virtually no solid information available regarding the annual gross revenue generated by the microstock companies. I decided to take a look at the Poll information that can be found on
Microstockgroup.com of 10 of the leading microstock agencies to see if I could draw any reasonable conclusions about the annual revenue of these companies.
Sources tell me that in an all-staff conference call on Wednesday, June 13, 2018, Nick Evans-Lombe and Adrian Murrell informed the
SilverHub.Media staff that the company would be going into administration, the UK version of bankruptcy protection.
Shutterstock has announced the launch of its Dublin office with the intent to initially hire 40 professionals including engineering roles, and to potentially grow the team further over the coming years. This project is supported by the Irish Government through IDA Ireland.
Shutterstock is expanding its aerial footage collection in a new distribution deal that will deliver hundreds of high-quality 4K videos produced by the largest global drone operations company,
DroneBase. From a soaring bird’s-eye view of the biggest cities in the world to incredible coastline vistas, all of this immersive content is now available to license for commercial use on Shutterstock.