Pricing
Stocktrek Images with specialized image collections in Healthcare and Biomedical Science, Armed Forces, Military Aviation, Space, Weather, Astronomy and Dinosaur Art has introduced a $35 price for web and mobile use of its images. The new web and mobile sizes of 600-800 pixels are ideal for use on web sites, online ads, digital magazines, periodicals, mobile applications, tablets, and other handheld devices.
Getty Images has launched its iStock
subscription offering in an attempt to compete with
Shutterstock. There are two levels of iStock subscriptions – iStock Essentials and iStock Signature. With iStock’s offering customers can download 250 images a month with the monthly plan or 750 images a month with the annual plan. With Shutterstock there is a daily limit of 25 images a day (750 a month) regardless of which plan you purchase.
The
Permission Machine (PM) is a startup in Belgium that is trying to educate social media users that they need permission to use the images they find on the web and provide them with a simple, easy way to license uses.
Recently, on the “
Stock Photography, buy and sell your images” group on LinkedIn photographer Pierre Charrlau complained that his Getty Images sales have “greatly diminished” and wanted to know if others were having the same experience.
On its web site for Flickr contributors Getty asks, “What are the average prices for RM and RF?” and then gives the following answer. “The average licensing fee for royalty free ranges from $175 to $225. And for rights managed licensing, keeping in mind that uses and fees vary widely; the average is around $550-$650.”
Fotolia has decided that in order to attract more customers to their microstock offering they need to lower prices for professional users. They have created a members-only Dollar Photo Club and are promoting it to readers of Graphic Design USA (
GDUSA).
In all the excitement about 35 million FREE images it is worth looking back at some of things that have been happening at Getty Images in the last three months. After watching revenue decline for the fifth straight quarter, and many of its top producers cut back on production or stop supplying new images altogether, Getty evidently decided that their turn-around strategy wasn’t working and they needed to make some radical changes.
Most photographers believe stock photo prices are declining everywhere. But not at
Shutterstock where they have seen a 27% increase in 3 years from $1.91 per download in Q4 2010 to $2.43 in Q4 2013. RM and traditional RF photographers are thinking, “This is not a story for me. I’ll never go near any distributor with prices that low.” Please don’t give up. Let me walk you through some numbers that you may find useful and interesting.
iStock has announced that in April it will launch a subscription product based on the
Thinkstock subscription product. The low priced Thinkstock product has been the fastest growing part Getty Images’ business.
A couple weeks ago I proposed an adjustment to current agency pricing strategies that offers the potential to get higher prices for the images in greatest demand and still make large quantities of excellent images available to customers who can’t afford the best. (See “
Solving The Problem Of Too Many Images”) Some subscribers thought I should also factor in production costs. Here's my response.
More and more stock agencies that license RM and Traditional RF rights are becoming aggregators of images rather than direct sellers of images. This is not a new phenomenon, but as more and more customers tend to go to a few large databases to find the images they need it is having a major impact on the income of many photographers.
It is getting harder and harder to decide which stock photography licensing model to use if a photographer’s goal is to maximize earnings. For a long time it was generally assumed that the way to maximize revenue was to license your images based on usage (Rights Managed). In this way the seller could charge a lot of money – sometimes many thousands of dollars -- when a customer wants to make extensive use of an image. The fatal flaw in the RM licensing strategy is that when every sale is negotiated, there is a tendency to accept whatever a customer is willing to pay. See some comparative statistics about all the licensing models.
Yesterday, I wrote about the problem of the
growing size of image databases and how this is making it difficult for customers to easily find the right image for their projects. Many good images are never seen by anyone because they get buried in the search returns delivered.
Over time royalty rates have declined. Usage fees have dropped dramatically in the last few years. And the huge oversupply of images is making it less likely that any images will ever be licensed. Faced with these facts many photographers have pulled back on new production of stock images, if not dropped out of the stock photo business entirely. Now,
Lightrocket offers a marketing option that may make some of those businesses sustainable.
Getty Images has supplied selected investors with its third quarter revenue figures. Indications are that revenue continues to decline. For the year ending June 30, 2013 revenue was $897 million. For the 4 quarters ending September 30, 2013 indications are that the revenue is less than the $897 million, but we have been unable to determine exactly how much it has declined.
As happens every fall there is a whirlwind of photo conferences – PACA Annual Conference, Visual Connection and PhotoPlusExpo (all in New York), and this year Microstock Expo in Berlin. In light of everything I’ve seen and heard between October 20 and November 17, 2013 I’ve provided a few observations as to where I think the stock photo industry is headed.
Buyers often ask, “Why do stock images cost so much?” Photographers and agents tend to respond, “Because some images cost more than others to produce.” But the buyer will invariably point out that some very simple images shot on a white background are often priced higher than other more complicated and complex images that obviously cost more to produce.
One of the surprising things that came out of this year’s
Visual Connections event in New York was the degree of confusion and misunderstandings graphic designers and art directors have about image rights. Many seem unsure as to what they can and cannot do with the images they license.
There is increasing interest among debt investors as to what is happening at Getty and particularly in their Midstock division. I posted an
analysis last week, but already there is new information worth updating.
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.
Given the changing and growing demands publishers are facing when developing an educational program, PACA’s Editorial Relations Committee and Cengage Learning have worked together to create a new “Preferred Provider” Insert License Agreement that helps meet the publisher’s needs while providing image vendors of a better understanding of how their images are being used.
Every photographer is aware that the average annual return-per-image has been steadily falling over the last few years. The numbers in this story based on the size of Getty's Premium image collection and the revenue it generates give an indication of just how much it has fallen.
Clearly Shutterstock is on a growth curve in terms of number of images downloaded and revenue. According to debt investors (those who trade in corporate bonds and corporate debt) Getty’s revenue has been declining over the last three quarters and the company’s expenses have been increasing due to increased marketing costs. To get back in the game Getty has to try to take market share from Shutterstock.
In this time of ever declining stock photo prices it is great when we can report a significant license fee for stock images. Last week one of the remaining, small, independent photo agencies negotiated a campaign of global scope entailing unlimited print, web and marketing uses of 7 images for a period of 10 years for a total fee of $415,000.
How fast is the education market moving from print to digital delivery? In its Q2 2013 earnings conference call with investors last week, Pearson, PLC, the world leading provider of educational materials and services provided some interesting data.