Pricing
Several major image producers that license their work through microstock distributors have told me that their revenue from
iStockphoto (IS),
Fotolia (FT) and
Dreamstime (DT) was down 25% to 30% in 2012 compared to 2011. What’s more, based on current trends they are predicting 2013 revenue will be down 35% to 45% compared to 2011.
There is increasing dissatisfaction among iSockphoto contributors as a result of
Googlegate, and other recent moves by iStock. Many of the approximately 5,000 exclusive contributors are exploring the option of giving up their exclusive and placing their images on multiple web sites. Shutterstock is actively pursuing iStock exclusive contributors and has created a direct email address,
wbva@fuhggrefgbpx.pbz, to guide them through the signup and approval process.
Many who license their images at Rights Managed or traditional Royalty Free prices believe it is impossible to earn significant revenue licensing images at microstock prices. This article offers some comparative analysis.
Jon Oringer, CEO of Shutterstock, has written a very
interesting piece about why being exclusive with one distributor doesn’t work for microstock photographers. I agree with his conclusion, but disagree with one of his major arguments.
Sean Locke (one of iStock’s highest earning contributors) discovered recently that some of his best selling images are now available on GoogleDrive for
FREE. There is a major thread in the
iStock forum. I’ll try to summarize what seems to be known so far.
Getty photographer are complaining that their images aren’t being seen because over 365,360 iStock Exclusive+ images have been placed on the Getty site and are being given search return order preference. iStock photographers are complaining because images from various Getty brands are being pushed into The Agency Collection on iStock. TAC now contains at least 58,546 images.
There is a continual drive in the stock photography world to produce more images. But more images don’t necessarily result in more revenue – particularly if prices are continually lowered in an effort to try to license those images.
I’ve been asked, “What’s the average price that stock images are being licensed for today?” Most RM and traditional RF image contributors would agree that on average fees have been steadily declining over the last few years. The question is how much. In the last few weeks I have gathered sales data from a few of Getty’s Image Partners and major individual contributors. While this survey is in no way scientific, I believe I can draw some reasonable conclusions about the degree of the decline.
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.”
One of the programs at the recent PACA International Conference asked five industry visionaries to explore emerging trends and predict what the stock photo business will be like in 2022. There was general agreement that the current business model of licensing based on usage is
broken and that in a few years (probably a lot less than 10) it will be necessary to develop a completely different approach to licensing.
It has been pointed out to me that Getty Images has made some dramatic changes in its
Rights Managed price calculator. This may have been around for a while, but it is the first time I’ve had a chance to examine it in some detail.
Back in the first quarter of 2007 Getty Images introduced “
Premium Access” (PA) pricing for their “best customers.” See what's happening with Premium Access and how it compares with microstock.
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.
Last week we wrote about the new Getty Images initiative
Post-Usage-Billing Service (PUBS). On Thursday Craig Peters, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Getty spoke at the Luminance event in New York and shared some additional insights. He spoke of the dilemma the photo industry faces in protecting copyright and how Getty’s new initiative can solve at least part of the problem.
Alan Capel, Head of Content at
Alamy explains that the price for printing 3 million copies of a textbook was much higher than we
reported earlier this week.
Photographer Jacques Jangoux reports that Alamy has licensed two of his images - A3N0PR (2 boys in a canoe in the Amazon region) and A3AB62 (waterfall of Jari River, tributary of the Amazon) – for just
$25.00 each for textbook use. Of course the photographer will only receive 60% of these figures.
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.
For some years we’ve seen a decline in rights managed and traditional royalty free prices. If you look at the price calculators of major distributors it might appear that prices haven’t declined all that much. The problem is that nobody pays those prices.
On the
MicrostockGroup blog there has been a debate as to whether it is better to try to license images through
Alamy rather than on microstock sites given that the license fees and royalty percentages are so much higher.
Based on our recent analysis of sales made by 193 of iStockphoto’s top sellers, total company downloads may have declined by as much as
22% in the first 6 months of 2012 compared to the same period in 2011. This story will walk you through how we collected the data, arrived at this number and explain why such a small sample of contributors is representative.
Alamy has published an 11-page
white paper that examines the challenges current pricing and licensing models face. The paper summarizes a round table discussion where key industry decision makers, including picture buyers, photographers, journalists, commentators and stock image providers, examined the issue.
T3Media, Inc. (formerly Thought Equity Motion), a leading provider of cloud-based video management and licensing services, has announced the launch of a new licensing offering—
Paya ™ (Pay-ya), the world's index of licensable content™. To watch a short video that explains how Paya works, click
here.
Stock photographers regularly complain about the “Race To The Bottom” in
terms of pricing and they look for someone to blame. Favorite whipping
boys are Getty Images, Alamy and microstock. But, these distributors are
not really the problem. The problem is technology.
Searching for a buyer for Getty Images or deciding whether to launch an
IPO may be the least of CEO Jonathan Klein’s worries these days. He’s
got to be looking at Shutterstock and Fotolia and anticipating that they
will use a good part of their new found wealth to build their premium
collections. When that happens, will these brands cut further into the
Getty Images franchise?
It no longer makes sense to keep microstock and traditional stock separate. It’s time to look at integration. Read this article to understand why and what the industry needs to do to go about accomplishing such an integration.