Internet search technology has enabled professional photographers to discover more and more uses of their images. As a result, an increasing number of photographers are pursuing the users for compensation. Given how the system works customers who have legitimately licensed rights to use images are often required to do extra work to prove they did the right thing in the first place. This is not making these good stock agency customers happy. Some stock agencies fear that this extra hassle may drive some of their best paying customers to turn to more
FREE images rather than bother with paid sources.
The CASE Act which will establish a Small Claims system that targets copyright abuse is
working its way through Congress. The bill has finally been passed in the House and is awaiting action in the Senate. Photographers interested in understanding some of the downsides of this bill should read this FREE Story.
Cathy Aron will be retiring as Executive Director of DMLA in the fall and Rick Gell will be taking over her duties. Over the summer Rick will be acting as Interim Executive Director as Cathy assists in the transition one day a week.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2019 revenue of
$161.7 million up 3% compared to Q2 2018 and down from $163.3 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download averaged
$3.44 per image, compared to $3.41 in Q2 2018.?? Total image and video downloads for Q2 were
46.6 million, up from 45.2 million a year earlier, and down from 47.2 million in Q1 2019.
StockFood has launched
StockFood Studios, an innovative production service for food photography. The Munich-based food experts, whose international brand is synonymous with professional food photography, are expanding their portfolio to include commissioned productions. The website www.stockfoodstudios.com offers this new service.
Forbes Magazine has a story entitled “
Move Over Stock Photos, It’s Time For User Generated Content.” There certainly is an increasing demand for User Generated Content (UGC) and the market is being flooded with it, but there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding how much it is likely to take over the stock photo market.
Photographers trying to license their images as
Rights Managed (RM) need to give some serious though about whether this strategy is still in their best interests. In theory, licensing based on usage should enable a photographer to occasionally get higher prices for certain uses, rather than giving away all future rights and allowing multiple re-uses for a low
Royalty Free (RF) license. The following are some reasons why this “theory” no longer works.
Free Images may not always be FREE. There are not only big legal risks for the users, but also potential time demands on users, creators and lawyers. Most users of Free images don’t recognize the risks they may be taking. One of the big questions for professional photographers is how to help those looking for free images to understand these risks.
Recently, I received a press release from
Freepik.com. The name is a misnomer because not all the pictures on the site are free. They do have about
1,750,000 free vectors, icons and photos, all created or wholly owned by Freepik. In addition, they have over
4,185,000 Premium photos and illustrations supplied by about 8,000 individual creators and distributors of microstock. A little under half of the pieces of content are photos. The rest are illustrations, vectors and icons.
The Internet is a great place for selling things if the finished product must be delivered by FedEx or UPS. But if you’re trying to sell is a digital version of what you’re showing,
then long range your business model doesn’t have much future. It’s too easy to “steal,” “appropriate” or whatever you want to call it.
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This stock photography news site focuses on the business side of photography with a special emphasis on stock photography. Our goal is to help photographers maximize their earnings based on the quality of their work and the commitment they are prepared to make to the trade. The information provided will be applicable to part-timers as well as full time professional photographers. We’ll leave it to others to teach photographers how to take better pictures.
Jim Pickerell launched his career as a photographer in 1963. In 1990 he began publishing a regular newsletter on stock photography. In 1995 the information was made available online as well as in print and was gradually expanded to a daily service.
Click here for Pickerell's full biography.
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