In May I
analyzed the sales of a few photographers who are major, direct suppliers to Getty. A major issue that all Specialist Agencies need to consider is whether the breakdown in the various price ranges in this analysis are representative of Getty’s total sales? Specialist agencies need to check their own figures against this baseline to determine if this is an accurate representation of Getty as a whole.
In July 2018 I did an
analysis of the more than 200 Getty Creative collections to determine how many images had been added to each collection in the almost two years between
August 2016 and June 2018. Overall there was a 37% increase in the number of images added, but there were wide variations in the sources of the growth.
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.
According to photographers
Masterfile has been unable to make any royalty payments to photographers since January 2018. The company
filed for bankruptcy in 2017. Payments to the bankruptcy lawyer are prioritized ahead of payments to photographers. It appears the company has not been generating enough revenue to cover fixed expenses and still pay royalties.
Shutterstock has announced a new content integration within Final Cut Pro X. The Shutterstock extension is the only stock footage extension to be integrated with the release of Final Cut Pro X and will enable seamless access to video, still image and music collections.
In late September 2018,
Google announced that it had been working with two photo industry consortiums, CEPIC and IPTC, to integrate some image ownership-related metadata into search results. Now Google images desktop view has a new “Image credits” link below the image. This information is collected from IPTC Creator, Credit and/or Copyright information if it exists.
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.
We have closed the
Editorial Photographer Income Survey that was sent out at the end of August. There were 270 responses which is somewhat disappointing considering the tens of thousands of photographers producing stock images today.
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.
Alamy.com and 360Cities.net have announced that the 360Cities’ collection of thousands of stunning, immersive 360° spherical images will now be available to Alamy customers through Alamy’s online worldwide marketplace. The 360Cities database will launch on Alamy.com on 5 November 2018 with an initial collection of approximately 150K images, to be supplemented with a regular stream of new content.