Marketing
500px has announced that industry veteran Kelly Thompson has joined 500px as Head of Marketplace. Thompson will oversee the development of new products to service the company’s growing number of advertising agency and large brand enterprise accounts, as well as the servicing of the company’s base of self-service marketplace customers.
Diomedia has developed an interesting way to use mobile devices to promote its historical collection. The Diomedia Historica (enter Historical Calendar at the App Store) to get the free app.
The results of the Graphic Design USA annual stock survey are now available online.
Check
it out. Be sure to read the extensive comments of Graphic Designes that provide some important insights into what image creators should be producing, and stock agencies should be doing to provide better search ability of their collections.
Flickr is curating its collection of over 10 billion images and contacting selected photographers to determine if they want to participate in
Flickr Marketplace. The Marketplace is expected to prepare images for licensing by many of the industry's RF and Microstock stock photo distributors and to pay image creators 51% or what Flickr receives.
Are you tired of ads for things you absolutely don’t want of need interrupting your favorite news or entertainment TV shows? Almost one-third of every hour is taken up with ads. When you’re trying to read something online do the pop-up ads that are often very difficult to get rid of interrupt your reading and train of thought? Many in the general population want to get rid of these annoyance, but how is that likely to affect revenue for image producers?
Scoopshot’s new focus on providing image buyers with professionally produced on-demand photography, produced to precise specifications, is a dramatic reversal from the company’s existing strategy of supplying User Generated Content (UGC).
Creative Market allows you to place your photos in front of over 1 million members. You set your own prices and earn 70% of every sale. The arrangement is non-exclusive so you can simultaneously market the same images through any other outlet you want. There is no approval process. Everything you submit is uploaded.
If you’re a videographer and have been discouraged by low prices and low royalties for your work it’s time to check out
Videoblocks. In April at the National Association of Broadcasters conference the company added a new feature when they launched the Marketplace section of their site. Customers must have an annual subscription in order to access Marketplace. When they choose any of the Marketplace clips they pay an additional $49 if it is HD or $199 for 4K.
If you’re trying to decide whether to get into video, or what to shoot, you may want to take a look at the
Corbis Motion Trends Study. This information should be of great value to anyone producing stock video regardless of whether they license their work through Corbis, or not.
What’s the difference between User Generated Content (UGC) and stock photography?
Maybe nothing! When people talk about UGC they are usually referring to pictures that can be found on the web (mostly on social media sites) that “someone else” may want to use. If that someone else wants to use the image (and doesn’t want to steal it) then technically it becomes a stock photograph.
Subscription licensing is in for some dramatic changes. We know that a significant number of the images subscription customers download are used in the designer’s “creative process,” but never find their way into a deliverable end product. Traditionally, creators of all the images downloaded – whether used in a deliverable product or not – have received an equal royalty share of the revenue paid for the subscriptions.
ImageBrief will be adding a stock search aspect called MyMarketplace in the near future. Right now they are reaching out to their premium photographers to collect images for this service. It is unclear when the actual service will be available for buyers to search, but it will add stock search to the briefing and finding a photographer they can hire directly features they already enjoy.
The launch of Windows 10 later this year could dramatically change the way people find pictures. On April 29th during the annual Microstock Build Developers Conference in San Francisco Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella described how Microsoft intends to (1) Build the Intelligent Cloud, (2) Reinvent productivity and business process and (3) Create more personal computing.
Recently, I was asked to comment on whether a photographer under exclusive contract with a stock agency that licensed the work as Rights Managed could simultaneously post the same images on one of a series of social media sites.
PetaPixel has a great story by 30-year-old Brendan van Son about how he has been supporting himself for the last 5 years as a travel photographer/journalist. During that time he has visited almost 80 countries. He provides a lot of very valuable detail for anyone thinking about travel photography as a career.
Stock photography is a two-sided market. For the most part image producers need a distributor to make potential customers aware of their work. Image buyers need distributors to make it easier for them to find what they need when they need it. The distributor needs to cover its cost of providing the service and make a profit. But the distributor must also manage the delicate balance between what customers are willing to pay and generating enough royalty for contributors to encourage them to continue to produce.
Almost every day another blog publishes a story ridiculing and putting down stock photography. They highlight images found on some of the major stock web sites that no one in their right mind would ever want use, except as a joke. Some examples can be found
here.
On February 24th at an invitation-only conference hosted in Miami by JPMorgan Chase & Co. Getty Images executives told investors that midstock revenue had declined 15% in Q4 2014 compared to Q4 2013. This decline was on top of a 9.8% decline in Q3 2014 compared to a year earlier. Getty’s midstock division includes iStock, Thinkstock and Photos.com.
Getty Images, the world’s leader in visual communication, and
LeanIn.Org, the women’s non-profit founded by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, are celebrating one year of partnership with the anniversary of the
Getty Images Lean In Collection – a curation of images devoted to the powerful depiction of women, girls and the communities who support them. Images from the collection have been licensed in over 65 countries, including Qatar, Kuwait and Korea, with sales doubling since the collection’s inception in February, 2014.
Getting new customers can be difficult. During Q3 2014
Shutterstock spent about 25% of its gross revenue on sales and marketing. At that rate sales and marketing costs for all of 2014 could be in the range of $80 million.
In the next year image creators who are also image buyers may determine the future of stock photography. One-third or more of the images purchased may be bought by people who are also trying to sell their images. As buyers they want the lowest possible price. With their seller hat on they want the highest possible price.
Should the price paid to use a photo cover the cost to produce it? Most stock photographers recognize it is highly unlikely that they will regularly recover the cost of producing an image from a single sale. The profit and loss calculation is much more complicated.
It seems likely that we will see some major shifts in the stock photography business as the three major players – Getty Images, Shutterstock and Adobe/Fotolia – jockey for position in a market that is experiencing very little, if any growth. At the end of 2014
Getty’s total revenue will be somewhere around $870 million, but $260 of that will be editorial. Shutterstocks will be about
$328 million and I estimate Fotolia’s at somewhere in the range of $110 million.
On Monday I mentioned several
search innovations that Shutterstock is testing at
Shutterstock/Labs. Most of these ideas were developed during company wide hackathons.
ImageBrief has updated its rules regarding RF and provided a long explanation
here. Evidentally, many ImageBrief (IB) contributors have been asking “Why is ImageBrief adding so many RF briefs?” IB’s answer is, “We’re responding to client demands and listening to the market.”