Marketing
Stipple, the San Francisco-based technology company, founded in 2010 with the vision of turning editorial photos into storefronts for consumers has closed its doors.
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.
ASMP has announced two webinars later this month that should be of value to stock photographers and stock photo agents. Both are free if you sign up and listen at the scheduled time. These webinars will also be recorded and made available within a week after the event through a web link. ASMP members will be able to listen to them for free. Non-members will be charged a fee of $4.99.
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).
StockFood has released a new collection of food images that points to a new trend in food photography, and to a certain extent in stock photography as a whole. They call their collection “
Perfectly Imperfect” which describes the spirit of spontaneity that is increasingly in demand in every type of photography.
The German microstock agency PantherMedia (
http://www.panthermedia.net), a German microstock agency with 28 million images in its collection, has relaunched its new website with the most comprehensive update in 10 years. Besides the clear new design, the website offers new products, new licences and additional features.
Getty Images has announced to its Flickr contributors that it has provided notice to terminate its existing agreement with
Flickr. The original 5-year agreement went into effect in July 2008. Getty has been unable to come to a new agreement at this time. Getty says they continue to be open to working with Yahoo!/Flickr.
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.
Shutterstock has reported a record 28 million downloads and $68 million in revenue for Q4 2013. The company’s revenue for all of 2013 was $235.5 million, up from $169.6 in 2012. About 28% of the revenue was paid out to contributors in royalties.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook executive and author of Lean In, has worked with Getty Images to try to identify 2,500 images that portray woman in more empowering ways than many of the stock images of old-fashioned stereotypes found in today’s advertisements and media. Photographers may want to review the "leanincollection" for shoot ideas.
Google has just made it much easier for searchers to find images they can legally use for FREE – even for commercial uses. Bing introduced this feature last July. Go to Google. Use the images search feature and search for any subject. Click on “Search Tools” and under that click on “Usage Rights.” The default search is “not filtered by license,” but the searcher can change that to any one of the following:
Total global ad spend in 2013 was between $489.6 billion (
Magna Global) and $503 billion (
ZenithOptimedia). This is up between 3.2% and 3.5% compared to 2012. According to
eMarketer the U.S. portion for 2013 is about $171.33 billion or 34% of the world media market.
After reading my story on
Lightrocket and the comments, Yvan Cohen, co-founder of Lightrocket provided some feedback and clarification.
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.
Visual Connections has announced that
Visual Connections Chicago (), the leading forum to meet and learn from image/footage buyers, will be moving to a new venue in 2014. Bookings for the Thursday, April 24, 2014 event will open on Wednesday, December 18 at 10am ET.
Photographers all over the world are making sales through
ImageBrief. While it can be a lot of work responding to briefs the photographers we talked to seem generally happy with the results. ImageBrief reported that in October and November they negotiated sales for 168 photographers operating in 30 different countries. (See list below)
Stocksy has announced that it has become the world's first stock photo website built around responsive web design principals. This step has made Stocksy the only stock photo site that can provide the same optimized research and buying experience across any smartphone, tablet or desktop device.
It’s time to take another look at
PeopleImages.com that Yuri Arcurs Productions launched 17 months ago. Yuri has long been the world’s most successful microstock photographer, and until June 2013 his work was represented on virtually all the world’s microstock distributors.
Design Pics Inc. has announced the acquisition of AgStock Images, a California based photo agency specializing in agricultural photography. Founded in 1996 by Ed Young,
AgstockImages.com is a comprehensive library of worldwide agricultural photography, representing over 115 leading agriculture, produce, livestock, entomology, botany and plant pathology photographers, including photographers who are also professors and researchers across the United States, Canada, Europe and South America.
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.
Does exclusive representation make sense in today’s stock photography world, or is it better to place your images with multiple distributors? Here are a few things to consider.
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.
The stock visual media industry is seeing a pick-up after the longest downturn in living memory. Visual Connections New York, the world’s largest marketing event devoted to commercial licensing of visual media, drew more buyers and exhibitors this year than in 2012. Buyers could learn about 72 different stock agency brands from around the world, including 21 new to New York and 22 from outside the US (Canada, UK, Germany, Sweden and Argentina).
Stock photography is changing rapidly. The most serious issues facing stock photographers are:
they have no idea who their potential customers are;
they don’t know what their customers are looking for in the way of images; and
they don’t understand how their customer’s businesses are changing.
Getty Images has done a deal with
Pinterest that will track the use of any of the 80 million photos and illustrations on Gettyimages.com whenever they are posted on the digital scrapbooking site. (A little over 7 million of those photos are on the Creative section of the site.)