New Technology
The buzz word in the world today is “Big Data” and how it is going to improve everything. But in the stock photo business are the major agencies are really examining the data they have collected? If they were I think they would be more worried about their future and doing a lot of things differently. I don’t see that happening.
In the “
Goodbye Shutterstock” thread on
MicrostockGroup marthamarks said, “My older images still sell on Shutterstock, but newer ones die there.” Why would that be? One would expect newer images to sell better, particularly when agencies continue to ask for more and more images. This does not seem to be insolated complaint, but one common to many long time Shutterstock contributors.
Adobe has launched the public beta of the
Adobe Stock Contributor Site, a new platform that enables creatives to upload and sell their photos, illustrations, videos and vectors to the world’s largest creative community.
After years of development
PicturEngine is about ready to begin promoting its search engine to customers. It has more than 500,000,000 keyword searchable images from 64 stock photo agencies and hundreds—soon to be thousands—of individual photographers.
Dreamstime, has implemented a significant improvement to its website security by switching all site pages to "HTTPS" including the dedicated mobile website and the Dreamstime applications for iOS and Android.
Shutterstock has launched a new keyword suggestion tool for iPhone that leverages a combination of metadata (man) and pixel data (machine) to suggest more relevant and accurate keywords for images that are uploaded in the
Shutterstock contributor app.
Getty Images has launched the
Getty Images Virtual Reality Group, a new business dedicated to the creation and global distribution of virtual reality (VR) content.
Microsoft has teamed up with
Shutterstock to add integration within PowerPoint in order to offer access to the vast collection of images for use in presentations.
In a
previous story we talked about five aspects of the image licensing business where serious modification to standard practices are needed, if the industry is move ahead and grow revenue. In that story I dealt with three of the five: (1) Pricing Floor For Certain Imagery, (2) Simplified Pricing and (3) Better Actionable Data For Contributors That Relates To What’s Selling. In this story we’ll examine the issues of (4) Curation and, (5) a Central Database For Small Collections.
Paul Melcher disagrees with much of my pessimism about the future of the stock photo industry. I have the greatest respect for Paul and his opinions. He is founding director of
Melcher Systems and has been working in the stock photo space for more than 20 years. He has a thorough understanding of our industry. He has done much more in depth research of the tech side of the industry than I have, and has much better contacts and networking in that space. For these reasons, it is important for my readers to carefully consider what he has to say.
Agencies need to think hard about supplying contributors with more detailed information about exactly what is being requested and what is really selling. It used to be enough to provide general information about the broad categories of subject matter in demand. At that point they would leave it up to the individual creator to guess at what buyers -- with whom they have no contact whatsoever -- might want. That is no longer enough. Shooting based on gut feelings no longer works.
I want to call your attention to a couple of comments to my recent story “
Curated Collections: The Future.” It is important to recognize that there are some great images on most of the stock photo sites with tens of millions of images. But as we shove everything that meets certain technical standards onto these sites, it becomes harder and harder to sort through all the mediocre shots and find the few great ones.
Pond5 has improved its systems for searching and finding the right video clip or image. In addition, it has introduced a Membership offering that provides significant saving for customers who pay monthly or annual subscription fees.
The three public companies in the stock photo industry –
Getty Image, Shutterstock and
AdobeStock -- face major challenges that will probably be impossible for them to overcome. Adobe is the possible exception because it can approach the stock image side of its business as a loss-leader that supports the other 98% of its business.
If you love Shutterstock, are a Google Chrome user and want Shutterstock to know everywhere you go and everything you do on the Internet, you may want to install the new
Shutterstock Tab just launched today. You can get the tab free of charge by going to the
Chrome webstore.
What amazes me is why all the smart people in the publishing world think they have to give away all their information when they put it on the Internet. In theory if you get enough “eyeballs” then you can sell more ads and the revenue from the ads will cover your costs and generate a profit. But, that theory is not working.
As more and more information consumers all over the world turn to the Internet for Information print publications are losing money. They can’t earn enough from Internet advertising to cover their costs. Traditionally, revenue from advertising has covered 50% or more of the total costs of operating a publication.
At Adobe MAX 2015 in Los Angeles today Adobe outlined its vision for a "connected creative canvas" where people create and share their work from anywhere. More than 7,000 graphic designers and photographers attended.
In a world where everyone is a content creator, publisher and editor, who do consumers most trust, and what do they expect from the content they consume? A new study from Adobe of 2,000 US consumers addresses these questions and more, revealing some surprising shifts in the content landscape:
Suppose there was a smartphone app that automatically sent every image capture to the cloud and stored all the metadata including date, time and exact location down to within 100 feet or less of where the picture was taken. (Also imagine if camera manufacturers built that into cameras.) It's coming!
LMKtag (also
Lamark) has developed a relatively inexpensive system to embed tags, invisible to the naked eye, in digital images files. These tags link back to a LMKtag database that contains the image creator’s name and contact information as well as whether the image is available for licensing. The database can also include caption information and other metadata about the image and the creator can adjust this information at any time.
Last week I wrote a story about “
Microsoft’s Research On Captioning Photos Automatically." I argued that this technology is a long way from being of much use to stock photo customers who trying to find useful photos for their projects. However,
helping users find photos may not be what Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are really trying to accomplish.
Microsoft recently published an article about the advancements they are making in developing technology that can automatically caption pictures. (See
here.) However, from the point of finding images on the Internet there is one big flaw in where they are headed.
In most cases there will be a huge number of choices that can reasonably have the same caption.
Microsoft say that worldwide there are about 400 new powerpoint presentations being prepared each second. That works out to about 12.6 billion presentations a year. A significant percentage of them use multiple images. Some are the creator’s personal images. But the vast majority are grabbed from the Internet via Google, Bing, Flickr or somewhere else. If users paid even $1.00 for each image used in such presentations the annual gross revenue might be more than 5 times the revenue generated worldwide by the stock photo industry.
Be sure to read Paul Melcher’s story in his
Kaptur Magazine about where image recognition software is headed.