New Technology
Last month we wrote about
Scoopshot a site where any photographer can submit cell phone pictures for editorial use. The company has been in business for about 18 months and has over 130,000 contributors from 165 different countries. Now Scoopshot has added an option that allows editors to identify and give assignments to a select group of photographers that produce professional quality work.
Last week we wrote about the new Getty Images initiative
Post-Usage-Billing Service (PUBS). On Thursday Craig Peters, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Getty spoke at the Luminance event in New York and shared some additional insights. He spoke of the dilemma the photo industry faces in protecting copyright and how Getty’s new initiative can solve at least part of the problem.
PicScout has announced the launch of the ImageIRC Post-Usage-Billing Service designed to assure photographers and content licensors that their work will be properly acknowledged on social media platforms which embrace the ImageIRC Post Usage Billing solution.
Pocketstock has created a new pricing strategy call Bidder that enables each customer to establish the price he or she is willing to pay for a royalty free image.
On its
Google Drive cloud storage service Google has added a feature that will allow its customers to use
Thinkstock photos for FREE. They are currently asking their customers to suggest photos that they would like to see included in this gallery of free photos.
We recently reported on
Foap.com, a Swedish site where photographers can sell pictures they take using their cellphones. Now the developers of the Finnish company
Scoopshot, which offers a similar service, tell us that their best selling photographers, Arto Mäkelä, has earned more than $19,000 from pictures he ha taken on his Android smartphone and uploaded to the free-to-download Scoopshot app.
Pond5 and Adobe have teamed up to develop a one-of-a-kind plug-in that gives video editors seamless access to the largest collection of over 1.1 million royalty-free stock videos, including 330,000 royalty-free music tracks and sound effects, all exclusively within Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.
Anyone thinking about setting up their own fully functional search engine to license images should read
Yuri Arcurs article about the trials and tribulations he went through in creating
PeopleImages.com.
An Australian company called
ImageBrief, has developed a way for buyers to submit briefs directly to photographers for the images they need. This cuts out the stock agency middle men, and eliminates the need for buyers to wade through massive online databases of images.
As of the end of April PacaSearch had 169,352,194 searchable images on
www.pacasearch.com. That is a lot of images. And the number is constantly growing. But, the number is not what makes searching on this site unique. What’s amazing is the fact that all the images are easily available for licensing because trademark, copyright and release issues have been addressed and sales models have been created.
RM photographers Take Note!! With the launch of
PeopleImages.com Yuri Arcurs has taken away your last best argument for why professional art directors and graphic designers should go to traditional RM sites to license the images they need.
Previously we wrote about the new search engine
PicturEngine. The key question is not how well the search works, the number of images they offer or the chance for photographers to ask for higher prices for their work. The key question is how will they make customers aware that their site exists? The question is marketing.
The
Aurora Multimedia Workshop designed to prepare photographers for creating effective multimedia projects will examine the challenging new world of visual storytelling from May 29 through June 1, 2012 at the University of Colorado campus in Bolder.
A new search engine called
PicturEngine is getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere. It has recently been released in Beta after four years in development. The founder, Justin Brinson, also owns two agencies: Corner House Stock Photos and Picturesque.
IIn August of 2011
Arius3D Corp made an
offer to purchase Masterfile for $21.4 million in a bid to expand into the 2D market. Since then Arius3D has been trying to raise the financing necessary to close the deal. Several tentative closing dates have passed, the last being March 31, 2012, and it has now been announced that the deal “will not close,” and the offer to purchase is not being extended.
Since the beginning of 2012 there has been an explosion of interest by
Venture Capitalists in investing in microstock companies. This article examines the implications.
Anyone asking themselves whether or not they should get into video should look at Corey Rich’s videos “
WHY” and “
HOW of WHY.” Corey is a filmmaker/photographer as well as a teacher. Yes, these videos were made to promote and sell the Nikon D4, but for the interested filmmaker they go far beyond that.
In the previous series of articles entitled
"Edication: How The Market Has Changed" we looked as some of the factors that have changed the educational market for images. This series of stories looks ahead. Not only have there been dramatic changes in the past, but the business of delivering educational materials to students is still very much in transition. There will certainly be a decline in the use of printed products, a growth in the delivery of educational material online and more use of video. Check out these stories for more about where things seem to be headed.
There’s a lot of buzz on the Internet about a new “social media” site Pinterest.com. It is designed to let people organize and share pictures they find on the web. “
People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.” Users can browse pinboards created by others, discover new things and get inspiration from people who share their interests -- all without paying a penny to use the pictures.
The photography business has changed dramatically -- and at a very rapid
pace. Kodak is near bankruptcy and trying to sell off its photographic
patents. Most of the photo labs that used to process film and make
prints have long since gone out of business. Locally, Penn Camera
Exchange the largest photo equipment supplier in the region is closing 5
out of its 8 stores. Professional photographers aren’t the only ones
who are hurting.
A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but permanently attached
descriptions are worth a lot more as photos travel through the digital
world. A campaign has been launched calling for the embedding of
descriptive and rights information in digital media and retaining it
during the whole life cycle.
Given the existence of these contributors stock photography is unlikely to be a dependable way to earn a living in the future. Those that are trying to earn their living taking pictures should focus on getting assignments or doing something that guarantees a certain level of compensation before they undertake the work.
Stipple Marketplace, the San Francisco based company with the goal of turning editorial images into e-commerce storefronts for consumers, has developed a system that allows publishers to earn money from the images they publish, not just sell ads around those images.
If you haven’t visited the Corbis web site for a while it may be time to
take another look. In 2010 Corbis decided that it was time to update
the search technology they had been using since 1995. The
project involved a series of architectural changes with two primary aims
– improving performance (speed of delivery) and relevancy of the
search results delivered. This story discusses some of the changes and modifications.
According to
eMarketer world advertising spend is expected to be about $500 billion this year. The online portion of this spend will make up about $80.2 billion, or 16.1% of the total. By 2015 online advertising spend is expected to reach $132.1 billion and be 22% of total advertising spend.