Editorial
The “Best In Show Festival 2016” of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs will open at 12:00 noon Saturday, May 14, at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre in West Palm Beach, FL.
Last fall, BVPA, the German association of picture agencies, asked me a series of questions about the U.S. market for stock photography and where I think it is headed. The following is what I told them along with links to a few relevant stories.
The Mega Agency, a new global media business, focused on delivering editorial images, is pleased to announce that David Ellis has been recruited as UK Sales Director.
As revenues have declined in recent years due to declining sales for the use of images in print, and increasing use of images on the web at much lower prices, many French editorial agencies have found it necessary to reorganize. Jean Michel Psaila, CEO and owner of
Abaca Press says, “The market has changed. We used to get €200 for print use. Now we get €5 for online use.”
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced a three-year deal with The Associated Press (AP) to distribute AP's daily global photo and packaged video output for license to customers based in the United States. This milestone will also give U.S. Shutterstock editorial customers access to over 30 million photos and nearly 2 million video clips from, respectively, AP Images and AP Archive.
If you’re in the editorial photography business keep your eye on
The Mega Agency. This company is a new editorial stock agency founded by the people who started Splash. Splash later became a key part of the Corbis editorial offering.
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2015 revenue of $115.9 million and a total of $425.1 million in revenue for all of 2015. The full year revenue was up about 30% from $328 million in 2014. Approximately, $8.6 million of the annual revenue was generated by Rex Features and PremiumBeat that were acquired during Q1 2015, and the impact of foreign currency exchanges. Excluding these contributions to revenue the company’s revenue growth was approximately 27% in 2015 down from 39% in the previous year.
Tomas Speight has joined
Panther Media GmbH as Chief Executive Officer. He will initiate a drive to grow the business into a global presence. Panther Media has a range of initiates relating to clients, international partnerships, as well as new content lines that will be launched in the near future. Further innovations beneficial to both photographers and clients are in the pipeline.
Since publishing “
Next Step For Corbis Photographers” last week, I’ve been contacted by a number of agents interested in talking to Corbis photographers who might be looking for somewhere else to place their work.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced an exclusive global syndication deal with
BFA, a leading lifestyle, fashion, art and entertainment content creation agency. Over 1.7 million editorial images in the BFA collection will now be available to Shutterstock’s Premier customers, which include some of the largest marketing communications companies and publishing houses in the world.
In the UK photographers can receive royalties when someone photocopies a page from a magazine or book that contains their image. In December the EPUK discussion group reported that REX Features, a UK editorial agency purchased by Shutterstock a year ago, misrepresented its right to collect certain monies from
DACS on behalf of some of its photographers and falsely reported to the photographers what it had received from DACS. The full story is available
here.
Landov Media, a small, but well respected Editorial agency closed its doors last week. It’s website
http://www.landov.com/ says it is no longer available and thanks the company’s “many loyal clients for your business and support through the years.”
The newsmedia struggles with the concept of reality and unbiased reporting, but what is reality? Is reality what can be recorded on film? Is it a JPEG rather than a RAW file? Is it only what is recorded in a video regardless of what might have been happening moments before the video started recording? If a digital file has been adjusted, or manipulated, can it still be an accurate representation of the truth of a situation?
Six REX employees were laid off by Shutterstock earlier this week. One had been with the company for 34 years. I asked Shutterstock for an explanation.
Users report that Getty’s standard editorial license offers the following: “
Worldwide editorial use for 15 years (may not be used for commercial purposes or print covers). Unlimited seats. No limits on impressions and print runs.” This is essentially a Royalty Free license for images that are being offered as Rights Managed. Unlike most RF, the price charged is not fixed and based on the file size delivered. The price may be negotiable depending on the customer. But once the image is delivered, the customer can use the image in multiple ways over a period of 15 years as long as the use is editorial in nature and not for some commercial purpose, or for the cover of a printed product.
This past weekend the Washington Post published a detailed insider view of the
ISIS propaganda machine that should be of interest to everyone engaged in editorial journalism. The writers – Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet – were able to interview a number of ISIS videographers and production people who had worked for ISiS in the contested territory and were later able to escape back to their home countries.
Recently, a European asked me how the editorial market for photography has changed in the U.S. the last 10 years. First, gross revenue for U.S. newspapers has declined about 60% from $49.3 billion in 2006 to $19.9 billion in 2014. As revenue has declined the space for editorial content, including pictures, has declined.
Bloomberg
has reported that Corbis will be cutting about 15% of its staff. The information came from an internal memo sent to employees by CEO Gary Shenk, and obtained by Bloomberg.
Newzulu has decided to focus its news collecting operation on video. They will continue to accept still images, but will limit the number of photos to 20 shots per submission.
Corbis and NetSeer have announced the launch of the industry’s first global programmatic platform for premium in-image advertising. The platform enables advertisers to programmatically target and buy premium In-Image advertising content while providing new monetization opportunities for publishers to thrive utilizing the visual content on their websites.
Recently, I received some second hand information about a major editorial agency in Europe that licensed about 70,000 in 2007. The number of images licensed was up to about 400,000 in 2014. Sounds great. But, here’s the rest of the story. The average price paid for each use in 2007 was about $167.00. The average price for each use in 2014 was a little over $12.00. Consequently, in spite of the almost 6 times growth in the number of images used in 2014 compared to 2007 the total revenue generated in 2014 was less than half that generated in 2007.
Shutterstock, Inc. has hired photographers Chelsea Lauren, Rob LaTour, Stephen Lovekin, and Andrew H. Walker to bring the best event photography and celebrity portraiture to the company.
ZUMA Press Inc. (
www.zumapress.com), a leading visual media provider for the editorial community, has announced that it is now representing images from Fairfax Syndication (
www.fairfaxsyndication.com), the most comprehensive range of Australian content from a portfolio of over 300 publications and websites.
The
Associated Press and British Movietone, one of the world's most comprehensive newsreel archives, are together bringing more than
1 million minutes of digitized film footage to YouTube. Showcasing the moments, people and events that have shaped the world, it will be the largest upload of historical news content on the video-sharing platform to date.
Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from investors trying to assess the stock photo industry growth potential and figure out where Shutterstock, Adobe and Getty Images are headed. In general here is what I’ve been telling them.