Macrostock
With the decline in public sporting events due to Covid-19, and thus the need for photo coverage, many sports photographers have seen a significant decline in demand for their services. But media companies still have time slots and space to fill. Consequently, they are turning more to documentaries and coverage of historical events to fill their gaps. In the UK this is great news for archies like Colorsport whose collection of sporting imagery goes back to the 1880s.
After publishing our article
“Getty’s RF ‘Market Freeze’: Expensive Customer Mess?" I received the following clarifying message from Matthew McKibben, Getty Images, PR Manager in The Americas. He said:
I can remember when I was primarily an assignment photographer and occasionally sold outtakes from assignments on the side. Most of the income I needed to support my family came from assignments. Stock sales gave us a little extra. Demand for stock started to grow and it became harder for me to get assignments as I was working in an area where the competition was stiff from a lot of top quality experienced photographers. Buyers wanted to pay a little less than it cost to do an assignment. They liked having instant access to the stock image they needed and not having to spend a lot of their time organizing assignment shoots.
Now that all of
Getty Images’ Creative Image offering is Royalty Free the company seems to be trying go occasionally get a somewhat higher price for certain uses by offering a
Market Freeze. They tell customers, “With Market-freeze, you can rest easy knowing we'll remove this image from our site for as long as you need it, with custom durations and total buyouts available.”
Since the 1980s “The legal and political environment has been tilted substantially in favor of shareholders and against workers,” according to Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard, and Anna Stansbury a Phd candidate at Harvard University. This story discusses the way this principal has played out in the stork photo business.
Mobistok in Hamburg, Germany has announces a new platform for licensing uses to stock images which puts power back into the hands of photographers. Anyone who shoots images with their smartphones can go to Mobistok to put their imagery up for sale. While many stock photo websites make it a bit more difficult for individuals to sell their photos, Mobistok has been created from the ground up as a seamless way to sell photos and videos.
It turns out that the link I provided for Alamy’s list of photo needs only works for me. Readers have found that when they click on the link it simply tries to open their Google Mail page in a browser.
So here’s the list.
House of Pictures, the picture agency for premium interiors, has been part of Image Professionals GmbH since
October 2019. The Munich-based agency group unites various leading specialist picture agencies under one roof. The website
www.houseofpictures.com has undergone a complete re-launch, presenting new agency content, updated functions and a revised, fresh design.
As I pointed out in
yesterday’s story EyeEm is the single largest supplier of stock images to Getty’s Creative Collection. Currently 8,005,719 of the 30,472,764 images in Getty’s Creative Collection have been supplied by EyeEm. That’s 26% of the total collection making EyeEm by far the largest contributor to Getty Creative.
Since June 2018, CEPIC has been actively collaborating closely with Google, and later with IPTC, and DMLA to find a way to make Google Image Search users aware that certain image found need to be licensed. On Wednesday February 26th at 3pm EST there will be an online Zoom meeting on Google Images Licensable Badge – Nuts & Bolts with Doug Dawirs, Senior Technical Adviser of the DMLA and hosted along with industry experts to explain, and gather input, on the upcoming UI,
Schema.org and IPTC changes. To register in advance for this meeting go here:
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/vpMucu-trDIu6pKIFcgRfuu5EPnVgsQlHQ
An
iStock Exclusive photographer asked, “Given that Getty is ‘racing to the bottom’ and is about to eliminate Rights Managed from its collection, do you think our Exclusive contracts will be next?" I don’t think so. It seems to me that it will still be to
Getty’s advantage to keep the Exclusive segment of iStock.
Paul Roberts of the Seattle Times has recently interviewed Craig Peters, Getty Images CEO, and published an analysis of the company’s current situation entitled “
Its Crunch Time For Seattle Based Photo Giant Getty Images, And For Photographers” that everyone in the industry may want to read.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the
Death Of Rights Managed Licensing, but Alamy reports that it is alive and well at Alamy. They say, “There’s been lots of discussion in recent weeks about the future of Rights-Managed licensing. Alamy has no plans to discontinue offering RM images and will continue to offer photographers a choice to license their photos as Rights-Managed or Royalty-Free."
For over a decade image creators have been discouraged by Premium Access pricing. I believe PA was first instituted around 2006 as a way for Getty to get a guaranteed monthly payment from some of its largest Enterprise clients rather than the company be being subject to the erratic monthly image needs of some of these customers where they might purchase a huge number of images one month and little or nothing the next.
The
Everett Collection now represents the Photo Link Collection! A finely edited portfolio focusing on New York City celebrities during the 1970’s to 2000’s. Highlights include behind the scenes shots and life behind the velvet ropes inside Studio 54.
Getty’s decision to kill RM may be an
opportunity for all those agencies and individuals who want to: (1) continue to license images for higher prices based on usage and (2) enforce their claims of copyright ownership. The key will be in providing a service that will help users, not just benefit image creators.
Getty is shutting down all Rights Managed licensing on
www.gettyimages.com. This may effectively be an end to the entire marketing strategy of pricing stock images based on how they are used. While there are still a number of small and mid-sized agencies that continue to price images based on usage, it seems highly unlikely that they will be able to continue to build their image collections or attract many customers in the future. Every stock photographer and stock agent should read
this explanation of Getty’s plans for “phased retirement of rights-managed creative images.”
A 65-year-old photographer who has been selling his work as stock for many years and licensing his images as RM wrote recently asking my advice. He has a large collection of images and licenses a lot directly to clients, but over the years he has also made a small percentage of sales through stock agencies. See my advice.
House of Pictures, the Copenhagen based interior and lifestyle feature agency, will become a brand of
Image Professionals GmbH on October 1st, 2019. Pernille Schlosser, the founder and Managing Director will remain on board and in charge of the widely recognized boutique agency. House of Pictures, founded by Pernille Schlosser in 2000, is matching feature stories with high-end lifestyle publications around the world.
The Image Works CEO Mark Antman has announced that after thirty-six years of operation The Image Works will be closing in the near future. He added, "We have had a fantastic run, but it is time for me to close the business, retire and move on."
Alamy has told contributors that they no longer need them to supply copies of releases when the images are submitted. However, they advise that it is best if the contributor would indicate in the Alamy Image Manager under the optional information tab that a release is accessible. Then the customer can request to see the release if it is needed.
In response to my story
RM Licensing No Longer Makes Sense Peter George Unger commented, “I have 9,200 images with Getty and every single one is RM. I am making on average $15,000 per year from them. Can you honestly tell me I can make more money than that on pathetic RF prices? for which they pay $0.25 cents per download. Which library would pay more then 15K on RF prices?
Effective September 1, 2019, StockFood will become
Image Professionals. The Munich-based media service provider
StockFood GmbH originally focused on food photography, but has continuously expanded its scope of business in recent years and is now emerging with a new company name. Image Professionals will bring together all of the company's specialized agencies and services. However, only the company is being renamed. StockFood, the food photo agency, will remain unaffected.
StockFood has launched
StockFood Studios, an innovative production service for food photography. The Munich-based food experts, whose international brand is synonymous with professional food photography, are expanding their portfolio to include commissioned productions. The website www.stockfoodstudios.com offers this new service.
Photographers trying to license their images as
Rights Managed (RM) need to give some serious though about whether this strategy is still in their best interests. In theory, licensing based on usage should enable a photographer to occasionally get higher prices for certain uses, rather than giving away all future rights and allowing multiple re-uses for a low
Royalty Free (RF) license. The following are some reasons why this “theory” no longer works.