Search
In my previous story about the
Google Licensable Badge I made a mistake about when the badge would actually go live. It actually started appearing on the site on 31 August 2020. It will be interesting to see how much Google’s new Licensable Badge will help or hinder stock photo sales. To test it I did a search for
“Office Workers.” Then you are given several options including one for “Clip Art” which seems to be all illustrations. and another for “Stock Photos”. I clicked Stock Photos and among the options given are “Royalty Free” and “Stock Photography”.
ustomers need a better way to quickly review a selection of images than most stock photo sites offer. They don’t need more images. They need to be able to review the best images quickly. Twenty-five years ago this was possible by reviewing the images that had been placed in tightly edited major agency print catalogs. Now that editing is gone. The current marketing goal seems to be to throw as many images as possible at customers and force them to spend their time doing the editing. Historical trends indicate that most customers have found the mages used by other customers to be most useful for their purposes as well. Most customers are not looking for an image that has never been used.
Stock photo agencies need to pay more attention to the time limitations of their customers and provide more efficient search options. As image collections get larger and larger searching for the right image becomes harder and harder for the image buyer and requires more and more of that buyer’s time. The problem with the current default search procedures is that customers must look through too many irrelevant images before they find one they can use.
Forbes Magazine has a story entitled “
Move Over Stock Photos, It’s Time For User Generated Content.” There certainly is an increasing demand for User Generated Content (UGC) and the market is being flooded with it, but there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding how much it is likely to take over the stock photo market.
Robert Harding, CEO of
Robert Harding Picture Library, recently sent a message to picture buyers asking the question “Is picture research dead?” Image creators need to carefully consider the implications of this message.
Will more images in an agency collection grow revenue? Is more choice always better?
Shutterstock is adding 1,608,350 new images a week to its collection. That’s 229,764 new images a day. The average customer reviews 500 or fewer returns before changing search parameters. So how do they make it possible for customers to review all those new images?
Did you know it takes Creatives twice as long to find an image that will work for their project as it did just 4 years ago? This is one of the facts that was uncovered in
Visualsteam’s Annual Survey of Creative Pros. This 35-page report is packed with other information and insights that should help image licensors and image creators as they plan for the future. The report can be purchased for $69.95 by contacting
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As fewer and fewer stock photographers earn enough from the licensing of their photos to justify continued production, some suggest that instead of letting stock agencies pay them 20% to 30% of the small gross fees collected to use their images, they should sell their images directly to customers. In this way they would get higher prices and keep 100% of what the customer pays.
Sometimes companies get so anxious to promote themselves that they announce new programs before they are actually functioning properly or ready for release. Last week
Dreamstime announced its “New Reverse Image Search” and said it “makes finding the perfect stock image a snap.”
In late September 2018,
Google announced that it had been working with two photo industry consortiums, CEPIC and IPTC, to integrate some image ownership-related metadata into search results. Now Google images desktop view has a new “Image credits” link below the image. This information is collected from IPTC Creator, Credit and/or Copyright information if it exists.
The images created by photographers who are trying to earn a portion of their living from their work represent very small minority of the total images that can be found on the Internet. Every day the number of images on the Internet that require licensing becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total. While there may be 2 billion unique images online that photographers have on offer for licensing, that number is a very small percentage of the total images available for viewing.
Recently, in a discussion with a stock photo agent the subject came up as to what it would take for Getty Images to repair its relationships with the Creator Community. I raised the issue late last year in “
Why Creators Are Dissatisfied With Getty.”
Stock agencies do a very poor job of advising photographers what to shoot. Most successful businesses try to keep the people producing their products well informed about what is selling and what isn’t. They don’t want their workers wasting time (and costing them money) producing products no one wants to buy.
I saw a story recently that said
Dreamstime had identified Kiev as the 15th most photographed city in the world. That surprised me. as I had expected a lot of other cities to be much higher in terms of tourist destinations than Kiev. I couldn’t find the original Dreamstime story in order to see who they had as number 1, but I found a lot of other lists of top cities and top travel destinations. They were all differed depending on who put together the list. I found one list of “25 Most Photographed Cities in Europe” and Kiev wasn’t on it. I decided to search
Shutterstock’s collection of 216,094,727 images to see which were the top cities with the most photos.
A multi-year review of Shutterstock download trends going back to Q3 2010 provides some interesting insights into how adding more images to the collection relates to sales growth. (See chart) Back in 2010 Shutterstock had 12.3 million images in its collection and 11.1 total downloads for that quarter. In theory the more choice you offer your customers the more sales you are likely to make. That pretty much held true through 2012 as Shutterstock almost doubled the size of its collection.
WebPurify, a full-service digital content moderation and review company with over 12 years experience is a new sponsor of the
Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA). The Irvine, CA based company’s mission is to maintain the quality and integrity of media libraries. WebPurify’s offers a combination of live content moderators and AI technology that can be a huge asset to stock photography websites in helping to curate, manage and moderate the copy associated with images and videos.
Laura Annick asked some questions concerning my article about the
concept of an ICL. Here are her comments and my response. You're assuming that 100% of all creators will have uploaded their images and thus if a searcher cannot find an image, then it must be free to use. As you know there are TONS of independent filmmakers out there. It could take quite a long time to get EVERYONE to upload their images. I would rather see a notice saying "Image Not Found, Further Research Needed" or Use at Own Risk.
A key to success of any business is supplying customer what they need and want. Sometimes you can sell them things they don’t need, but there is a limit as to how long you can survive with that strategy. Image user don’t want more images. They want to find exactly the right image quickly. They don’t want to be editors. They want someone to do the editing for them. Most don’t have a lot of time to waste.
Recently, I received a call from the developer of a real estate website who is looking for a picture researcher to help him find images to illustrate the stories he will publish on his website. He is looking for “free” pictures, but has determined that it takes too much time, and is too much hassle, to do the research on the free sites himself. He is willing to pay someone to do that research, but not pay for the photographs.
One has to wonder if Getty does any analysis of their Creative Collection in terms of what sells and what doesn’t. Clearly, as we
reported yesterday, the largest and fastest growing segment of the Getty collection is EyeEM with 4,558,201 RF images. Back in
August 2016 EyeEm had only recently started contributing to Getty Images and had 256,152 images in the collection. They have 17.79 times as many images now as in 2016. At that time Getty had a total of 16,687,710 images in the Creative Collection. That collection has grown 43% in size in two years, but nothing like EyeEm’s 1779% growth.
In this report I have searched each of the different RM and RF collections on the Creative section of
www.GettyImages.com to determine the number of images in each collection. Collection sizes vary greatly from EyeEm with 4,558,201 RF images to Silkroad Images, PictureIndia, Chic Sketch and Corbis Historical, all with fewer than 200 images each.
One of the big mysteries in the stock photo agency business is the percentage of “
Unique images” licensed annually. Some agencies, like Shutterstock, report the total number of images licensed, but many of those licensed are used by multiple customers so the actual number of
different, unique images used is much smaller.
Shutterstock is enlisting the help of IBM’s Watson AI technology to make it easier for marketers to find images, videos, and music tracks. The company announced today that its library of more than 200 million assets will become available in July through the Watson Content Hub, a cloud-based management system designed to aid in the creation of websites, apps, billboards, and more.
Shutterstock, Inc. has launched of Shutterstock
Reveal, a new
Google Chrome extension, together with the release of its new experimentation site,
Shutterstock Showcase, which features two additional new search innovations -
Copy Space and
Refine.
SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, has acquired
Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary Oath. Flickr was founded in 2004 and sold to Yahoo in 2005. Yahoo, in turn, was acquired by Verizon in 2016 for
$4.83 billion. Verizon combined Flickr with AOL to create a new subsidiary called Oath.