Search
Over a billion searches are conducted annually on Gettyimages.com. Getty often provides information on a few search terms that are being used more frequently this year than in the previous year. Recently, they provided the following list and the percentage increase in 2017 compared to 2016.
The biggest problem for stock photographers today is not what to shoot, but how to get their photos near the top of the search return order. There are way too many images with the same keywords in all the major image collections. If your photo appears at the 4,746th spot in the search return, there is not much chance that any customer will ever see it -- let alone buy it. In fact, it has been determined that very few customers will look at more that 500 thumbnails before doing a different search or going somewhere else.
Dreamstime has filed a sweeping lawsuit against Google in California federal court alleging anticompetitive and discriminatory antitrust law violations as well as on-going breaches of contract, in order to use its monopoly position in online search to benefit its business partners –
Shutterstock, and of late
Getty Images – while leaving other stock photo sellers out in the cold.
Given stock imagery oversupply, and ever falling prices, in order to justify continued production of the type of images customers want to buy, professional image creators need to find a way to reduce, or eliminate, some of the middleman cuts.
If stock agencies really want to help their customers the most important thing they could do is make it possible for customers to search for just those image that have been previously “Used.” The biggest problems facing customers today is too much choice. Only a very small percentage of the images in the major agency collections are ever licensed, but customers have no way to distinguish the used images from those that have never been used.
One of the issues these videographers face is accurately tagging their video clips so they can be easily discovered by customers.
Microstocksolutions LLC has released its
VRmeta® app for iOS and Android that is designed to make it easier for videographers to accurately tag their digital video and 360°/ VR clips with time and location-based metadata.
A Shutterstock investor asked me recently, “What can Shutterstock do to grow revenue?” He went on, “worldwide, the number of customers willing to actually pay for the images they use seems to be flat, not growing. Shutterstock
cut prices In 2017. Downloads were up less than 2% compared to 2016. Meanwhile, they added enough new images to grow their collection by 46% in 2017 compared to 2016. Art directors say the size of the collection is making it harder, not easier, for them to search and find what they need. AI doesn’t seem to be solving the search problem."
Getting images into the Getty Images collection so potential customers might see them has just become more time consuming for image creators. As of February 9th, 2018 Getty has ended its practice of adding custom keywords to the basic list of words photographers submit.
Kodak and
WENN Digital, in a licensing partnership, have announced the launch of the KODAKOne image rights management platform utilizing blockchain technology and KODAKCoin, a photo-centric cryptocurrency to empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management.
Copytrack, the German organization that tracks use of images on the Internet and then pursues infringers when an unauthorized use is discovered has announced that its “blockchain powered copyright registry and enforcement platform is preparing the enter the second round of the crowdsale” as a way of raising revenue for future expansion.
Can blockchains improve tracking of stock photo sales, give creators greater control, cut costs and increase royalties? Various companies are talking about instituting such systems. Announcements are expected in the near future. Such systems may reduce the need for some of the services stock agencies currently provide and remit 80% to 90% of the fee the customer pays to the photographer.
According to Statista 1,200 billion photos will be taken worldwide in 2017. Not surprisingly, 85% of them will be taken with Smartphones, 4.7% taken with Tablets and only 10.3% were taken with digital cameras. That works out to about 123,600,000,000 photos taken with digital cameras. A very small percentage of these will be made available available for licensing.
Jim Domke, creator of the Domke Camera Bag, recently commented about my
Can Customers Find You article. He said, “Those searching for photos on Google or Bing are searching for FREE photos.” I disagree.
Tired of low stock photo prices? Maybe you ought to license your images to customers direct. More and more customers are finding the images they need by searching Google. Sometimes the image may be one of yours that is represented by an agency. You may be able to get these searchers to come directly to you.
The
GDUSA Survey of graphic designers provides a list of subjects in greatest demand by image buyers. The top 25 listed appear in more or less the following order. I searched the five major stock photo distributors – Getty Images, Shutterstock, AdobeStock, iStock and Alamy – to determine the number of images returned when each keyword is used.
Photographers and agencies complain about Copyright Infringement. But, in many ways they make it hard for customers to discover who owns an image, whether it is one that needs to be licensed and how to properly license it. Most people in business will tell you that if you want to sell more products you need to make it easier for customers to find and pay for your products.
Stocktrek Images has revamped its website with the emphasis on a new appearance to enhance its customer interaction. With the client's approach to licensing images changing significantly in the past years, Stocktrek has developed a new website to incorporate the requirements and demands of today's clients.
Hemis.fr, an independent photography agency founded in France in 2004 has launched a new website with a trendy design. The site has a high speed search engine that is fully responsive to Smartphone and Touch pad search. The site is searchable in both French and English.
20/20 Software, a leading provider of multi-media websites and image/business management software to media libraries, museums, corporations, institutions, and newspapers, has outlined some of the newest tools it offers for working with footage.
Alamy has launched a
Spanish language version of its customer website with additional language sites for Italian, French and Portuguese-speaking countries scheduled to launch at a later date.
Stock photo customers have a big problem. They need more time and they need to be able to operate more efficiently. Stock photo sellers could help. Check out how.
Have your images that sold a year or two ago sold again recently? If not, it may be because the images are now buried so deep in the search return order that customers no longer see them.
One of the biggest problems in the photo world today is that we are being buried in photos. InfoTrend estimates that consumers will take 1.2 trillion photos worldwide in 2017. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is 9%. This year 3,934,500,000,000 will be stored on hard drives and other formats worldwide.
Both Shutterstock and Adobe Stock have announced that users of
Google Slides can now access their collections directly. This could result in more image uses for photographers with images in both collections.
Shutterstock, Inc. has updated its custom-built plugins to more fully integrate with Adobe’s Creative Cloud®, adding compatibility directly within the Adobe Premiere Pro®, Adobe Illustrator®, and Adobe InDesign® applications. This is the first time Shutterstock has made its high quality video collection of 8 million clips available through a plugin, giving amateur filmmakers and veteran film editors another powerful tool at their disposal within Premiere Pro®.