Midstock
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.
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 a previous story, I came to the conclusion that the Corbis properties VCG purchased probably generated in the range of
$60 million in 2015. Does that mean that after experiencing steadily declining Premium and Midstock revenue for several quarters Getty is likely to have a $60 million increase in 2016? I think the answer is No. Here’s a dozen reasons why.
If you’re a photographer who licenses your work as RM because you believe that’s the way to earn the most money (or a reasonable fee) when your pictures are used, it’s time to take a look at Offset. Many photographers are so opposed to microstock and subscription that they refuse to consider anything connected in any way with Shutterstock. If it is a Shutterstock initiative then it must be bad.
The tedious process of uploading images for consideration by iStock is about to get much easier. On February 7th Kasper Ravlo will be launching a new tool called
Q-hero. The average time to submit a file for review will drop from over one minute per image to less than 1-2 seconds. Instead of being the slowest site for image submissions, iStock will become the fastest.
Most image creators believe that adding images to online searchable databases will grow downloads and sales. This is particularly true, when one assumes that the new images being added are better than the ones produced earlier because the image creator has improved through experience and has a better understanding of what customers want. However, an examination of the sales by iStock’s leading contributors indicates that adding images is often counter productive in terms of increasing downloads. In fact, contributors who add very few, or remove, images often show the greatest download-per-image in the collection.
To better understand the potential for an iStock turnaround it is worth comparing iStock and Shutterstock downloads. At the end of my report on
Shutterstock’s Q3 results I estimated the number of IOD (single image) and subscription downloads Shutterstock will have for 2015. For an explanation of how I calculated the iStock numbers see this
story. The following chart compares the sales of these two companies.
Previously, I have supplied an analysis (
here) and (
here) of iStock’s downloads in 2015 and the number of images 430 of their leading contributors have in the collection. While 430 is only a small percentage of iStock’s more than 100,000 contributors this small group has somewhere between 55,070,000 and 58,554.000 downloads since the company’s founding in 2002. I believe this represents about one-third of iStock’s total downloads.
An increasing number of iStock’s most productive contributors have been dramatically reducing their production of new images in the last two years.
Ever since Getty Images invented Premium Access (PA) licensing image creators have been upset that their images were being licensed to some users for ridiculously low prices. Often images licensed in this manner are ones that have been extremely costly to produce. For at least one contributor Rights Managed PA sales now represent 66% of total sales at an average price of $12.00 and over half the sales are for $4.35 or less.
What should we expect next from Adobe? The following is pure speculation. I have no inside information that the following is part of Adobe’s plan, but it seems logical to me that they will move in this direction in the near future. If they do it could benefit many image creators and possibly negatively affect some.
Shutterstock has provided investors with some very interesting information about their Enterprise pricing strategy and how it differs from their normal E-commerce pricing. You can find the “E-commerce vs. Enterprise Case Study” by going go to this link (
http://investor.shutterstock.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251362&p=irol-presentations). Then open the pdf under “Investor Presentation” that was uploaded on 11/18/15. The chart explaining the Case Study is on page 25 of this 37 page pdf.
According to
Bloomberg, Getty Images has found a way to raise a net $90 Million in an effort to revive its “Midstock” business.
Stock footage provider
Dissolve has announced that it will add royalty-free photography to its creative offering on October 1 of this year. The move comes after two years of steady revenue growth and a burgeoning reputation in the footage-licensing market.
Previously,
500PX had priced the images in its Marketplace at flat rates of $50 for web resolution, $250 for print resolution, and $750 for products for resale. Now they have introduced a second tier for images their editors deem of lower quality. The flat rate prices for images in this tier, called Core, are $35 for web resolution, $150 for print resolution, and $300 for products for resale. The prices for the first Prime tier will remain the same.
For new readers, or those who may have missed some of what I have written over the last few months, the following are a list of stories worth looking at to get a sense of where the industry is headed.
An increasing number of iStock’s most productive contributors seem to be pulling back on their production of new images. Of the 430 photographers and illustrators we have been tracking for more than four years only 34% have added more than 100 images to their collections in the last six months. That leaves two-thirds of this group of contributors who have added fewer than 100 images or removed images from the collection.
Since 2009 I have been tracking the image downloads of some of iStock’s leading contributors. Beginning in 2012 I increased the number of individuals tracked on a semi-annual basis to 430. While 430 is only a small percentage of iStock’s total contributors which number more than 100,000 combined this small group has at least 55,479,000 downloads and given the way iStock reports these numbers possibly as many as 58,416,000 downloads. I believe these numbers represent about one-third of all iStock downloads since the company’s founding in 2002.
Downloads for 430 of iStock’s leading contributors have continued their steady decline in the first half of 2015. Getty had hoped that the
launch of iStock subscriptions in April 2014 and the launch in September 2014 of a
single price for images, regardless of the file size needed, would turn iStock’s fortunes around and bring customers back from its competitors. Neither strategy seems to have worked.
Matt Munson, CEO of Twenty20, recently made the case for why User Generated Content (UGC) will be
The Death Of Stock Photos. He argued that “stock photos do not depict reality” and that “brands that use them risk coming off as generic and out-of-touch” with consumers.
If the blogs are any indication more and more Shutterstock contributors seem to be complaining about declining revenue. While individual royalties may not have been as high as some would have liked, for several years they were at least going up steadily month to month to month, or compared to the same month a year earlier. Within the last year or so an increasing number of contributors are complaining about revenue stagnation or decline.
Shutterstock has reported $97.5 million in revenue for Q1 2015, a 34% increase over Q1 2015. There were 33.4 downloads for the quarter. About 28% percent of revenue for the quarter was paid out to contributors in royalties. The average price per download was $2.87 up from $2.68 in the previous quarter and a 17% increase compared to Q1 2015. There were 51.6 million images in the collection as of March 31, 2015 plus 2.6 million video clips. At the end of the quarter the company had 542 employees worldwide.?
In March,
Shutterstock began testing a new collection called
Premier Selects that is only available to Enterprise customers. For more about how it works check out
https://premier.shutterstock.com.
Pond5, has unveiled auto-tagging technology that they claim is the first of its kind in the stock media industry. Built with artificial intelligence, this pioneering feature automatically generates keywords for each photo and video uploaded to the Pond5 platform.
In August 2014
EyeEm announced that it would be introducing a “Market” aspect to its social media site. Market has finally been launched. EyeEm was established in 2011 and currently has over 13 million users who post photos taken with their cell phones and comment on each other’s work. It is unclear how many images are on the site.