Future Planning
The results of the Graphic Design USA annual stock survey are now available online.
Check
it out. Be sure to read the extensive comments of Graphic Designes that provide some important insights into what image creators should be producing, and stock agencies should be doing to provide better search ability of their collections.
As more and more information consumers all over the world turn to the Internet for Information print publications are losing money. They can’t earn enough from Internet advertising to cover their costs. Traditionally, revenue from advertising has covered 50% or more of the total costs of operating a publication.
In a world where everyone is a content creator, publisher and editor, who do consumers most trust, and what do they expect from the content they consume? A new study from Adobe of 2,000 US consumers addresses these questions and more, revealing some surprising shifts in the content landscape:
VisualSteam has announced the results of its annual survey of art buyers regarding the use of stock photography and video. Getty Images, iStock Photos, and Shutterstock take the top 3 spots (in that order) as the go-to resources for art buyers.
The new Adobe Digital Publishing Solution (DPS), the next generation in its groundbreaking Digital Publishing Suite, pioneers new ways for brands to deliver high-impact content to mobile apps and is likely to result in more images appearing in apps. It will also become increasingly difficult for image creators to know if their images are being used in apps, or not.
If you’re trying to decide whether to get into video, or what to shoot, you may want to take a look at the
Corbis Motion Trends Study. This information should be of great value to anyone producing stock video regardless of whether they license their work through Corbis, or not.
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.
Adobe has launched
[St] Adobe Stock as part of its Adobe Creative Cloud subscription offering. Creative Cloud customers are now able to launch Adobe Stock directly within CC desktop software such as Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop or After Effects, and add watermarked or licensed images to their Creative Cloud Libraries. This will allow them to access and work with images across multiple desktop tools.
During the
CEPIC Congress in Warsaw a Russian stock photo agent told me that Russian photographers can live and support a family very comfortably on 50,000 roubles a month. At today’s currency exchange that works out to about $886 per month or $10,632 per year.
Are we about to experience another major shift in the photography market similar to the shift from RM to RF and the dramatic changes brought about by Microstock? At the
CEPIC Congress in Warsaw on Friday June 5th at 10:00am I will be moderating a
panel discussion on Crowdsourcing and how it is likely to impact the stock photography business in the near future.
Bond traders are asking “If Getty Images changed its name, but had all the same content and pictures, would this have a significant impact on sales/marketing?” The reason for this question is that revenue has been declining for Getty for at least eight quarter and it is becoming increasing apparent that there is likely no way to turn the business around.
Stock Photo Secrets has put together a list of
80 Stock PhotographyTrends For 2015, In 2014 Stock Photo Secrets surveyed stock agencies and put together a list
50 trends of the kinds of imagery customers were buying. This year 16 agencies responded with the 80 most popular subjects their customers are requesting and using.
I am constantly challenged on why I think there is likely to be little or no revenue growth in the stock photo business. Many point out that clearly there is a huge explosion in the use of imagery online. Therefore, why won’t that be reflected in the growth of stock photo revenue? They also point to Shutterstock’s consistent 40% growth per year over for the last three years. Here are 6 reasons why industry revenue growth is and will continue to be in the very low single digits, until it finally turns negative.
One of the arguments for licensing images as Rights Managed is that only then can they be licensed for Exclusive uses because all the uses of the images are controlled and limited. With Royalty Free customers can continue to use the images they acquire in unspecified ways long after initially licensed with very few limitations.
Using numbers from Getty Images it is interesting to look back at the RM and RF unit sales and revenue trends over the last decade. Between 2003 and 2007 when Getty was a public company they provided investors with very precise gross revenue and average price per image figures. This made it possible to make a reasonable estimate of the number of images licensed in each category.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in the motion picture and sound recording industry has dropped from as high as 368,000 in 2013 down to just 298,000 in August, a 19% drop in just over two years. (See
MarketWatch story for more details.