Subscription
With Getty’s announcement in late October of the
Unification Timeline that is due to take effect January 3, 2017 most iStock contributors have focused on the fact that the minimum guaranteed royalty for a subscription download would be $0.02.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced that its vast collection of 100 million high-quality photos and illustrations is now accessible within Adobe Photoshop® software through its new custom built plugin. With more than 100,000 new images added every day, the Shutterstock plugin boasts the largest collection of photos and illustrations that can be licensed directly within the Creative Cloud desktop application.
Shutterstock, Inc. has acquired of over 700,000 images from two prominent photo collections: The Art Archive and The Kobal Collection. Both collections, previously held by UK-based The Picture Desk, are now available to Shutterstock Premier customers globally.
Yesterday, I talked about why the business of licensing rights to stock photos - as currently structured - is
Designed To Fail unless some major changes are made. Two of the changes needed are:
(1) make finding the right image for a project much easier for the buyer, and
(2) improving supplier efficiency.
If you’re curious as to why Shutterstock’s stock price keeps rising while from the perspective of many in in our industry Shutterstock’s long term growth prospects don’t appear to be that favorable, David Trainer offers some interesting insights. See
here. Trainer is CEO of New Constructs (
www.newconstructs.com), an independent research firm that leverages proprietary technology to find key insights from the Financial Footnotes of 10Ks and 10Qs. After studying his analysis here are a few of my thoughts.
Shutterstock has launched a new keyword suggestion tool for iPhone that leverages a combination of metadata (man) and pixel data (machine) to suggest more relevant and accurate keywords for images that are uploaded in the
Shutterstock contributor app.
Shutterstock, Inc. has announced an API integration with Google. The image licensing deal provides Google’s digital and mobile display advertising products, including Adsense, Adwords, and Admob, with access to Shutterstock’s collection of more than 90 million images for license.
Shutterstock, Inc. has made its visual search features,
first introduced for desktop use in March available for mobile use. Reverse Image Search for mobile invites users to capture the world around them on their mobile phones, and then upload them via the
Shutterstock app to search Shutterstock’s collection of over 80 million images for similar content and style.
Shutterstock has notificed its Offset contributors that it has decided to make Offset content available to its Enterprise clients (over 24,000 of them) at a price point between $50 and $100. The current Offset price for a 72dpi web use image is $250.
Most photographers use two different figures to track revenue trends – revenue
Per-Image-Licensed and revenue
Per-Image-In-Collection. It’s easy for a photographer to figure his own per-image-licensed figure, but it is very difficult to determine how that might stack up with all photographers because the specifics of the number of images are usually not available even when you know (or have some idea of) the gross revenue collected during the period.
Microsoft has teamed up with
Shutterstock to add integration within PowerPoint in order to offer access to the vast collection of images for use in presentations.
Shutterstock has reported Q1 2016 revenue of $116.7 million up $19.1 million compared to Q1 2015. The growth is due mainly to new customers and increased activity by enterprise clients. Royalties paid to contributors during the quarter were about 29% of total revenue, or approximately $33.8 million. Currently, there are over 100,000 contributors meaning that the average contributor earned $338 during the quarter.
Shutterstock has signed a 3-year exclusive worldwide distribution agreement with
Starpix, a boutique celebrity, red carpet and event photo company that provides photo coverage on the East coast for leading film studio clients and publishers.
Shutterstock has announced a partnership with
PR Newswire that will provide its customers with access to the Shutterstock 83 million+ image library of licensable photos.
The Shutterstock Contributor App that contributors may obtain from the Apple App store has been upgraded to allow contributors to directly attach, upload and manage model and property releases to their images from their phones.
A videographer wrote recently complaining that two of his video clips had been sold by Getty Images to Viacom for a broadcast show on Comedy Central. This show also appears on the web. These two sales were made through a Premium Access deal and netted the videographer a whopping $8.46 for the two sales.
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.
A photographer recently asked if I could explain why
Shutterstock is making such an aggressive effort to grow its collection. Currently, the company over 77 million images in its collection and is adding over 800,000 new images a week. As far as I can tell Shutterstock believes their customers want more and more choice not only in subject matter, but in newer, more updated images.
Shutterstock has reported Q4 2015 revenue of $115.9 million and a total of $425.1 million in revenue for all of 2015. The full year revenue was up about 30% from $328 million in 2014. Approximately, $8.6 million of the annual revenue was generated by Rex Features and PremiumBeat that were acquired during Q1 2015, and the impact of foreign currency exchanges. Excluding these contributions to revenue the company’s revenue growth was approximately 27% in 2015 down from 39% in the previous year.
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.
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.
Shutterstock is not making enough money so they have decided to lower the royalties paid for Enhanced Licenses. Here's what it means for image creators.
In an effort to make it easier for more people to use Shutterstock imagery the company is partnering with
Optimizely and
Sprinklr. By integrating
Shutterstock’s newest API directly into their platforms, customers of these organizations will be able to easily search, preview, and license from the Shutterstock collection. Contributors will earn a royalty each time an Optimizely or Sprinklr customer licenses one of their images.
Pond5 is in the process of creating a collection of video clips that can be offered through low priced subscriptions. Contributors have the option of nominating their low-selling files for inclusion in the collection and will receive a minimum monthly royalties of $0.50 per item for every clip in the collection, regardless of downloads and usage.
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.