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Articles from April 2009
Photographic activities that produced the highest average revenues were advertising and brochure, consumer editorial and architectural assignments.
Everyone wants to know the best strategy for marketing their images. The numbers from this year's income survey show that more people used the rights-managed strategy than any other, and that their average gross revenue was the highest at $56,326. However, image marketers should not be too quick to jump to the conclusion that rights-managed is necessarily the correct approach.
There were some very surprising results when we compared U.S. photographers with those residing elsewhere. Average U.S. stock photographer revenues appear to be substantially below those generated by shooters living elsewhere, apart from the few U.S. respondents earning in excess of $500,000.
New San Francisco-based photography site Snapixel markets itself as an offering that combines elements of Flickr and iStockphoto.
On the heels of a recent loss of the National Football League business, Getty Images has announced it has renewed its agreement to serve as an official photographic partner of the United States Olympic Committee.
The average annual earnings of photographers responding to the 2008
Selling Stock self-employed photographer income survey are $110,409, leaving out the top five producers whose earnings are uncharacteristically large. Of this, the average annual stock income was $65,475, which means that 41% of photographers' freelance revenues come from something other than the licensing of rights to stock images.
Image Source founder Christina Vaughan has been shortlisted for the Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The honor is part of the Asian Women of Achievement awards, which identify Asian women making a significant contribution to British life.
LookStat, an online startup serving microstock photographers, has announced it has closed a round of financing with $500 in venture capital. The Seattle technology company offers a Web-based service that allows microstock contributors to track their sales by image at multiple sites.
The results of Selling Stock’s 2008
self-employed photographer income survey compared to the
2007 results are disappointing on several fronts. First, we only had 136 responses this year compared with 238 in 2007. Many factors could have contributed to this, but the 2008 data must be viewed as having less validity. Nevertheless, as we parse the data there are some interesting nuggets of information.
Dubai-based Arabic stock library Gulfimages has launched Upload, a portal that will accept contributions from professional, semi-professional and hobbyist photographers.
According to the latest figures ZenithOptimedia, global ad spending will decline by 6.9% in 2009 compared to last year. The largest losses will be in emerging Central and Eastern European markets, which will drop by 13.9%. North America is projected to decline by 8.3%, with the United States losing 8.7%, more than both regional and global averages. Western Europe's projected ad-spend decline is 6.7%.
The search leader continued expanding its image-related offerings with Similar Images, an experimental search feature from Google Labs. While Google did not pioneer the underlying image-recognition technology or image-to-image searches, the company’s increasing attention to all things visual offers insight into online image-consumption trends. For stock producers and marketers, this foreshadows both opportunities and challenges.
Injecting a little fun into the upcoming annual BAPLA Picture Buyers' Fair in London, TopFoto has designed its PBF stand to look like a bar. The company will also giving away bottles of William Wilberforce Freedom Ale.
PantherMedia's proposed credits-per-day subscription plan is structured so customers who need larger files for print uses pay more reasonable prices for their images than is the case with existing subscription and microstock plans.
Given the rapidly changing trends in the stock photo industry, photographers need to pay close attention to the duration of new contracts they are being asked to sign.
Cambridge, U.K.-based technology company Imense has launched Annotator, which it says is the first semi-automatic tool that can reduce keywording time by a factor of 4, while providing more commercially relevant keywords.
The number of traditionally priced transactions is declining, as is the average price per image.
Selling Stock estimates that the Americas are responsible for 41% of global stock-licensing revenue, while 49% come from Europe, the Middle East and the Arab world, and the final 10% from the Asia Pacific region.
Munich-based PantherMedia, which has just crossed the 1-millionth-image benchmark, is inviting photographers to participate in its newly introduced microstock and opt-in subscription offerings.
Bill Gates-owned Corbis has announced that it once again represents celebrity photography by Don Flood and Jill Greenberg. The addition strengthens the Corbis Outline celebrity offering.
U.K. technology company Capture will debut its image pre-flight utility Greenlight to the U.S. market at this weekend's PACA Symposium in Chicago. The first version of Greenlight has been designed primarily to enable agencies to quickly analyze image files and generate a report of common errors.
Jack Hollingsworth, one of the most prolific stock shooters of the last couple decades, has announced a three-day educational program called Photographer Makeover. The first of probably many seminars begins on June 1 in Austin, Texas.
How does the total 2008 editorial revenue of $700 million break down among breaking news, editorial features and books? And what portion of this revenue goes to large editorial suppliers operating outside the stock industry?
Commercial stock accounts for 56% of total revenues generated by licensing still images. Editorial, specifically celebrity imagery, is the one traditional growth segment, while the sales of microstock and subscription products now nearly equal revenues generated by traditional royalty-free images.
Appropriation artist Richard Prince has responded to a suit filed by French photographer Patrick Cariou with, unsurprisingly, a fair-use defense.
Selling Stock has updated its estimates of the gross revenue generated worldwide by the stock photo industry in 2008. We have also estimated the number of images licensed under rights-managed, royalty-free and microstock models and segmented global sales by geographic region.
Over three quarters (77%) of consumers agree that they can make a positive difference by purchasing from socially or environmentally responsible companies, says the new BBMG Conscious Consumer Report: Redefining Value in a New Economy. However, 23% of consumers they have "no way of knowing" if a product is actually green or does what it claims.
I believe that worldwide customers pay a combined total of about $1.8 billion for still stock images and illustration annually. There has been virtually no growth in this market in the last few of years. In the fall of 2008 Corbis CEO Gary Shenk estimated that total 2007 revenue for the industry was $2.3 billion and predicted that it will decline to $2.2 billion by 2012.
Rumors of Getty Images losing the exclusive business of the National Football League have been circulating for over a week and were finally confirmed during this week's annual meeting of The Associated Press. In passing, AP president and chief executive officer Tom Curley said that last week, the AP became the exclusive licenser of NFL photography for commercial use, winning the business from Getty.
The eighth annual Picture Buyers Fair takes place on May 6 and 7 at London's Business Design Centre and offers a new service to photographers.
The Associated Press has announced plans to launch an industry initiative to protect news content from misappropriation online. Unfortunately, the proposed measures amount to tracking content and suing perpetrators, with which the stock-licensing industry has had plenty of experience but limited and unquantifiable success.
Getty Images has notified its suppliers that it will discontinue offering rights-managed content on the Jupiterimages website as of August 1. Images will be pulled down from www.jupiterimages.com, www.jupiterimages.ca, www.jupiterimages.co.uk, www.jupiterimages.com.au, www.jupiterimages.de, www.jupiterimages.fr and www.jupiterimages.es.
Getty Images has revised, simplified and made its model and property releases more visually appealing with larger text. These releases are available in twelve languages and anyone can use them, regardless of whether or not they license images through Getty Images.
While undoubtedly self-promotional in initial intent, PhotoShelter's newly released SEO Cookbook offers plain-language guidance on how to optimize a photography Web site for best search-engine placement. The 30-page PDF file is available upon request and will be particularly useful for those who are daunted by marketing their work online.
Las Vegas-based multiethnic stock-licensing company Blend Images has revamped its identity, Web site and marketing campaign. The design work was done by Spil Creative, a New York shop managed by Latin-American and Asian-American partners.
On April 2, Corbis filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a Washington, D.C.-based National Museum of Crime and Punishment. Beyond the inescapable irony of a museum devoted to crime committing one, the allegations outlined in the complaint are particularly egregious. Purportedly, NMCP agreed to pay Corbis a licensing fee of $139,600 for limited non-exclusive use of 705 images, did not pay any of such fees but has used the images since last May and continues to do so to this day.
After a recent partnership with Thought Equity Motion, which was universally deemed a smart move by industry pundits, Corbis has launched a new Corbis Motion Web site. The Bill Gates-owned company now offers ten times more footage and boasts sophisticated e-commerce features.
The most commonly heard complaint from traditional photographers about microstock is that it is impossible to make money selling pictures for a few dollars. Yet the expected 2009 earnings of some 150 iStockphoto contributors suggest that these shooters make a very respectable living, even by U.S. full-time traditional shooter standards.
California-based Brand Affinity Technologies, which specializes in bringing athlete and celebrity endorsements to the Web, has struck a limited exclusive deal to provide its advertiser-clients with access to Getty Images editorial image collection.
At this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, ImageSpan and PicScout announced a partnership to help ImageSpan's LicenseStream subscribers track and monetize content published online. The two companies said this alliance not only offers licensing and tracking services, but also addresses the growing problem of online image theft.
Portland-based Aurora Photos has launched an eco-compilation. The company aims to address the needs of earth-conscious advertisers, green-living magazines, corporations and environmental organizations.
According to the latest Corbis Creative IQ Trends report, the popularity of triathlons has exploded since their introduction as an Olympic sport at the 2000 Sydney games. Economic pressures have helped, as people increasingly seek positive outlets to exert control over their lives.
WebMediaBrands-reported fourth-quarter figures for Jupiterimages show an 11.6% revenue decline from total 2007 revenues and a 23.1% decline from last year's final quarter.
The following is a list of the 131 highest producing contributors to iStockphoto and shows the number of downloads they had in March 2009 and approximate figures of the royalty revenue this represents. The data came from istockcharts (http://istockcharts.multimedia.de/). The first column is the total number of downloads for the individual as it was listed on istockcharts on March 2, 2009. The second column show downloads as of April 1st and the third column is the difference between these two numbers or total downloads for that individual for the month.
Alamy has removed the "comments" feature from its corporate blog. The company has also announced that it is restricting its online forum topics.
Six months after the initial announcement of the partnership between Time Inc. and Getty Images, the two have launched jointly owned Life.com. While the new Web site is a treasure trove for image lovers and history buffs, its image-use policies raise a number of issues for both consumers and content owners.