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Articles from July 2020
I can remember when I was primarily an assignment photographer and occasionally sold outtakes from assignments on the side. Most of the income I needed to support my family came from assignments. Stock sales gave us a little extra. Demand for stock started to grow and it became harder for me to get assignments as I was working in an area where the competition was stiff from a lot of top quality experienced photographers. Buyers wanted to pay a little less than it cost to do an assignment. They liked having instant access to the stock image they needed and not having to spend a lot of their time organizing assignment shoots.
Shutterstock has reported Q2 2020 revenue of
$159.2 million down 2% compared to $161.7 million in Q2 2019 and down from $161.3 million the previous quarter. Revenue per download was
$3.61 per-image compared to $3.44 in Q2 2019 and $3.42 the previous quarter. Total image and video downloads for Q2 were
44 million compared to 46.6 million a year earlier and down from 46.8 million from the previous quarter. At the end of the quarter Shutterstock had over
340 million images and
19 million video clips in its collection,
Shutterstock has entered into a partnership with Microsoft to give brands access to the stock photography company’s library of images for use in ads. The API integration with Microsoft Advertising will give advertisers on the Microsoft Audience Network
FREE ACCESS to millions of commercially licensed images.
Shutterstock’s gross revenue in 2019 was
$648,500,000. Total royalties paid out to all contributors in 2019 was about
$181,730,000. Total Shutterstock stock owned by Jon Oringer is worth over $650,000,000.
A
Getty Images photographer reports that he gets a lot of sales to a Scottsdale, Arizona company called
Design Pickle that offers full design services to businesses. Getty licenses these photo uses for
$0.17. The photographer gets a
$0.03 royalty for his work.
Now that all of
Getty Images’ Creative Image offering is Royalty Free the company seems to be trying go occasionally get a somewhat higher price for certain uses by offering a
Market Freeze. They tell customers, “With Market-freeze, you can rest easy knowing we'll remove this image from our site for as long as you need it, with custom durations and total buyouts available.”
Great Escape Publishing has published its first annual
GEP Stock Photography Index 2020 which ranks, rates, compares and contrasts the top 10 online stock-photography sites.
Covid-19 has required everyone to re-think their business model and how they communicate with interested parties. Among the questions that footage professionals have are: How have they adapted to the exigencies of remote work? Is demand for archival content holding up? What can media companies do to fully unlock the commercial potential of their archival collections, and which technologies show the most promise in this evolution? See the webinar.
If photographers are serious about trying to earn a portion of their living from photography they should probably focus on producing video rather than still images. Or maybe when they organize a video shoot also shoot some still images of the same situations. Recently, I was talking to Cameron Gough of
Envato in Australia. He pointed out that the majority of the company’s earnings come from graphic related content and only about 10% to 20% of downloads are of still stock images. He also noted that video footage was the second highest type of content in demand without giving a percentage.
In March 2020, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court
ruling held that Congress lacked authority to abrogate state’s sovereign immunity from infringement suits in the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 (CRCA). When Congress passed the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act, it was responding to pressure from filmmakers like Rick Allen – as well as movie studios, software companies, and many other IP stakeholders – who said states were abusing sovereign immunity to avoid paying licensing fees.
Since the 1980s “The legal and political environment has been tilted substantially in favor of shareholders and against workers,” according to Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard, and Anna Stansbury a Phd candidate at Harvard University. This story discusses the way this principal has played out in the stork photo business.
The French publication
BBN Times has published a report outlining four reasons why businesses should use professionally produced photos rather than pictures shot by their employees or amateurs. To read the full story which is in English click
here.
Getty Images has passed along a keywording tip to its photographers who may be taking pictures related to Black Lives Matter.
What’s an image worth? Owen Franken sent me his image (shown below) of sliced duck in a Paris restaurant as it appears on the Getty Images website. The list price on Gettyimages.com for a large file is
$475 Euros. If all the customer needs is a very small file, only suitable for online use, the price is only 50 Euros. Getty licensed this image to a customer in Canada for
$0.14 and the photographer received
$0.03 for his work. The photographer’s royalty share of the gross sale price is 20% so actually the photographer was only entitled to $0.028, but in a moment of generosity Getty rounded the payment to the next highest cent.
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This stock photography news site focuses on the business side of photography with a special emphasis on stock photography. Our goal is to help photographers maximize their earnings based on the quality of their work and the commitment they are prepared to make to the trade. The information provided will be applicable to part-timers as well as full time professional photographers. We’ll leave it to others to teach photographers how to take better pictures.
Jim Pickerell launched his career as a photographer in 1963. In 1990 he began publishing a regular newsletter on stock photography. In 1995 the information was made available online as well as in print and was gradually expanded to a daily service.
Click here for Pickerell's full biography.
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