Today, a lot of businesses get marketing and branding mixed up. They are confused as to what the differences are, what they both mean or they try promoting their business with one and without the other. Simply put, marketing is how you reach your target market with advertising, promotions and public relations. Marketing is showing the world with what you do. Branding is who you are or what the world thinks you are. Every time a prospect or a potential customer makes contact with you in person, print, virally or by other means, they are formulating an opinion of you as a brand. 

Veer has relaunched its Web site, billing the new treatment as uncomplicated. While Veer still carries traditionally priced stills, it is certainly catering to the no-hassle customer segment with simplified licensing and prices that span the gamut—starting at $1.

During his keynote speech at the Dublin gathering of CEPIC, Stockbyte founder Jerry Kennelly announced the upcoming launch of his new business Tweak. Operating on a content-as-a-service model, Tweak aims to become a major global self-service design library and change the way customers access creative content.

Barton recently took a look at the use of a microstock photo in Web sites ranging from a German consulting firm to a keyword-spamming plastic surgery domain. The photographer describes the photo as a “perfect-people perfect-world lowest-common-denominator cookie-cutter pile-them-high sell-them-cheap image” and asks: “Why would a reputable company want to be associated with those words?” There are numerous answers, and most are so mind-bogglingly simple as to make anyone wonder why stock-industry insiders are still having this meaningless debate.

As buyer budgetary pressures and competition continue to drive prices downward, stock image production companies and solo practitioners are increasingly looking to maximize their earnings by cutting out the middleman.

Here’s the best chance you’ll ever have to win 100 Euros (or the equivalent in dollars). You can also respond to a photographer survey or have fun testing your knowledge of photography business trends. Check it out. It will only take a couple minutes.

If you are in the stock imagery business and want to stay current with worldwide industry trends the annual CEPIC Congress is a must event to attend. Held every year in early June - this year in Dublin, Ireland at the brand new Aviva Stadium - it was an opportunity to meet and greet industry leaders and exchange ideas. Traditionally CEPIC has been an organization focused on the needs of those who license rights to traditional customers, mostly larger commercial organizations. This year one day was devoted to a New Media Conference (microstock). This event was very well attended by traditional sellers, many still wary of microstock and not ready to embrace it fully, but also accepting that the $400 million a year business is a major force in the industry and here to stay.  

I had already been a still photographer for over 20 years when I started exploring digital video and the motion medium ten years ago. I had built a successful career shooting editorially for magazines like National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure to name a few, as well as producing annual reports for major corporations.  When digital video hit the scene in the late ‘90’s, I was already starting to feel a slight frustration in trying to tell certain stories with a still camera. I was beginning to think and see in terms of movement and sound.  At the same time, technology was making it possible and affordable with digital video cameras and non-linear editing software for me to use this medium to tell my stories.  The new tools were a means to an end.

This story provides links to some of the stories on this site that may be of interest to someone new to the stock photography business, or someone who might to have a brief refresher course on some of the things that have been happening in the last few years. Many of these stories will also give you some idea of developing trends and what the future might hold.

The opportunity to interact with editors from publishing companies, picture researchers, stock agents and photographers at the American Society of Picture Professionals’ (ASPP) Reinvention weekend in Boston provided a clearer picture of where the business of producing images for publication is headed.  Here are a few of my take-aways from the three day conference.

Street vending your photography is not for everybody.  But if you can live within the income limits, are innovative, like the outdoors, and truly enjoy people- you can have a lot of fun.  Experience and suggestions from NYC.

As the photo industry struggles with pricing and licensing structures to accommodate digital uses, such uses keep growing. Every month brings new evidence of advertising, marketing and communications budgets steadily moving in the direction of the Internet, with predictions that 2010 will see digital spending surpassing print.

Tom discusses his strategies for success in stock photography with advice for both new and established stock photographers. He discusses what to shoot, the importance of RPI, selecting agencies and even what gear he uses.

Katy von Brandenfels, of BigCheesePhoto won €100 our May/June PhotoLicensingOptions’ contest designed to encourage those interested in the business of producing and licensing rights to images to sign up for this FREE weekly email every Saturday.

The photo discussed in this article is an almost perfect stock photo. It's not cutting edge; it's not trendy. It's not hip or cool. wshat it is is a photo that will license again and aagain for years....extending its revenue stream long after its production costs have been recouped. This is a photo with a very long tail.

How to create estimates that get the job and build your business.

Photographer, Art Director and Editor Sarah Golonka shares with us her knowledge and tips on succeeding in stock photography.

With all the free information available on the Internet why would or should anyone want to pay for information? Many consumers believe that writers should give away their work in order to build a following of customers who will then pay them for some other product or service they provide. Most would acknowledge that some effort and expense is required on the part of the creator to produce good, useful information, but often that is not deemed to be of any economic value. Photographers tend to supply information on their blogs as a way of getting customers to hire them for assignment work, for paid speaking engagements or as a way of selling a book. The other way to earn revenue is to generate enough traffic to your site that advertisers will pay to surround your information with ads in hopes that some or your popularity will rub off on them. Is giving away information the only way?

Is Flickr a place for a professional photographer to display his work and sell images? Todd Klassy thinks so. Right now he is an amateur devoting maybe 3 hours a week to shooting and another 6 in post production and studying photography. After the first of the year he intends to quit his job of 17 years and start working full time as a photographer.

Jim Erickson breaks all the stock photography rules and yet is one of the world’s most successful sellers of stock images. Pick any strategy that everyone agrees is the key to success in stock, and Jim Erickson is probably doing the opposite. He sells stock to clients rather than through agencies. Erickson never licenses rights to an image for less than $350, and the average license fee is about $1,800. He produces an annual print catalog and distributes it to only 20,000 top buyers. His gross revenue from stock sales in 2008 was over $2 million and he couples his stock business with an assignment business that grosses an additional $2 million. Read more about how he does it.

If you sell pictures for use in print publications take a look at www.backcastonline.com. Not so much for the content (although it is great), but for the concept which could be a huge new opportunity and salvation for editorial photographers.

Traditional photographers argue that Premium Access volumes will never make up the difference for low prices. Despite that argument Getty is licensing more and more of their images at Premium Access prices. The royalties paid for these sales are often lower than those paid by microstock companies and Getty volumes don't seem to be making up the difference.

The Long Tail describes a new way of looking at, and approaching, markets in the Web 2.0 environment. The term was first coined by Chris Anderson in a Wired magazine article in October 2004. It is illustrative of the business strategy of Internet companies like Amazon.com and Netflix which sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities, to a very large base of customers. This buying pattern creates what is called a "power law distribution curve" or long tail.

As the stock industry changes, traditional stock agencies and distributors are losing ground because they have failed to adopt new technological efficiencies. Granted, constantly keeping up with the latest technological changes can be expensive, and most agencies have already invested huge amounts to get where they are today. But, microstock sellers have introduced a number of strategies that traditional agencies and distributors should be considering – if not rushing to adopt.

There are four basic marketing pricing strategies to consider when trying to decide how to market stock images. They are Rights Managed, Royalty Free, Microstock and Subscription. Below I will list some of the advantages and disadvantages of each from the image producer's perspective. However photographers need to remember that if a particular strategy offers an advantage for the customer it may become widely used regardless of the hopes or desires of photographers.

In 2009 should photographers market newly produced images as rights managed (RM), traditional royalty free (RF) or microstock? In my view, it won’t make a whole lot of difference.

For photographers there are basically three ways to get photos where customers can see them. The first is setting up a searchable site. This can be costly and tends not to work well unless the photographer has a broad niche image collection, and a solid base of customers. Being recognized as a leading light in the niche helps.