StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

QuickLinks For 2006-06-30

• Is YouTube a flash in the pan?
  As video-sharing site YouTube rides an enormous wave of popularity, a research firm has expressed doubts about the company's business prospects.
  Josh Martin, an IDC research analyst, issued a report Thursday asserting that YouTube will struggle to squeeze profits from its video-sharing business, primarily because its audience has grown accustomed to paying nothing for the service. [...]
  YouTube owns more than 40 percent of the burgeoning video-sharing market, and more than 13 million people log on ... every month. But even while the company's profile mushrooms, and more than a year since YouTube was founded, executives have yet to roll out a business model.
  C|Net.
  Tags: YouTube video sharing

QuickLinks For 2006-06-29

• Microsoft Creates Icons of Imaging Program:
  Microsoft today unveiled its Icons of Imaging program, a new initiative designed to recognize world-renowned photographers who use the Windows operating system in their digital workflow. [...]
  The announcement was made at Microsoft's first ever Pro Photographer Summit, held on the company's sprawling campus outside Seattle. [...]
  The Icons program is Microsoft's first and biggest attempt at building long-term relations with the professional photography community.
  Jay DeFoore/AmericanPhoto.
  Related:
  •Microsoft Launches Icons of Imaging Program at First Microsoft Pro Photo Summit
  •Microsoft acquires iView Multimedia (Peter Krogh)
  Tags: Microsoft professional photographers

QuickLinks For 2006-06-28

• Jean-François Leroy´s Editorial on the 2006 Visa pour l'image festival:
  The news in 2005/2006 has brought its grim harvest of bad news, wars, disasters, threats and bombings. [...]
  One more comment. We can no longer refer to it as a fashion or trend; there were so many reports sent in this year which were nothing more than a series of posed shots showing people clutching the portrait of a loved one now dead – victims of the tsunami, of Chernobyl, famine or war – we could have done an entire festival with the same type of report. How boring! Do we really need to point out that the sum total of individual stories can never – or so rar rarely – tell a full story. And when a trend becomes a system, then we really have the ultimate form of boredom!
  The complete festival program here (pdf-download).
  Tags: Visa pour l'image festival

Digital Railroad Partners With APA, Launches New Corporate Site

Digital Railroad announced today a partnership with the Advertising Photographers of America (APA), following an earlier cooperation with the local NYC chapter of APA. The company noted in a statement that its services will enable APA members to better manage their workflow, increase their image sales worldwide and that new programs as well as new services will increase market opportunities for APA membership.

QuickLinks For 2006-06-27

• Warner Bros. strikes deal with video-sharing site:
  Warner Bros. Entertainment on Monday began selling full-length feature films and TV shows over the Internet via Guba, one of a legion of companies presenting amateur-videos on the Web. The agreement is the latest sign that at least some in Hollywood may be ready to deal with Internet sites that some in the movie business consider a threat. Guba plans to stand out by being one of the few video-sharing sites that is profitable. CEO McInerney said his company, which began as a subscription service and now also generates revenue through ad sales, never had enough money to operate on a deficit.
  CNET.
  Related:
  • Warner Bros. to Offer Content Online (WSJ, June 27)
  • Warner Bros. offers video on demand through Guba (TC, June 26)
  • NBC to run TV promos on YouTube (HWR, June 27)
  • Video is Converging on Us (APAD, June 26)
  Tags: online video sharing

QuickLinks For 2006-06-26

• Today the Rocky Mountains News runs a long article on Thought Equity and the $300 million stock video footage market:
  Denver-based Thought Equity is the world's largest stock video footage licensing and management company, with more than 165,000 clips on its Web site. The four- year-old company essentially serves as a middleman between ad agencies and media companies that want to incorporate stock footage into their own productions and the vast film libraries that own those rights. [...]
  Stock footage is estimated to be a $300 million market, according to BBC Worldwide, and is poised to grow to $1 billion by 2010 as more clips make their way into Internet ads, cell-phone snippets and digital billboards.

QuickLinks For 2006-06-24

• MySQL addresses istockphoto's enterprise needs:
  In 2002, the company moved to a fee structure and wanted to increase traffic. "We came across this amazing thing that looked like enterprise-grade software, called MySQL", said EVP Patrick Lor. With that and PHP, they re-coded the entire site, and in 2002 sold 154,000 images at 25 cents each. [...]
  Today, istockphoto.com runs 12 clusters of eight CPUs each on name brand hardware with "five-nines kind of quality." Each day, istockphoto.com sells about 45 gigabytes, or $20K, worth of images, grossing more than $7 million a year.
  NewsForge.
  Tags: iStockphoto MySQL

QuickLinks For 2006-06-23

• The Face of India, What it's like to find yourself a TIME cover model:
  But what happens when someone who isn't famous, or even a model, actually wakes up one day to find themselves the face of America's most popular newsmagazine?
  That's what happened to Gunjan Thiagarajah, 29, a sales and marketing employee at a biotech firm in Los Angeles [...] a friend invited her to a photo shoot with a stock photographer. She thought it would be a fun experience and a quick way to make $100. She had no idea that, through the process of stock photography, her face would become an international symbol for the future of India.
  Time.com (thx for the hint, DR).
  Related: $150 for a photo on a 39-cent-stamp (Orlando Sentinel, June 18, 2006)
  Tags: For 100 bucks, we can be Heroes just for one day (Link)

QuickLinks For 2006-06-22

• ITN revamp ‘not just a coat of paint’:
  ITN formed a landmark partnership with Google in January which already enables us to sell video clips straight to US consumers. In this imagery market it is no longer the BBC and Sky News which we see as the big players around us, but Getty, Corbis and other aggregators of still imagery who, like ITN, see the use of stills and video merging — above all in corporate, advertising and consumer markets. If your children use photos from the web to enliven their school homework, it is a fair bet that in two to three years they may be downloading ITN video clips.
  Press Gazette UK.
  Related: ITN Archive becomes ITN Source (June 19, 2006)
  Tags: ITN Archive ITN Source

Analysts Recommend: "Getty Images needs to consider the acquisition of Jupitermedia"

On Monday this week, the "Financial Performance Scorecard, Full Year 2005" report from Outsell, Inc., a research and advisory firm providing market analytics for the $308 billion information industry, announced that in the new Outsell 100 Top 10 company ranking the companies Google, Autonomy, Adobe Systems and Jupitermedia Corporation are listed, among others.

QuickLinks For 2006-06-19

• $150 for a photo on a 39-cent-stamp:
  Carl Purcell is a travel photographer whose art has graced publications ranging from National Geographic and U.S. News and World Report to travel sections in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Still, an online archive at corbis.com is home to 12,800 of his more than 300,000 photos and is a primary source of income for him. One popular photo alone -- of palms blowing in a typhoon in the South Pacific -- has netted more than $25,000, Purcell says.

QuickLinks For 2006-06-16

• It’s time to take stock of your photos:
  Since setting up office in India in late 2005, Getty Images already has five corporate offices across the country and it is growing.
  Estimated market for pre-shot digital images is $12 million and Getty Visage is a major player in the SAARC region. Sales are largely driven by India, with an 85% contribution to the overall revenue, followed by Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
  Aliya Rashid/DNA India/Money on "with its huge entertainment and media industries, India is big market for stock images."
  Tags: Stock photo industry in Asia

Veer Launches New RF Label Somos Hispanic Images

The last months have seen new agencies and news collections focussing on latin and hispanic stock photos.

Latin Visions launched in early May and said that it´s the first photo stock agency with relevant content for the growing need for hispanic content.

Shortly before the 2006 CEPIC Congress, the two Ex-Corbis SVPs Jennifer Hurshell and Joe Barrett announced their new venture GoGo Images with multicultural RF images to fill the "Hispanic and Latin Gap" and the "Chinese Gap". Both explained during a presentation of Pepper Stark at the CEPIC in Biarritz that GoGo Images launches with 2,500 images, will showcase around 7,500 images by the end of 2006 and grow to about 25,000 images in 2007. Additionally plans are to add indian, black and gay/lesbian content in 2007.

A Personal Note After The CEPIC Congress 2006 In Biarritz

Besides meeting all the GBOEs (Greatest Business Man on Earth), GAOEs (Greatest Stock Agency Owner on Earth), GPOEs (Greatest Stock Portal Owner on Earth) and GJOEs (Greatest Stock Photo Journalist on Earth) and besides the confidential things happening behind the curtains, I found little newsworthy things happening in Biarritz during the  CEPIC. Except for one circumstance.

QuickLinks For 2006-06-12 (News Roundup)

After visiting the CEPIC Congress and being offline deliberately awhile, a short news roundup:

• Getty Images and Amana have signed a reciprocal distribution arrangement:
  Getty will offer a selection of 50,000 images from the Neovision, Sebun Photo and Amana brands, in return Amana will distribute 50,000 images from Getty Images´ Taxi, Photodisc and Digital Vision collections.
  More details here.
  Tags: Getty Images; Amana

QuickLinks For 2006-06-07

• Adobe Photographers Directory statistics:
  According to the APD team, every month some 2,000 photographers are getting contacted for business as a result of the directory. They also report that:
  3,500 pro photographers have joined the directory representing:
  
  • Partnerships with 28 pro photography associations in 10 countries
  • Photographers from 35 countries
  • 36% of the invited photographers
  43,000 (on average) unique visitors a month go the directory, with the majority coming from the link in Adobe Bridge.
  John Nack/Adobe.
  Tags: Adobe Photographers Directory

QuickLinks For 2006-06-06

• Avanti, avanti! The consolidation of the stock photo industry and the three giants moves constantly forward during the CEPIC Congress in Biarritz:
  Corbis was recently overwhelmed with emotion learning through the "leading magazine for the picture business", VISUELL (the online version), that its 2004 revenues were $140 million: "Revenues went through the roof, climbing from $140 million in 2004 to $228 million in 2005" (translated from Kraut).
  In fact, those were the revenues for 2003, the 2004 revenues were around $170 million.

JupiterImages Acquires Workbook Stock, Strengthens Again Its RM Business

Workbook, Inc., founded in 1977 and based in Los Angeles (CEO Alexis Scott), is the parent company of Workbook Stock, a collection of superior RM imagery predominantly as well as RF images. Other services of Workbook, Inc. include assignment, fine art (framed art for sale), the phonebook (a directory listing of ad agencies, art buyers, etc.) and resources.

The rumors that JupiterImages might at least be interested in acquiring Workbook Stock date back to mid-April, when Jim Pickerell reported in his Story 825 on April 14, 2006, shortly after the PACA conference, that "the most persistent rumor was that Workbookstock would be acquired by Jupiterimages".

Off To The CEPIC 2006 Congress In Biarritz, Catching One Of Those 25 Taxis Driving Around

We´re off to the annual Stock Photo Industry Freak Show, the european CEPIC Congress 2006 in Biarritz, France. With over 737 delegates and 414 companies from 51 countries it´s by far the most important meeting in this industry in the world.
It´s more than only an european event, and has significatly more attendees than the recently held PACA conference.The CEPIC Congress starts officially on June 7th (view the program here and compare it to the PACA meeting schedule).

Boost Mobile Offers Getty Images´ PictureCast Service

Following Corbis´CEO Steve Davis, who said during the 2006 Corbis Annual Meeting in mid-March that Corbis had experienced 100 percent growth in mobile image sales last year, Getty Images announced in early April 2006 its extended mobile strategy to bring news, sports and entertainment mobile-ready images as well as video clips to mobile customers.

In a related matter, JupiterResearch, recently sold by JupiterMedia, announced by the end of March 2006 the prediction that the mobile video market will generate revenues of over $500 million by 2010, up from $62 million in 2005, and has found that 41% of mobile phone users are interested in some form of video service on their mobile phone. According to IDC, 800 million camera-phones are forecast to be in use worldwide by the end of 2007.

QuickLinks For 2006-06-01

• Readers zoom in on Microsoft's JPEG rival:
  The world is ready for a new photo compression format to rival the ubiquitous JPEG, CNET News.com readers say. But they're not so sure it should be a Microsoft product such as the new Windows Media Photo format, which promises better quality images at half the size as JPEG files.
  In an unscientific poll asking whether a JPEG competitor is needed, almost half of the 5,621 voters said maybe, "but I'm concerned about it being a Microsoft product." About 20 percent said, yes, "e-mail and Web pages need smaller files," and about 30 percent voted, no, "JPEG works just fine."
  CNET.
  Related: Microsoft shows off JPEG rival (Topic 2)
  Tags: Windows Media Photo JPEG