StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

QuickLinks For 2012-01-19

• Just extended:
  The 50 Free Stock Media promotion from Pond5 is now running until Jan. 31th.

• Jobs shed as Getty Images absorbs iStockphoto:
  Getty Images has confirmed to BJP that 30 employees have been made redundant at iStockphoto. "We are completing the process of full functional integration across the two brands," says Getty Images' CEO Jonathan Klein. "Nonetheless, Getty Images remains committed to the vitality of the iStockphoto brand."
  The layoffs comes just a few days after Kelly Thompson announced that he was leaving Getty Images. Getty Images says: "Kelly has now decided that the time is right for him to leave the business to pursue other interests and we wish him the very best in all his future endeavours.
  Kelly's last day with the company will be January 20."
  BJP.
  Related:
  • Kelly Thompson, now SVP, PD@GI
    (Aug. 05, 2011)

• Fotolia’s new art-inspired stock photography collection:
  We’ve teamed up with deviantART to create a collection of amazing images.
  The collection features over 3,000 images, what’s even more unique, these images are exclusive to Fotolia, meaning that they are only available to Fotolia members.
  Images: The deviantART Collection on Fotolia. - More details.

Fotolia V3, Changes of Subscription Plans

In the light of the upcoming V3 of Fotolia´s website (and the competition) some major changes were announced:

1. There will be only *one* subscription plan left in the future, instead of the Standard (L size) and the Premium (XXL size) subscription. This is for many reasons very interesting, the Premium subscription was alive little over 2 years.
   Changes with respect to contributor commissions below (without absolute re-/progressive values between percentage differences):
   
   
   
   
   
2. Videos in HD will no longer be offered in the subscription plan (like earlier in the Premium subscription), "but web resolution vids are available", in M size, counting now as five downloads.
   HD vids need to be acquired separately in the future, as single downloads.
   
   
3. Vectors, counting earlier as 3 DL, are counting now as 1 DL, and commissions for contributors were cut way stronger than for images, being in RPD now equal to images. Do your own math.
   
   
4. Further Details on Image Pricing, Vector Pricing and Video Pricing.

 

Related:

• Contributor Royalty Changes@Fotolia (Jan. 21, 2011)
• Fotolia launches Premium Subscription (July 07, 2009)
• New Fotolia Microstock Subscription (May 31, 2008); Act II; Act III.

 

Michael Leis vs. Microstock (and Daryl Lang with Dyed Hairs)

OK, this below and this one below are not images from my old acquitance Michael Leis - and it is barely not the task of microstock to make this happen - but this from Fotolia US runs like hell.

[Images: Vetta Provocateur Collection by Fotolia (George Mayer/konradbak) and pshek]

Actually even this one below looks distantly like Daryl Lang with dyed hairs & 5 years younger ... .

Can you imagine the power of an excel sheet (in the end it all comes down to this) making this happen to many people outside for free and for ever?

 

 
 

 
 

Fotolia Offers Free Microstock Subscription To Bloggers

How many times in the past years have people puzzled around with their excel sheets trying to create and calculate the free blogger flatrate for microstock images?

Those excel sheets all went Jamd fubar, and even PhotoXpress does not offer any free images to new users anymore.

Fotolia´s new offer to some bloggers (a few selected ones of course from the design and media world) instead now gives to these bloggers the possibility to download up to 5 images per day from the Standard Subscription (not the Premium Subscription) in L-Size - limited to a full month nota bene.

The images are coming from Fotolia, not from PhotoXpress.

[Update Apr. 10, 2011: To make things clearer for some, I extended the 3rd paragraph]

[Update Apr. 11, 2011: Related: "Amazing free photo subscription offer for Bloggers"]

 

QuickLinks For 2011-02-01

• Flixtime was only the beginning... :
  Launched in February 2010, Flixtime was the first partnership between Fotolia and AudioMicro.
  Now AudioMicro receives an equity investment from Fotolia and former investor DFJ Frontier. More details in the press release and on TechCrunch.
  Related:
  • A Short Fall Conversation With AudioMicro´s Ryan Born on Microstock Audio
  (Oct. 22, 2008)

Contributor Royalty Changes@Fotolia

A quick overview below about the recent changes in contributor royalties at Fotolia. Not Year-over-Year, instead based on the two-year-period 2009 until 2011 to demonstrate the development.

Still this does not fully reflect the situation of contributors since Fotolia indeed increased the prices of their credit packages from 2010 to 2011 between 5,26% and 6,67% (depending on the size of these packages), but contributors do not benefit from this because their slice is based on the credits needed to buy an image, not on the price of the image itself.

QuickLinks For 2010-10-01

• Amid(st) an industry of imitators:
  
  Serban Enache on Facebook on new hires ("Sales Executive, International Channel Partnerships") at Shutterstock.

• Fotolia´s new Provocateur "collection" ("Affordable avant-garde"):
  If there would be more from this type of imagery (not only 100+ images) at this price, with only a few having the potential, I´d be ready to forget about Vetta.

iStock unleashes iPhone App, Fotolia rolls out Adobe AIR application

Since I lack the time to publish both in the press release section, here are the latest news:

• +++ iStockphoto delivers iPhone App for browsing and sharing photos +++
  +++ More details +++

• +++ Fotolia launches first AIR application for stock photos +++
  +++ More details +++

 

Fotolia and AudioMicro Team Up on Flixtime; AudioMicro Exclusive Provider of Microstock Music

Flixtime is a great idea, distantly similar (but: "nearly two years in the making") to the cooperation (press release and report) between Animoto (co - financed by Bruce Livingstone: "My mother can use Animoto") and iStockphoto.

Details over here and a jealous comment over there from a competitor: "That’s very neat, however you fail to make it clear that in order to use most of Fotolia’s stock photos and music, you must pay for the content. This is a smart way Fotolia adds a new distribution channel to their stock content".

Related:

• A Short Fall Conversation With AudioMicro´s Ryan Born on Microstock Audio
  (Oct. 22, 2008)

PhotoXpress - so far for the Future of Free Images

• "Now with over 600,000 royalty-free, high-resolution images, the next version of PhotoXpress.com will launch soon with new features" and "tools such as Light boxes and Advanced Search."
  (From their recent newsletter; words in bold emphasized by me)

QuickLinks For 2010-01-20

• After Shutterstock and Dreamstime, also 123RF.com is ready for editorial content:
  Images will be accepted and reviewed now. However, they will not appear immediately on the site. Once we have sufficient content, we will then launch the editorial content on 123RF.com. We anticipate this to happen at the end of February 2010. (How to here)

• A late Happy New Year 2010 with SpiderPic, another nail in the coffin, the modern and more aggressive version of the meanwhile more old-fashioned ImageTrail:
  

• While I missed to mention before Christmas 2009 the new price structure of Fotolia for 2010, Roberto Marinello has a nice overview on this.

"Honey, I´m back"

Years later the idea of a microstock photo portal is back ...  these days, you add of course celebrity stuff ... today PixMac announced that - after Fotolia - images from Dreamstime are now available on their site, together with the new Infinite Luxury Collection with around 100,000 images from Image Source.

More details, also here.

QuickLinks For 2009-10-23

• New "Dynamic Search" from Dreamstime:
  Check the new "Dynamic Search" [example] link on our search results page. The feature is just released from beta. The page loads the next set of images automatically as you scroll. We hope this will make content research process much smoother. I believe that each extra click that is saved is a huge leap forward.

• New marketing gig from Fotolia: Operation Level Ground. Related details.

QuickLinks For 2009-08-04

• Late summer Free Images Madness:

  1. Stock.xchng:
  Breaking News - 400,000 images!
  (July 20, 2009. Related News)

  2. PhotoXpress:
  Offering over 400,000 free professional high-resolution images and illustrations, PhotoXpress.com has officially become the largest online supplier of free stock imagery.
  (August 04, 2009. The website says "443,951 photos")

  3. Free Stock Images:
  Google Trends shows people searching for stock images is declining year on year.
  (Source)

• Late summer Gossip Madness:
  Bruce Livingstone, who founded online stock-photography provider iStockphoto, paid $2.5 million for a landmark midcentury Los Angeles home that was on the market very briefly. The 1966 home, on a slope in the Los Feliz community, has been given landmark status by Los Angeles.
  Mr. Livingstone, 38, bought the house including much of the artwork and furnishings, by designers including Isamu Noguchi, Herman Miller and Arne Jacobsen. “It’s a bit of a time capsule,” said Mr. Livingstone who is relocating with his family from Seattle to Los Angeles for a digital media venture.

Fotolia launches Premium Subscription

Just in, and apparently aimed at Shutterstock, Fotolia launched today the full resolution Premium Subscription with some similiarites to the previous Corporate Account.

Prices start higher at Fotolia with €249/month for 25 images/day (Shutterstock: €199), but align with a 12-months subscription (FT with €2.061 vs. SS with €2049). This comparison is not valid for the US where SS starts at $249/month, like Fotolia, and 12-months subscription are $2.061 (FT) vs. $2.559 (SS). Dreamstime in comparison: $239 and $2.399.

Fotolia vector and video files now count as 3 respectively 10 downloads. -More here.

CEPIC 2009: Free Images and Free Flying Crown Caps

So while Obama Barack stayed in Dresden during the CEPIC congress for nearly a day when we were out in the evening for drinking a beer and wanted to return to the hotel while all roads were blocked, the fun continued with our session on Saturday morning, moderated by John Balean from Topfoto, on Free Images: Friends or Foes, with Patrick Lor of Fotolia, Kelly Thompson from iStockphoto, Charlotte Lippmann of UK-based Picture Research Association and me.

Up to now you never ever had a tiny chance in your lifetime to sit on a panel with two iStockers, one former one and one present one, and the session partly mirrored this dramaturgy of its very own kind with crown caps flying from the right side all over the panel desk to the left side.

Thanks also to Jon from Shutterstock, Serban from Dreamstime and Alex from 123RF for contributing their opinion on the matter. And a special Thank you! to Barack who responded to the question if a professional picture researcher should use more free images with a clear voice by kindly saying: Yes, we can´t. But I don´t go into the details here.

Fotolia raises between $50 million and $100 million Venture Capital from TA Associates

Some competitors of Fotolia have taken pride in the past months to spread the rumor that Fotolia was already or was about to be sold at that time.

TechCrunch/Erick Schonfeld, in another new article on Fotolia - and no further comment from me - emphasizes that "Fotolia Takes A Massive $50 Million To $100 Million Round" from TA Assiociates, but mentions also "there are some rumors going around in venture circles that Fotolia got sold outright for $150 million. Our source, however, emphasizes that the company was not sold. Instead, after competitive bidding from more traditional venture firms, TA Associates came in with a massive injection of capital."

Now you take your calculator and assess:

1. The underlying company evaluation, and
2. The underlying estimation of the microstock image market size.

 

PhotoXpress by Fotolia offers 350,000 free images

Lor’s ambitions are to have close to a million photos available free of charge and PhotoXpress will remain independent from sister site Fotolia, however the two are intricately connected. PhotoXpress members will be able to license up to 10 images daily, free of cost.

Professional ad agencies and firms who might need more than 10 images a day will be sent to Fotolia. In this sense, PhotoXpress is a lead generator for Fotolia. But more than that, it is a way for professional photographers to expose some of their work for free to a larger Web audience, while inculcating a respect for copyrights among Web consumers. It is an attempt to bridge the two worlds, and Fotolia wanted to do this before its competitors did.

Lor says the biggest challenge is convincing the photography world to give away stock photography for free. PhotoXpress is still working out if the site will make any revenue - the obvious revenue stream is third-party advertising on the site, but Lor couldn't confirm or deny that there will be ads on the site. PhotoXpress's main competitor is Hungarian site Stock.xchange.

Sources: TechCrunch/Leena Rao (above/compiled) and Fotolia.

A sudden surprise before our CEPIC session on free images. -Check the license agreement (e.g. "limited to a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels in website uses") and check with your wife before using some partly strange stuff over there (1; 2; 3 and 4; initial keyword: beach).

Related:

• Patrick Lor, Co-founder of iStockphoto, joins Fotolia (May 06, 2009)

 

Patrick Lor, Co-founder of iStockphoto, joins Fotolia

Patrick Lor, co-founder of iStockphoto, a Getty owned-online marketplace for microstock photography and video, has joined rival Fotolia as the President of Fotolia North America.
According to Lor, his non-compete contract expired with Getty recently, which left him available to get back into the stock photography business.
iStockphoto was initially launched to democratize photography and let all people use images, Lor says. He was disappointed to hear of iStockphoto’s aggressive price increases following the Getty acquisition and maintains that Fotolia’s prices are much more fair for consumers.
Lor hopes to launch some new services in the future but won’t reveal what those are just yet.

Sources: Leena Rao/TechCrunch (compiled/accentuation in bold above by me) and Fotolia.

Regardless of the small mistake in the TC post - iStock (since 2000) is way longer in business than Fotolia (since 2005) - it´s a strange time for iStockphoto:

QuickLinks For 2009-02-21

• For download: the corrected PhotoShelter Photobuyer Survey (1.3 MB).

• Rumor: 2009 Overall Stock Photo Sales Down 40 Percent (Philip Nealey)

• Adography sounded initially like an interesting idea, but then it turned out:
  "You cannot do anything with that photo until it is taken off of the site. You agree not to sell it to anybody else or to appoint another company to sell it for you. In short, you agree not to publish the photo in any way while the photo is on the site."
  May be the soon starting SmugMugPro will be this kind of a desired solution.

• Recent statistics from Fotolia:
  

  • Of out one million registered members, 860,000 are active (defined as having made at least one credit card purchase or uploaded content within the past three months).
  • Fotolia says it is registering new members at a rate of 3,000 per day (86,800 per month).
  • The number of uploads is very close to the number of paid downloads. People upload 40,000 images and other content every day, and download 50,000 images a day. That download rate translates to 1.5 million paid downloads a month.
  • Fotolia already has 20,000 videos uploaded.

Micro Madness for the Weekend

After the recent newsletter sent out to contributors, it have been touching days for Fotolia:

• MicroStockGroup
• Yahoo MicroPayment Group
• Fotolia forum:

FT US forum 1

FT US forum 2

FT German forum

Next act:

David Mail of ProStockMaster wrote a nice piece (*) on iStockphoto´s Dollar Bin:

"Here is the email I just have received from iStockphoto.com.

You have two options. You either give me your money and then I kill you or I first kill you and then I take your money." (**)

Quotation compiled. Of course. (Link to the related iStock forum topic)

(*) Update Feb. 23, 2009. And because it´s a mad Monday, the link doesn´t work anymore and the blog post over there was removed.

(**) Update Feb. 24, 2009. And because it´s a mad Tuesday, the blog post of David Mail is up and running again.

Fotolia to launch Microstock Footage

Probably starting at the end of January 2009, Fotolia will begin to offer microstock video, "all the formats" (details at 3:21 in this video).

Related:

• A Short Midsummer Conversation With Shutterstock´s Jon Oringer on Microstock Footage (Aug. 05, 2008)

QuickLinks For 2008-10-22

• Fotolia Swiss photo agency Kursiv launches the new image collection BloopPix, "from" Fotolia´s Reseller API "the deepest sources of the internet", because "Bloop is the name of a sound of unknown origin, captured somewhere west of south america in deep sea", and "the source of the sound however remains unclear".
  
  This specific Image and pricing here at Fotolia, and this specific image and pricing here at Kursiv.
  
  It is however possible and likely that other images from other sources are included in BloopPix.