StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog

QuickLinks For 2011-12-22

• France-Soir, death of a newspaper:
  "Its glory days were in the 1950s and 1960s, when it sold over 1 million copies per day. The paper's finest hour came in November 1970, when it sold 2 million copies.
  Its circulation had been declining for years. According to AFP, recent circulation was only a disappointing 30,000 copies per day" (France24.com), leading to "89 job losses" (Independent).

• Adapt to survive, a photographer's view of the market today:
  "We are in a period of transition. Although too much web content generates no income for its creators, new revenue streams are gradually establishing themselves. Some sites already bring in real money from advertising, or paywall subscriptions. News websites are beginning to commission or buy in photo stories in the form of multimedia pieces (still images and sound), or web documentaries (video, stills and sound, sometimes with interactive features)."
  Freelance photog Philip Wolmuth in the BBC News.

• "Stay hungry, stay foolish": have fun with your Holiday Shopping during the Christmas Season, meeting your family & old and new friends again.

QuickLinks For 2010-04-15

• Microstock IL, a subsidiary of a|s|a|p Creative:
  A new microstock site, co-founded by Yaniv Hanina, specializing in Christian, Muslim and Jewish content, starting with 100,000 images & 6,500 new images each month.

• These little disrespectful microstockers, you gotta love them:
  "Tony if you want any advice, just drop me a line, haha just kidding!"

• Adam Riggs responding to "How did you arrive at those figures?":
  "Subscriptions are in our DNA, but there are a lot of stock companies that don't like subscriptions because they haven't figured out how to price them in a way that guarantees positive cash flow and is also a value proposition to the customer."

QuickLinks For 2009-06-27

Yin and Yang:

• New microstock agency Pixamba by David Mail, the creator of ProStockMaster:
  Nowadays, we are starting the public Beta, adding more functionality and more new services as we go. I believe that Pixamba, which utilizes latest web technologies and the cloud computing infrastructure is one of the fastest stock agencies in the world today, probably the fastest one.
  Designed from the ground up with the experience and understanding of the leading micro- and midstocks, Pixamba aims to be the next generation wave of stock photography and media services. We plan to utilize our technology advantage adding unique services in the next few month.

• The Chicago IL based entertainment stock photo archive Pix International ("PixIntl") is currently being offered for sale. Started by photographer Linda Matlow in 1979, the archive consists of more than 82,000  inventoried images of entertainment images solely photographed and owned by Linda Matlow. Subjects include celebrity, bands, politicans, events, VIPs over the past 30 years. Thru the years, her work has been published thousands of times around the world.
  Approximately 36,500+ plus high res images are on their site hosted thru Photoshelter with an additional 45,500 slides and negatives neatly labeled and organized.
  Linda can be contacted by email: lmatlow (at) yahoo.com.

QuickLinks For 2008-09-02

• "Back to Basics", Corbis new September Creative IQ Trend:
  As the economy slows down, the evidence that consumers are cutting back is all around us. Corbis’ latest Creative IQ Trend highlights that this presents marketers with an interesting opportunity to ensure their products and services tap into this "Back to Basics" feeling and photographers will need to provide creatives with imagery that reflects this trend.

• Picture Press is looking for new content:
  Upgrading it`s own content by new material from the global RM picture suppliers Ardea, Able Images, Minden Pictures, Flower Photo, Red Cover and Tips Images since 2007, Picture Press is still looking for new and fresh photographs. "Especially  we are interested in people, beauty and lifestyle pictures", said Klaus Plaumann, marketing director of the Hamburg based agency. "Any offer would be welcome".
  Please contact Klaus directly: plaumann.klaus[at]picturepress.de, tel #49 40 3703 2570.

QuickLinks For 2008-07-18

• Flickr boss claims Getty deal is great opportunity for photographer members:
  For a time, Flickr considered building an entire licensing platform of its own. However, this option was soon dropped. Instead, Flickr reached out to a number of external companies such as Corbis and Getty. "I can't even remember who approached who", says Flickr CEO Srivastava. "Getty already has had a relationship with Yahoo for a long time. We reached out to them, along with other people. We will not receive a cut of every sales made by Getty."
  The deal was signed earlier this month, with Flickr receiving an undisclosed financial compensation. There is still one caveat: by signing this partnership with Getty, Flickr is banned from partnering with any other licensing company.
  BJP (compiled/abbreviated).
  
  • Related: Getty robust in Flickr deal defence (BJP; compiled/abbreviated):
    Klein estimates that the first images will be available to license from Christmas 2008. Klein added that the deal was 'long term', covering at least five years, that Getty would be unlikely to sign up a photographer with just a couple of shots, and that photographers who regularly update their images will probably do best out of the deal. "Our experience is that less than 1000 photographers will generate the majority of the sales."
    And, while selected Flickr images will sell above the $200 mark, the financial benefits for photographers are still being worked out.
    

QuickLinks For 2008-07-17

• Blinkx Adopts Private-Label Video Search Model:
  Blinkx is the latest niche video search engine to shift to a private-label model rather than concentrating on becoming a destination for video search. Pixsy, Digitalsmiths and Truveo also are offering video search services to other sites and companies.
  The new service, Blinkx Red Label, lets Web sites integrate Blinkx’s search technology into their sites. That will let site visitors search for video and also watch video that’s been paired with targeted ads.
  The Red Label service is free of charge. Ad revenue will be split between Blinkx and each site. Blinkx said it indexes more than 26 million hours of premium content.
  TVWeek. Similar on ShareCast.

• Getty Images hires VP of communications:
  Reporting to co-founder and CEO Jonathan Klein, Caroline Andoscia will work to provide strategic media planning and PR as Getty moves forward with new partnerships, like with photo-sharing Web site Flickr.
  PRWeek.

QuickLinks For 2008-07-09

• How Getty Is Killing the Stock Photo Industry:
  Now before you yell that this is a case of spilled milk from an upstart, let me explain why this is more of a David & Goliath story. You see, one of Getty Images' Executive VPs started contacting us as early as July 2006. Initially it was to use PhotoShelter technology to provide a way for non-Getty photographers to submit images. But once the PhotoShelter Collection was announced, they wanted access to our content because we provided ready-to-license, edited content from thousands of contributors around the world.
  They contacted us in July 07, September 07, October 07 and November 07, and we turned them down for one simple reason: It was a terrible deal for photographers (then, as it is now), and did very little to alter the fundamental imbalance in the stock industry.
  PhotoShelter CEO Allen Murabayashi about the Getty/Flickr deal.
  A clever and smart masterpiece of communication and indeed very glorious to report publicly your past business negotiations. It leaves a stale aftertaste, especially after PhotoShelter launched the Flickr Import Tool in March which was shut down 36 hours later. Not that he doesn´t have a point, but this is just bad style.

QuickLinks For 2008-07-06

• Science studies - Corbis`July Creative IQ Trend Report:
  This report highlights the need for the creative community to reflect the increasing demands for skilled workers in the physical and applied sciences. As a large portion of the science and engineering workforce approaches retirement within the next decade, it’s time for science to take centre stage around the world. Only this week, UK-based researchers were in the spotlight for cracking the trillionth letter of the DNA code and across Europe, plans are under way to increase research and development investment, with the aim of making Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world within the next two years.
  The Creative IQ Trend Reports are now available to give the wider creative community a heads-up on material likely to be in demand in advertising and publishing over the next few months.

QuickLinks For 2008-07-04

• Charles Mauzy responds to questions from SAA ombudsman David Sanger:
  Up to today our sales by industry segment have been definitely weighted to the editorial buyers. Over the first 6 months of MP 25% of our sales were to Magazine Publishers, 24% to Book Publishers, and 5 % to Newspapers. Corporate buyers comprised 23% and the Advertising plus Graphic Design firms combined for 19%.
  We are very focused on shifting this mix to increase the percentage of sales going into the Advertising and Graphic Design segments where there is still a proven need for higher value rights-managed imagery and licensing fees are higher in general.
  To add some color to this, over the same 6 month period our average license fee per transaction into the Advertising segment was $609 and into the Magazine Pub segment $243.
  Digital Railroad blog.

QuickLinks For 2008-07-03

• Getty Images Goes Bye-Bye:
  What is interesting is that Hellman & Friedman bought DoubleClick back in 2005 in a deal that was valued around $1.1 Billion, and within three years this was a leading huge Internet acquisition where the firm sold DoubleClick to Google for around $3.1 Billion.
  You could argue that the entire DoubleClick profit is being used to buy Getty.
  We aren´t inclined to predict who will own Getty Images after 2010 or 2011, but we are fairly certain that it will look different as an operating company or via who runs it.
  24/7 Wallst/Jon C. Ogg.

QuickLinks For 2008-07-02

• Struggling picture agency Red Cover owes photographers thousands:
  Red Cover, based in Balham, south London, that owes nearly £500,000 to creditors has told freelance photographers and writers it will not be able to pay them for up to two years. The agency supplies home interior pictures to Getty Images, and provides some editorial content.The company´s accounts, filed in March 2007, show it had total assets of £218,050 and outstanding debts to creditors of £498,232.
  Sounds familiar? More in Press Gazette UK/Patrick Smith.

QuickLinks For 2008-06-27

• Happy snappers zoom into the industry frame:
  Gary Shenk predicts sales of amateur snaps will triple in the next five years to control 25 per cent of the $2 billion global market.
  Today Corbis is a $320 million international business.
  The Sydney Morning Herald.

• Commercial on CNBC - nearly all iStock footage.

• Shortly after its 25th company anniversary, Bilderberg had to file for insolvency.

• I was just talking to an AP photographer and the bulk rates AP has worked out with clients has brought down the per image rate to new lows. He also told me that photographers will now not own their outtakes, that all images will be owned by AP. This prevents the photographers from selling the outtakes as their own stock.
  Peter Bennett of Ambient Images on stockphoto.net.

QuickLinks For 2008-06-19

• Corbis unit changing name to GreenLight to reflect role:
  One division of Bill Gates´ image-licensing company, Corbis, is renaming itself to make its role clearer, the company said.
  Corbis´ Rights Services division, which owns and licenses the rights to images of deceased celebrities including Steve McQueen and Mae West, will change its name to GreenLight. Working with talent agencies, GreenLight will also take on the business of linking living celebrities with brands seeking famous people to represent them.
  Seattle Post-Intelligencer. [Update: more details here]

QuickLinks For 2008-06-18

• Flickr Co-founders Join Mass Exodus From Yahoo + more news soon:
  Fake officially left last Friday. Butterfield will leave on July 12. From what we hear, neither has imminent plans to work on any new projects, but I suspect we haven´€™t heard the last from either of them. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. In June 2007 Yahoo shutdown Yahoo Photos, making Flickr their exclusive photo sharing website. Today Flickr hosts over 2 billion images.
  TechCrunch/Michael.
  Related:
  
  • Flickr co-founders depart Yahoo (CNET/Stephen Shankland)
  • Yahoo's Yang may be yearning for yesterday (LA Times)

QuickLinks For 2008-05-14

• Pixsy Powering Ditto:
  Media search platform provider Pixsy has sealed a distribution partnership with visual search engine Ditto which will utilize Pixsy´s media search platform to power consumer image search on destination search property Ditto.com and across its network of partners and affiliates.
  Duncan Riley on The Inquisitr.

• Reuters Frees Content with New API:
  In a pretty significant move, Reuters is making its news content available to the developer community through the use of a non-commercial API offering, through Reuters Labs. This means that you can now take Reuters news and create applications around it, or better fit the content into your existing applications and sites. [...]
  But what does this mean for existing third-party partners like Mochila, that act as conduits for spreading Reuters content across the web? As the new API offering is non-commercial, there shouldn´t be too much of a conflict of interest.
  Mashable.
  Related: Reuters´ web content tracking deal with Attributor (Mar. 05).

• New Shutterstock Contributor Earnings Schedule:
  Here are the new facts and the vivid discussion.

QuickLinks For 2008-05-10

• 2008 Stock Photo Market Crash?
  Essay by Phil Nealey, the stock shooter who contributes to Getty/Veer (Somos).

• Shutterstock will be "announcing the details of your 2008 raise on Tues, May 13th".
  Shutterstock forum message.

• From Getty Images´recent 10-Q SEC filing, quite interesting:
  

  

QuickLinks For 2008-04-30

• Speaking volumes:
  "The top-end of the market is still selling very well. There are times when images from iStock are alright, but if you need something for an advertising campaign, you won´t use us. High-end agencies will still strive. It´s those in the middle that will be in trouble. Our collection is getting so good that it´s squeezing the ones in the middle. They will need to find a pretty good niche to fit into".
  The British Journal of Photography interviews Kelly Thompson.

• Infinite Collection, MediaMagnet, now EVO images by 123RF:
  "123RF will only add 500 to 1,000 images per working day".

• Like in March and April, I will post only sporadically in the next weeks, except for occasional postings in the press release section and the job section.

QuickLinks For 2008-04-22

• OnRequest Adds $8 Million:
  OnRequest Images, a Seattle-based provider of custom imagery, has raised $8 million in additional Series C funding from European Founders Fund, according to a regulatory filing. The company had previously raised a $9 million Series C round led by Menlo Ventures, with return backers Maveron and Frazier Technology Ventures also participating.
  Related:
  
  • OnRequest Images raises $8 million (JC/Seattle Post-Intelligencer):
    Janice Mayo, president of OnRequest, said the company -- now with more than 50 employees -- is on the path to hit profitability this year.

• Augustine Fou, founder of PictureSandbox and Phreetings (Photo + Greeting), introduces Facebook phreetings.

QuickLinks For 2008-04-01

• Corbis Creative IQ Trend Report - Girls Got Game and Advertisers are Cashing In:
  This month´s creative trend report illustrates how, in a traditionally male-dominated industry, women´s sports are enjoying a boom as more girls embrace sports as a means of health, style or just for fun. Professional female sports figures, such as Maria Sharapova, Danica Patrick, Michelle Wie, Gabrielle Reece and Mia Hamm are partly driving this trend as they become more fashionable and receive more public attention.
  With the growing interest and participation in sports among females comes an increase in spending on women´s sports and fitness attire. Brands worldwide are eager to tap into the $15 billion that females spend each year on fitness apparel.
  Corbis Creative IQ Trend Report for April 2008 (PDF-Download).
  These reports - initially circulated internally as a guide for Corbis’ photographers - have now been made available to the wider creative community.

QuickLinks For 2008-03-22

• Those suing Getty Images, be thankful a buyout came at all:
  Some businesses can easily be ruined by crowdsourcing.
  Jon 0gg/Blogging Buyouts.
  Related:
  
  • Law Offices of Brian M. Felgoise, P.C. Announces Class Action Lawsuit on Behalf of Shareholders of Getty Images (Mar. 19, 2008)

QuickLinks For 2008-03-19

• Picollator beta:
  Picollator allows you to upload any picture you like with a person´s face. It searches over the Internet for all matches, without the need to type text queries or rename the picture with specific keywords.
  Techpin.

QuickLinks For 2008-03-09

• Interview with CEO and Founder of PhotoShelter, Allen Murabayashi:
  Question: As an entrepreneur or investor, what are your thoughts on competition? How do you view competition?
  Allen Murybayashi: The competition is really Getty Images, and in this respect it´s tough because they are a very well established player with lots of big contracts in place. However, there´s also a lot of unrest in the industry and people are looking in particular for ways to license images very easily for usage on the web. In this respect, there is a huge opportunity for an Internet upstart to come in and shake things up. Getty uses the Internet as a channel; they are not an Internet company. We think this distinction actually ends up being pretty crucial in the operating philosophy.
  Darren Herman/Marketing, Advertising, Media and Technology Blog.
  Related:
  
  • Interview With Allen Murabayashi, CEO Of Photoshelter (July 25, 2005)

QuickLinks For 2008-03-05, II

• Einstein Inc., in death, he mastered the science of making money:
  "When I heard what the licensing fee was, I freaked out", says Ingrid Sinyor of Euro­graphics, a poster manufacturer in Canada. To print five Einstein posters, with a run of 5,000 each, Sinyor says she paid Corbis $20,000 in licensing fees in addition to $5,000 for the images themselves.
  In an effort to maintain its grip on all things Einstein, Corbis and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ) have trademarked the Einstein name and image.
  "Suppose I were at a conference and I took a picture of Niels Bohr and Einstein. What if Einstein gave me a picture of himself? Would I have to pay to use it?"
  "We get calls literally every day", says Martin Cribbs, the director of rights representation at Corbis. "And the vast majority are small companies that want to do an Einstein key chain or something like that. Ninety-nine percent of those get turned away. We´re not in the business of one-off Einstein novelty items".
  Even if a company hoping to make an Einstein yarmulke manages to assemble the cash and to get a call back from Corbis, it must leap a final hurdle: getting approval from HUJ. Every single reproduction of an Einstein likeness or creation of an Einstein product must be approved by the university, and, according to several manufacturers, the process is extremely demanding.
  Discover Magazine, two pages (comp.), with A Brief/-er History of Time about the Schroedinger equation, The Roger Richmann Agency, Corbis and the thrill of licensing images of Albert Einstein.

• Search engines, Image conscious:
  Idée Inc. needs to bulk up, both in servers to crawl and index the Web´s unknown billions of images, and in employees to beat bushes for new business partners - and that means getting venture capital. Leila Boujnane needs a VC willing to invest the $10 million or so she thinks the company has to raise.
  Canadian Business magazine, two pages.

QuickLinks For 2008-03-05

• Corbis Creative IQ Trends: travel imagery is changing towards Ethical Tourism.
  Corbis in a PDF about the impact of eco and ethical-tourism on the image business.

• Reuters web content tracking deal with Attributor has revealed thirst for lifestyle and entertainments, the 'infotainment' stories:
  Maria Molland, global head of strategy and business development: "We have been a little surprised they [online readers] are moving more toward fluff stories, infotainment, as a result we are putting a lot more editorial resources behind sport and lifestyle.
  [That] is very different from those Reuters core elements - business, finance and hard news. That was one big shock. The second was understanding how photos are used in conjunction with text.
  Our theory, and I think it has been backed up by Attributor, is that people are using photos and text in conjunction, so it´s becoming much more important to find out how we can create links between different types of stories".

• Associated Press and picturemaxx deepen their cooperation from Dec. 2004:
  All AP Images are now available on i-picturemaxx/APIS, +3,500 new images/daily.

QuickLinks For 2008-02-29

• This is just stupid, Major League Baseball imposes restrictions for online content:
  MLB has become the latest property to impose limits on news outlets posting online content developed at league facilities, following the NFL´s hotly debated 45-second rule.
  In a new credentialing terms-and-conditions sheet MLB is limiting news organizations from posting more than 120 seconds a day of audio or video from league facilities, with game highlights restricted only to rights holders that have a separate rights deal with MLB Advanced Media.