Apparently, Getty Images is no longer in love with its entertainment division. Word in the street is that all the top executives of that branch, Vince Bannon, VP of Strategic Partnerships and Georges DeKeerle, Sr. Director EMEA have been given the pink slip. And there might be more.  The reasons are not clear. Some say that the celebrity division, Read More →

The world of sports has always been dominated by exceptional achievements. It is indelibly carved into a precise moment in time when the  accumulation of a lifetime of efforts culminates into a victorious epiphany.  A combination of a defeat of physical limitation as well as the complete and absolute annihilation of any competitors, it is a never-to-be-repeated-again Read More →

As the flow of news coming out of the stock photo industry major – and not so major – players keep on pushing one press release after the other, it is always good to take a step back and analyze trends. It’s been a hectic first six months of 2016 and if its any indication, Read More →

An Interview with Ulf Schmidt-Funke by Stefan Hartmann for PICTORIAL Magazin 04/2016. It was – actually – a discussion about an entirely different topic. But Ulf Schmidt-Funke was just about to travel to the USA, where he planned to meet with major market players – including Reuters, New York Times and Shutterstock – on behalf Read More →

The issue seemed simple enough: Find a photo of a green landscape with a clean blue sky, add the company’s logo and tagline and post it on the homepage of the site. Sure, they could easily find an inexpensive photo that matched their need but after that, emptiness. For a small company with no in-house Read More →

Now that the flow of comments, rumors, anger and misled interpretations have died down and that more facts have flown through the pipeline, it is a good time to take a more  educated approach. Let’s kill the misinterpretations first: Getty did not buy Corbis.. …nor is it responsible for its sale to VCG. Rumors of Read More →

Rumors have been rampant for a while. First Shutterstock was believed to be the buyer, a rumor quickly killed by no other than Jon Oringer himself during their last quarterly report. At the last DMLA conference, the target moved to China Visual Group and remained there. It is confirmed today: LOS ANGELES & BEIJING–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Corbis Read More →

Although they circle at different speeds, have different sizes and even differ in their composition, some planets happen to periodically align themselves so perfectly that it is possible, from earth, to see them on the same horizon. This is what happened a few weeks ago with Venus, Jupiter and Mars. In a rare coincidence, the Read More →

While there has never been so many photos taken and shared online, the world of professional photo licensing is not striving. In fact, most legacy companies have seen their revenue freeze or decline in the last decade, with rare exceptions.  While at first contradictory, a closer analysis reveals that part of the issue seems to be linked to Read More →