Public photo industry surveys are so rare and few that it is always a refreshing exercise to review one when they do come out. VisualSteam just released the 2015 edition of its Art Buyer Survey and it surfaces some interesting trends. Leslie Hughes, VisualSteam’s President and CEO, said, “Art Buyers are frustrated by stock agencies … Read More →
Responding to an increasing demand for reliable insights on the stock photography market, the three top stock photography industry experts, Lee Torrens, Paul Melcher and Amos Struck, have officially launched Stock Photo Insight (http://stockphotoinsight.com), a consulting service providing calls with all three experts simultaneously. In addition, Stock Photo Insight is introducing a one-question-by-email service where … Read More →
The road to editorial supremacy is paved with many dangerous potholes and if Shutterstock wants to succeed in that space, it has to be ready to change the rules. The same way it has done with commercial stock. However, this time, the competition is ready and up in arms. Surprise strategy will not work. Firepower, … Read More →
Jon Oringer of Shutterstock said it well: barrier of entry in stock photography licensing today is very low (actually getting lower), barrier to scalability is very high and getting higher. In other words, it is easy to find and regroup content to license (UGC or not). It is much harder to find clients. Now with … Read More →
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Bloomberg started spewing articles after articles on the sorry state of Getty Images. Three in a row, which is more than they did in the last 3 years combined. Fresh from insider knowledge, it reported Getty Images having poor ratings on a debt secured when purchased by the Carlyle Group as … Read More →
One of the biggest issue facing the professional photos licensing world today is search engines. In their effort to stay appealing to their users, they have all added an image search that allows for the quick and easy return of photos ( or graphics) corresponding to a query. Google, of course, but Yahoo and Bing … Read More →
While judges from top photojournalism competitions ( World Press, PoYi, etc) are getting ready to sit down and assume their role of gatekeepers of the true art, what is or not acceptable image alteration continues to slow burn deep inside the profession with no clear resolution in sight. Each organization, each publication, and each photographer … Read More →
We cannot achieve anything significant by ourselves. As much as we would love to, it is impossible to succeed without the help of others. Yet, over and over, we try with the same predictable outcome. For decades now, the number one issue that has plague the photo licensing industry has been attribution. Indelibly linking an … Read More →
JUNE 25, 2014 , Guest post by Robert Henson The annual conference CEPIC recently took place in Berlin, where international photo libraries congregate primarily to seek distribution for their images and/or image collections to represent for their clients. The industry they serve is commercial and editorial image licensing, and their clients are advertisers and publishers of all stripes … Read More →
What the image sharing culture has revealed is that non-pros are much better at taking pictures than anyone thought. In an analog world, everyone kept for themselves: Pros shooting for large distribution periodicals and amateurs shooting for friends and family.With the advent of Flickr, we started seeing a large volume of non pros with high … Read More →