Archives: April, 2007
News
Art Resource representing Yale University Art Gallery
New York City base Art Resource has announced a new partnership to represent fine art images from the Yale University Art Gallery. As the official image rights and reproductions representative Art Resource will have access to one of the oldest and most prestigious university art museums in America and the third oldest such museum in the world. The Gallery’s archive includes more than 185,000 objects including works from ancient times to the present day representing civilizations from around the globe.
Features
Visual case study: State Farm microsite NowWhat.com
State Farm Insurance has recently launched an interesting campaign with the microsite Nowwhat.com. The campaign is targeted at a younger demographic and uses highly engaging television and magazine ads pointing to "nowwhat.com". The ads for this campaign are very simple employing little copy and highly entertaining images to prevail on the viewers curiosity to make the connection from the ads to the site. Upon visiting the site the viewer is presented with identifiable problems and of course the insurance solutions supplied by State Farm. Meg Asaro and Karen D’Silva from Spark Visual Research take a closer look at the images used by State Farm to reach a whole new set of potential customers.
News
Niche RF producer 40260 signs with Alamy to supply baby-boomer content
Jack Hollingsworth’s new royalty free niche collection, called 40260, a name that signifies the baby boomer age group of forty- to sixty-year-olds, has signed a representation agreement with the stock portal, Alamy. The specialty lifestyle collection, which currently numbers 3700 images on Alamy, portrays upbeat, healthy and happy-looking boomers enjoying their leisure time.
News
A21/Superstock posts widening loss for 2006
The A21 Group’s 2006 results showed growing revenue due to acquisitions, but widening losses to go along with them. Revenue from the stock image licensing division of the company grew 25% from $9.6MM to $12MM from 2005 to 2006. Surprisingly, despite the company’s October ’05 acquisition of Ingram Publishing, its gross margin in the image licensing sector remained flat at about 68% year over year. Apparently, Ingram’s lower-priced CD and subscription product line had no impact on gross margins. The gross profit margin at the newly acquired consumer art business, ArtSelect, came in at only 55% giving the company a lower gross profit margin over-all of 62% in 2006 vs. 68% the previous year.
News
Camera maker Olympus to enter the stock photo business
Olympus Corporation has decided to enter the stock photo business. Olympus, Japan's well established photography equipment manufacturer has agreed to a collaboration with the Kyoto-based Artefactory Corporation, a digital photographing company known for its art images of important treasures of Japan. According to persons familiar with the deal, Olympus will acquire a 47.4% stake in Artefactory.
News
AFP signs content deal with Google ending copyright lawsuit
Agence France-Presse (AFP) has announced that it completed a licensing agreement with Google giving the search engine the right to post AFP news and photos. The agreement ends a copyright lawsuit filed by AFP two years ago while allowing Google the right to post AFP content on Google News and other services. The deal "will enable the use of AFP's newswire content in innovative, new ways that will dramatically improve the way users experience newswire content on the Internet," the statement said.
News
IPTC and Ifra photo metadata conference tacked onto CEPIC
Two of the most influential trade organizations in the European media, IPTC and Ifra, have organized the first international conference focused specifically on the topic of photo metadata. The event will take place in Florence, Italy on Thursday, June 7 of this year and will coincide with the annual CEPIC conference of picture archive companies. Adobe Systems, Inc. will sponsor the one-day conference.
News
Gary Shenk to succeed Steve Davis as CEO of Corbis
Corbis has announced plans to promote Gary Shenk, to the position of Chief Executive Officer as of July 1st of this year. Shenk will take over from Steve Davis who has held the CEO post for ten years. Davis, will remain on Corbis’s board of advisors, but will step down from day-to-day activities at the company to pursue opportunities in public service and philanthropy.
News
Stephen Mayes returns to Image Source as head of US Operations
The London based Royalty Free Producer Image Source, has announced the appointment of photography veteran, Stephen Mayes, to the role of Chief Operating Officer - Americas. In addition to industry experience Mayes previously worked for Image Source as Creative Director prior to crossing ‘the pond’ to serve as a director at Art+Commerce in New York. In addition, Mayes has held senior level positions at Getty Images, Network Photographers and Photonica. Stephen will be responsible for driving the expansion of the creative output and sales of Image Source's New York and newly opened Los Angeles offices.
News
Digital Railroad launches Marketplace beta
The online archiving service for professional photographers, DigitalRailroad.net, has launched a service called Marketplace which allows member photographers to contribute images to a single database. The service gives buyers an opportunity to search for images from a variety of Digital Railroad photographers and suppliers through one point of access. The company launched its Marketplace platform with over 1MM images.
News
Getty investigation finds no intentional wrong-doing in backdating of stock options
Today, Getty issued a press-release stating that its recently completed internal investigation into possible violations of SEC regulations concerning the granting of stock options to employees revealed the company had, in fact, issued back-dated options. The release explains that the occurrence resulted from delays between the decision to issue the options and the actual time of issuance, rather than a willful attempt to enrich the recipients illegally. The company will restate prior years’ earnings to correct the financial results for fiscal 2002 and prior years to the tune of $28MM to $32MM.
News
Jonathan Gibson leaves JupiterImages to launch OJO Images
Jonathan Gibson, who for the last several years has managed Jupiter Images’ distribution channel network, has left that company to found a royalty free production company called OJO Images (“OJO” coming from the Spanish word for “eye.”). Gibson has put together an impressive roster of highly successful stock photographers for his company, including Chris Ryan, Robert Daly, Chris Newton, Matt Hind, Martin Barraud and Justin Pumfrey.
News
Gary Shenk appoints new leadership team for Corbis
Even before he is to officially take the top post at Corbis, the company’s soon-to-be CEO, Gary Shenk, has named a new top management team. The new nine-person executive team consists entirely of Corbis insiders and will report directly to Shenk. Two former members of the executive team “will be leaving the company,” according to a press-release issued today. As announced earlier this month, Shenk will succeed Steve Davis as CEO officially on July 1, 2007.
News
HBO stock footage library now online at HBOarchives.com
HBO Archives, HBO’s stock footage library, has launched a new website at hboarchives.com. The new site allows users to search and preview footage, as well as view showcase reels. HBO Archives offers footage originating on either High Definition video or 35mm film, and key digital developments have been made in conjunction with HBO’s online partner, Thought Equity Motion, to make the collection more readily available.
News
Alamy releases 1Q06 stats
Each quarter, the Oxford, England, based stock photo portal, Alamy, releases an interesting set of statistics about their image library and their sales. As a privately held company, Alamy does not release sales or profit figures. But the figures they do release show certain measures of progress at the company and, to the extent we believe some of the figures reflect wider trends, shed some light on conditions in the industry in general.
News
Holland’s ANP launches World Portraits
Stock photography meets micro-banking
Bas van Beek, the stock photo industry veteran who helped build Benelux Press to become the number one stock photo agency in the Netherlands, has helped launch World Portraits, an entirely new agency with an ethical twist. The agency, which will feature images of people from all corners of the earth, but especially from less developed nations, has created a payment system whereby the models shown in the images will receive a share of the revenue whenever their likeness sells.
News
Jupiter launches Animation Factory Pro to serve professional multi-media producers
Jupitermedia (Nasdaq: JUPM) has announced that it has launched a professional version of its popular Animation Factory flash animation site called Animation Factory Pro (AF Pro). Jupiter acquired the South Dakota based Animation Factory in Dec 2005 for $9.35 million (and the assumption of certain unknown liabilities). The subscription website now offers annual memberships with varying access levels starting with ‘Gold’ at $59.95, ‘Platinum” at $99.95, and now ‘Pro’ at $199.95. In addition to the basic offering Pro subscribers are granted access to high definition backgrounds, special video elements and alpha channels for compositing in video or flash animations, flash Web site templates and a library of sound effects and music loops.
News
Micro-stock site Lucky Oliver introduces new “midstock” pricing option
The managers of micro-stock site Lucky Oliver have attempted to find a middle ground between the low, low micro-stock prices and the higher prices one expects to pay for higher end royalty free imagery. Aptly named “midstock,” the model allows for Lucky Oliver’s best-selling photographers to set their own prices for images of their own choosing. In addition, the midstock images will appear more prominently in search results by way of placement in a highlighted grouping of images called Sideshow.
News
Shutterstock increasing royalties for most prolific contributors
The microstock subscription agency Shutterstock has announced that it is going to increase royalties for its best producers. Under the current model buyers subscribe on a monthly basis and Shutterstock pays a contributor 25¢ each time their image is downloaded. With this recent announcement Shutterstock has agreed to increase that payout to 30¢ per download effective May 1st, 2007 for any contributor who has earned $500 or more in sales from Shutterstock. Contributors who have not yet reached $500 in total earnings will remain at the same rate until this milestone is achieved.
News
The Image Works now representing photography from the George Eastman House
The Image Works, an independent editorial stock photography agency based in WoodStock, NY has penned a deal with The George Eastman House photography collection. The George Eastman House operates in the former home of George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak Company, and claims to be the world’s oldest photography museum having opened its doors in 1949. The collection now includes over 400,000 photographic prints, transparencies and negatives from more than 14,000 photographers including one of the largest collections of daguerreotypes in the world, major collections of early British and French photographers and important work by many of the great names in the field.
News
Superstock enters mobile market with MyNuMo
Superstock has announced a partnership with MyNuMo, a seller of content for mobile devices, to offer stock photos to MyNuMo's customers for use as wallpaper on mobile phones. MyNuMo's web-site serves as a marketplace for user-generated content. Visitors to the site can use it to publish and sell music, images and video for use on mobile phones. MyNuMo customers will now also have access to a collection of professional stock images from Superstock. MyNuMo charges $2.00 per wallpaper image.
Features
Interview with Glenn Parker and James Cape of Photolibrary
The Australian Photolibrary Group has drawn attention to itself in a very short period of time following a number of takeovers: the Anthony Blake Food Collection, the Garden Picture Library, Oxford Scientific, Monsoon and CDI The Image Library. Probably its most spectacular acquisition was New York based Index Stock. What are the Australian company’s plans?
visuell: Let’s begin with the latest takeover in your company’s expansion programme and talk about Index Stock. Many people in the industry were surprised at your purchase of this agency in view of the fact that it does not really fit into what has been your acquisition strategy to date – up to now, you have bought small but well-stocked specialist agencies. How does Index Stock, with its more conservative stockfile, fit into this picture? Was the price simply too attractive?
News
123RF unplugged from Flickr
Speculation about when Yahoo's Flickr, the world’s most popular photo sharing site, might enter the micro-stock business has surfaced in stock photo industry circles for months. Last week, it seemed, that day might have arrived when Inmagine announced it had created a Flickr sanctioned plug-in that would allow Flickr-Pro members to place their images in the micro-stock market through Inmagine’s micro-stock site, 123RF. Within twenty four hours of that announcement, however, Flickr revoked Inmagine’s access, rendering the plug-in moot.
