Category: Stock Photography Subscriptions
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PhotoSpin launches annual Spinner Awards contest
Long Beach, CA based PhotoSpin, a leading royalty free stock subscription company has announced that it will be running it’s annual Advertising contenst dubbed the ‘Spinner Awards’. To participate in the contest designers must create an account in the MySpin Directory and upload their ads. The contest is open to PhotoSpin’s customers and visitors as well as anyone else with a creative flair and a spirit for competition.
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Shutterstock launches new on-demand subscription buying terms
New York based Shutterstock, one of the first micro-payment subscription-based stock photo agencies, has announced that it has created four new on-demand subscription licensing plans allowing users to download images anytime over a one year period without any daily or monthly download limits. Previously the company only offered a subscription with a ‘25-a-day’ download limit.
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Photo News Round-Up
• 123rf.com has launched a new service for corporate customers allowing them to create a customized stock photo intranet site under their own banner while 123RF supplies the images. Corporate clients can then administrate the intranet, giving access to downloads and other privileges to appropriate staff members. Click here for more information.
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Fotolia launches micro-payment subscription service
Fotolia, a micro-stock company based in New York, has announced that it has launched a subscription product giving users access to its image library of more than 3.5 million stock images. This news follows a similar announcement from Getty’s iStockphoto last month who claimed to be responding to customer demand for subsciption licensing. “The Fotolia subscription service will allow high-volume customers to continue to receive the best deal in microstock photography on the Web, being able to license images for as little as $.20 per image, while not impacting the revenues of our stock photographers.” explains Oleg Tcheltzoff, co-founder and president of Fotolia, LLC. “
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Northfoto signs agreement to represent Jupiterimages subscription services
Northfoto, a stock photo agency based in Budapest, Hungary, has penned a deal with Jupiter Media to represent three of its paid subscription services (Clipart.com, Comstock Complete and Jupiter Images Unlimited) to editorial and creative clients in Hungary and Romania.
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iStockphoto introducing stock photography and footage subscription in May ‘08
Getty’s micropayment product, iStockphoto, the first and largest of the micro-payment sites with an image licensed every 1.4 seconds, has announced that it will be launching a subscription service to allow open access to photos, illustrations, and footage, for a period of 3, 6 or 12 months. The company is currently in private BETA testing of the new service and has declined to release information about the pricing and terms of the service except to say that Packages will start for as little as $96/month. Other companies offering similar subscription services include Shutterstock, SnapVillage and Stockxpert.
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Newscom now offering broadcast quality news footage from Reuters
Newscom, a leading provider of text and visual content, has announced that it is now offering its subscribers online access to broadcast quality video from the international news agency Reuters making this the first major news agency to offer broadcast quality breaking news footage online in the U.S.
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Crestock revises web-site with version 3.0
The Norway-based micro-stock web-site Crestock has upgraded its web-site, adding several features for both buyers and contributors of images. On the buyer side, the company has added a quick roll-over preview feature and advanced search features such as the ability to find other images with the same models in a given image, or images by the same photographer and an overview of recently viewed images so one can easily locate an image from a previous search.
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Shutterstock’s collection reaches two million images
Ten months ago the fledgling micro stock subscription service (launched in 2003) was proud of achieving the major milestone of ‘1 Million Images’. Little did they know that due to a growing awareness of microstock and subscription licensing the collection would double in Less than one year; exceeding two million images. In fact the company has stated that the collection is growing at a rate of approximately 25,000 images per week. This growth has been realized despite the company’s claim that less than 40% of the images submitted meet the companies standards to be added to the collection.
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Corbis launches micro-stock beta site SnapVillage.com
Corbis has become the last of the big three to enter the micro-stock business with the beta launch of SnapVillage.com. Rather than purchase one of the existing micro-stock sites as Jupiter and Getty did, Corbis has developed its own micro-stock site in-house. Having built the site from the ground, up, Corbis has included unique pricing and purchasing features that will set it apart from other micro-stock sites.
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Shutterstock is helping micro-stock photographers gain access to red carpet
In order to build a library of celebrity images the subscription based micro-payment site Shutterstock is taking matters into its own hands by using its customer service reps to help its 60,000+ photographers obtain press passes. The company is targeting red carpet events such as film premieres, award shows, concerts or political rallies where it plans to leverage the Shutterstock name to obtain the credentials in exchange for exclusive rights to sell the images created at the event. It is not clear yet whether credentials will be granted and the decision will surely be made on an event-by-event basis. Shutterstock appears to be the first micro-payment stock photography site to aggressively pursue celebrity content.
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Getty Images acquires citizen photojournalism pioneer Scoopt
Getty Images (NYSE: GYI) has announced that it has acquired Scoopt, a pioneer in marketing eyewitness images (citizen photojournalism) to mainstream media outlets. Scoopt was launched in 2005 and has gained recent notoriety when it supplied images to the media of the tragic Manhattan plane crash that killed New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle in October 2006 and coverage of the fierce January 2006 storms in the U.K., which brought devastation and disruption to large parts of the country.
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ASPP selects Niki Barrie as Picture Professional Of The Year
Each year the American Society of Picture Professionals (ASPP) selects one person in the industry to receive its Picture Professional of the Year award. For 2006 ASPP has selected Niki Barrie who has also served the organization as the editor of the organizations quarterly publication, The Picture Professional since 1992.
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PACA launches PACAdex online directory
The Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) has announced the launch of a new online directory tool called PACAdex (currently in is in beta testing) for those planning to attend the PACA International Conference October 20-22, 2006 in Key West Florida. PACAdex, developed by Idée Inc, is essentially an online business card listing of all conference participants including photos to help members network and identify each other at the conference.
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Haim Ariav departs Superstock
Haim Ariav, Chief Creative Officer of a21 and the President and Chief Creative Officer of SuperStock, has left the organization. According to an agreement between Ariav and the company included in an 8-K form filed by A21 on June 12, 2006, Mr. Ariav's employment with the Company terminated as of May 25, 2006. He also resigned from its Board of Directors. Pursuant to the Agreement, Mr. Ariav will receive severance package including continuation of his salary for one year and accelerated vesting of shares and stock options. Referring to Ariav's resignation from the company and the board, the 8-K form states, "The foregoing did not result from a disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company's operations, policies or practices."
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Digital Railroad expands support of PLUS Coalition
Digital Railroad has expanded its collaboration with the PLUS Coalition by raising its membership in the coalition to the highest possible level, that of Charter Sustaining Member, and has become part of the elite PLUS Leadership Circle. This announcement implies that DigitalRailroad has increased its level of financial contribution to PLUS, though the exact amount was not disclosed. The move by DigitalRailroad makes sense from several angles. Like any company engaged in the licensing of images, DR will benefit from the accomplishment of the PLUS Coalition goal to improve image licensing processes by creating an integrated system of universal licensing standards. Such standards would clearly simplify the on-line marketing and licensing of images that users of DR's technology engage in. In addition, the move raises DR's profile among the various groups already associated with PLUS, which includes potential users of DR's technology from both the photographer and the client side.
Click here to view the original press release.
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A21 SuperStock Posts $4.7MM Loss for 2005
A21 Group, owner of SuperStock, PureStock, and Ingram Publishing, reported its 2005 full-year results, posting a net loss of $4.8MM on revenue of $9.6MM. Compared to adjusted(*) figures for 2004, this represents a 7% increase in the company’s gross sales and a near doubling of its net loss. The company’s gross profit margin decreased from 70% to 68% as its cost of revenue rose at a faster rate than revenue. Management attributes this relative increase in the cost of revenue to the normal fluctuations in the proportions of higher vs. lower commission imagery it licenses. Conversely, Selling General and Administrative expenses dropped as a percentage of revenue leading to a relatively flat negative EBITDA of $928K in 2005 vs. an adjusted $834K in 2004.
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Getty Posts Improved Sales, Flat EBITDA for 1Q ‘06, Stock Declines
Getty Images reported gross revenue of $200.9MM for the first quarter of 2006, a 13% increase over the $178.1MM the company posted for the same quarter in '05. CEO Jonathan Klein attributed the increase to "strong growth rates in non-English speaking countries far exceeding our overall growth." At the same time, the cost of revenue rose by only 2% allowing for a three percentage point improvement in the gross profit margin from 71% on 1Q05 to 74% in 1Q06. Management attributes this growth in the gross margin to the increase in its inventory of wholly-owned material which generates no commissions payable to contributors or suppliers.
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New VP of Creative Strategy and new Seattle office for UpperCut
Punchstock’s RM brand, Uppercut Images has promoted Benjamin Winters to the post of Vice President of Creative Strategy. Winters, who has been part of Uppercut’s creative team since 2004, has also worked for Getty Images and Imagestate. In this new position, Winters will be responsible for leading the content strategy for the RM collection. In addition, Uppercut has relocated its offices from Bainbridge Island to a new space just blocks from the Starbucks world headquarters located on First Avenue South in downtown Seattle. Click here to view the original press release.
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iStockphoto offering 700,000 images to HP customers
The recently acquired micro-payment stock photography site iStockphoto has announced that it has signed a new deal with Hewlett Packard (HP) to offer more than 700,000 image to HP customers starting at just $1 each, via the HP In-House Marketing Portal, an online resource that provides small and medium businesses (SMBs) with tools to create marketing materials internally. “iStockphoto provides outstanding imagery for a great price,” said Vince Ferraro, vice president of marketing, LaserJet Business, HP. “By using iStockphoto’s extensive online image library combined with HP’s industry-leading color printers, small businesses can now develop professional-quality marketing and presentation materials at a fraction of the traditional time and cost.” One has to think that deals like this are exactly what Getty Images had in mind when it acquired iStockphoto. Click here to view the original press release.
