Integration Brings Over 150,000 New Users, Millions of Images, and 17 Languages to Pond5’s Marketplace for Media Makers

BROOKLYN, NY, March 5th, 2013. Pond5 Inc. and Pixmac s.r.o. announced today that they have reached a definitive agreement under which Pond5 will acquire the assets of Pixmac, a leading stock imagery network based in the Czech Republic. With millions of stock photos and illustrations distributed in 17 languages and in multiple currencies, the acquisition of Pixmac accelerates Pond5’s strategy to offer a global marketplace where media makers can connect with fellow artists, sell their stock media while earning industry-leading payouts, and license content from the world’s most comprehensive selection of creative elements for use in their own productions.

With the integration of Pixmac, Pond5’s vast selection of stock video footage, audio, images, 3D models, and motion graphics templates will be available globally across the Pixmac network of more than 20 domains, via a multi- language, multi-currency platform. The aggregate traffic across the network will more than double Pond5’s current traffic base. The Pixmac network of local managers and reviewers will also be joining Pond5, further broadening Pond5‘s reach and bringing industry expertise from key global markets in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
“The Pixmac team has built something truly impressive, and we are very excited to be working with them to continue to build out the world’s most vibrant marketplace for media makers,” said Tom Bennett, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pond5. “The talent, technology, and community they bring will be a fantastic addition to Pond5 and a big win for our artists and our buyers.” “We are proud of what we have achieved so far, and we are excited to see what the integration has in store for our contributors,” said Vita Valka, co- founder and Chief Executive Officer, Pixmac. “Pond5 has challenged the microstock industry by letting artists price their own content and by providing them the best royalties. They’re the most artist-friendly marketplace around, and that’s the exact model that’s going to win in the long-run. We’re thrilled to be joining forces. ” Over 6,000 Pixmac photographers and illustrators are expected to join Pond5, bringing with them millions of images which will be available via the Pond5 website. Pixmac artists will get a substantial raise to match their Pond5 counterparts, and will earn 50% royalties on all sales.

About Pond5

Pond5 is the world’s most vibrant marketplace for media makers, offering the web’s largest collection of royalty-free stock video footage, as well as millions of stock photos, illustrations, music tracks, sound effects, Adobe After Effects project templates, and 3D models. Disrupting the traditional stock agency model with an open, dynamic marketplace, Pond5 invites media makers from all over the world to submit their own content and set their own prices, earning 50% on each sale – significantly higher than traditional players. Submissions are curated by the Pond5 team, and made available for immediate preview, purchase and download. All content is licensed under a simple royalty-free license that provides customers lifetime, worldwide usage rights across all media. Pond5 was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Brooklyn, NY, USA with offices in Geneva, Switzerland and Prague, Czech Republic. For more information, visit http://www.pond5.com.

About Pixmac

Pixmac is a global provider of stock imagery, offering millions of stock photographs and illustrations in 17 languages and multiple currencies. Based in the Czech Republic, the site was launched in 2008 and is currently home to an artist community of over 6,000 photographers and illustrators worldwide. Some key Pixmac domains include:

• http://www.pixmac.com
• http://www.pixmac.at
• http://www.pixmac.com.br
• http://www.pixmac.cz
• http://www.pixmac.de
• http://www.pixmac.es
• http://www.pixmac.fi
• http://www.pixmac.fr
• http://www.pixmac.hu
• http://www.pixmac.in
• http://www.pixmac.nl
• http://www.pixmac.pl
• http://www.pixmac.ru
• http://www.pixmac.sk

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Image Source, the world’s leading independent premium stock photography agency, has re-launched the IMSO resource blog in its latest move to support professional photographers.

London (PRWEB) February 06, 2013 – Premium stock photography agency Image Source has re-launched its photographer resource blog, IMSO (http://www.imagesource.com/blog/), as part of its continued commitment to support photographers. Since early 2011 IMSO has provided industry trending information for photographers and image buyers. Following increasing popularity and success, Image Source took the decision to re-launch IMSO as a dedicated professional photographer resource featuring photography trends, tips, reviews and interviews with leading industry figures.

Four months on from their merger with Cultura Creative, Image Source has continued to honour its commitment to support photographers at a time when royalty rates are falling across the industry. In this latest move to assist photographers, Image Source has re-launched IMSO as a resource blog to offer direction and insight based on the latest industry trends. By providing these detailed insights, Image Source is helping photographers to shoot content that accurately reflects what is being demanded by image buyers.
As well as helping photographers with knowing what to shoot, IMSO offers a chance for photographers to share their experiences, to learn and to contribute to a knowledge base designed specifically to help premium stock photographers.
Indeed a recent interview with Alys Tomlinson provided useful insight into shooting education photography.
However, IMSO is not just about Image Source’s own professional photographers; it also caters for the wider photography community. Through exhibition reviews, tips and interviews, IMSO seeks to help amateurs, enthusiasts and other professionals, whether or not they work with Image Source.
“The idea is to provide support to the wider industry which is largely feeling the strains of falling royalty rates and increasingly unfavourable terms. IMSO seeks to help photographers, new and old, to work within the changing industry, to choose the right content to shoot and to share ideas and experiences”, said Anthony Harris, Image Source’s Chief Operating Officer.

The original version of IMSO, which launched in April 2011, targeted wider creative industries including art, design and fashion. It began refocusing on photography in May 2012 and by November 2012 traffic had increased by over 500%. Image Source remains fully committed to raising the level of professional premium stock photography. With new features already in the pipeline, IMSO is well placed to become a central community in the professional stock photography industry.

About Image Source

Image Source is the world’s leading producer of premium royalty free stock imagery, motion and Cross-Media content. Headquartered in London, UK, with a regional office in New York, the company also supplies imagery through over 200 partners worldwide. This strong international sales network enabled the company to win the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2005. Image Source is currently the only platform in the industry able to showcase matched still images and motion clips displayed side-by-side for any given keyword search result, enabling creative art buyers to fulfil an integrated multimedia campaign brief in one simple purchase path. Search for royalty free high quality stock photos, images, video, footage, clips and Cross-Media content 24/7 at http://www.imagesource.com/.

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Depositphotos breaks a new record: another million files were added to the agency’s library in less than two months.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida, January 31, 2013 – Depositphotos, the fastest-growing microstock agency in the world, increased its library by another million files. The agency’s library recently passed the 12 million milestone high-quality stock photographs, vector images and videos sold under a royalty-free license. The agency’s library increased by 140% during the calendar year 2012.

With the clients’ convenience as a major priority, Depositphotos’ team is currently working on merging buyers’ and contributors’ accounts, which will give the users an opportunity to make the most of the Depositphotos website.

“We do understand that the growing library will attract more and more prospective buyers to the agency. Therefore, we are redoubling our efforts to make it possible for our customers to make use of all the website’s features in the simplest way,” says Depositphotos’ Chief Operating Officer, Igor Kaliuzhnyi.

About Depositphotos Inc.

Depositphotos is the fastest-growing microstock agency in the world. Currently, it offers over 12 million stock photographs, vector images, and videos sold under royalty-free licenses. Depositphotos’ library is increased daily by thousands of files, carefully screened and selected by moderators. The company is headquartered in Florida, USA, and has business offices in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Ukraine and Russia.

For more information, please visit http://depositphotos.com/, and follow Depositphotos on Facebook or @Depositphotos on Twitter.

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BROOKLYN, New York (January 29, 2013) – Pond5, the world’s most vibrant marketplace for media makers, announced today its public release of the new version “v2” of its website. The site offers a dramatically improved experience for both customers and contributors, giving filmmakers, photographers, musicians, 3D artists, and all kinds of media makers a place to connect with fellow artists, sell their stock media, and purchase high-quality content for their productions.

Artists on Pond5 contribute to a vast, rapidly-growing repository of creative elements, which now features more than 1.5 million video clips – the largest selection of royalty-free stock footage on the web – and more than 10 million stock photos, illustrations, audio files, 3D models, and motion graphics templates ­- all available for instant download.

New features implemented on the site include:

• Larger, higher quality thumbnails and previews. The media is front and center, loading quickly and in high resolution.  Video and audio plays back directly from search results, and watermarked previews are freely downloadable for use in mockups, rough cuts, and testing.
• Advanced Search. Media makers can quickly find what they’re looking for with granular filters for media type, resolution, duration, price, aspect ratio, etc.
• Infinite Scroll. Instead of flipping page-by-page through search results and waiting for pageloads, users are now presented with a continuously loading page of content, making the search process fast and seamless – an industry first.
• Collections. Media makers can now collect, organize and share their favorite media easily and quickly using the new Collections feature.
• Drag and Drop. In another first, users can now add content to their carts or collections using an intuitive drag and drop interface.
• Customized Artist Profiles. Contributors on Pond5 can promote their portfolios and build their brand more effectively with the ability to visually customize their artist pages.

“We’re focused on creating the fastest, most artist-friendly platform for media makers around the world to exchange creative elements, connect with other creators, and get inspired,” says Tom Bennett, co-founder and CEO. “These latest features are a big step in that direction.”

Content from Pond5 has been used in virtually every type of media project and by virtually every type of media maker, with a diverse array of more than 100,000 customers including major Hollywood studios, television networks, book and magazine publishers, video game makers, bloggers, and a long list of of others.

To sign up to Pond5, visit http://www.pond5.com.

About Pond5 Inc.

Pond5 is the world’s most vibrant marketplace for media makers, offering the web’s largest collection of royalty-free video footage, as well as millions of stock photos, illustrations, music tracks, sound effects, Adobe After Effects project templates, and 3D models. Disrupting the traditional stock agency model with an open, dynamic marketplace, Pond5 invites media makers from all over the world to submit their own content and set their own prices, earning 50% on each sale – significantly higher than traditional players.  Submissions are curated by the Pond5 team, and made available for immediate preview, purchase and download.  All content is licensed under a simple royalty-free license that provides customers lifetime, worldwide usage rights across all media. Visit Pond5 at http://www.pond5.com.

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Imagine if Batman and The Joker joined forces to eliminate extreme global poverty

WASHINGTON – NEW YORK – CALGARY – Whether you’re liberal or conservative, a dog person or cat lover, a Yankees or Red Sox fan, you’re invited to take part in a unique multimedia contest that brings opposites together to change the world. ONE, a 3 million-strong global advocacy organization that fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, and iStockphoto, the web’s favored source for user-generated imagery and multimedia, are partnering with Zooppa to launch a competition today in order to raise awareness of the plight of the world’s poorest citizens.

Hosted on Zooppa.com, a multimedia platform, the “ONE Thing We Agree On” contest will run through February 26, 2013. It is a challenge for creative minds to develop a video or print piece that showcases rivals uniting to fight issues such as poverty, famine and disease. Entrants are encouraged to think outside the box and submit in-your-face, edgy, fun and/or funny briefs. Videos must be short and the message conveyed in three minutes or less (also, they shouldn’t be sad. No one likes sad.)

Entrants will be judged based on adherence to the spirit of the brief, creativity, production value and whether the submission is compelling and engaging. Judges will include: Tom Freston, ONE Chairman of the Board and former CEO of Viacom and MTV Networks; Andrew Saunders, Getty Images Senior Vice President of Creative Imagery and Product Development; and Jeff Davidoff, ONE Chief Marketing Officer. The winner will be announced during the annual SXSW music, film, and interactive conference in Austin, Texas in March 2013. 

Twelve winners in total – six video winners and six print winners – will share $20,000 dollars and 35,000 free credits from iStockphoto. Winners will also be featured at ONE’s live events, on its website and social media platforms.

“The global movement dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty has brought together some strange bedfellows over the years,” says ONE Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Davidoff. “At ONE, our supporters come from the left, right and center and include business professionals, students, faith leaders, mom bloggers and everyone in between. This contest is a unique way to show that, when it comes to saving lives and making the world a better place, this is one thing that we can ALL agree on.”

As part of an exclusive sponsorship, iStockphoto will provide the first 500 entrants with free credits to license high-quality, imagery, footage and audio from iStockphoto for use in their “ONE Thing We Agree On” submissions.

“We’re proud to take part in the ‘ONE Thing We Agree On’ campaign because we are committed to elevating creative minds,” said Rebecca Rockafellar, Senior Vice President of e-commerce at Getty Images and General Manager of iStockphoto, “This competition allows the iStockphoto community to dig deep and create something engaging for an incredible cause.”

About ONE

ONE is a global advocacy and campaigning organization co-founded by Bono and backed by more than 3 million people from around the world dedicated to fighting extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa. For more information please visit www.ONE.org.

About iStockphoto
iStockphoto offers easy, affordable inspiration with millions of hand-picked, royalty-free photos, illustrations, videos and audio tracks. Using the most advanced search in the business, customers download a file every second from a collection of more than ten million files for business, marketing and personal projects. iStockphoto started in 2000, pioneering the micropayment photography business model, and has become one of the most successful and profitable user-generated content sites in the world. iStockphoto pays out more than $1.7 million weekly in artist royalties. iStockphoto is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Getty Images.

About Zooppa

Zooppa.com is the world’s leading creative crowdsourcing platform.  Over 100 leading brands and their agencies work with Zooppa to create fresh, on-brief content, including videos, prints, music and concepts.  Zooppa is based in Seattle with 200,000 members around the world.

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Oslo, Norway. December 18, 2012. With the new app “YAY Images”, from low price image provider YAY Images, users can search images, use project folders, purchase and download stock images directly with their iPad.  The image app gives you access to over three million royalty free images, perfect to use with your Keynote presentation or other creative projects.

The app features an advanced search, including color search, making it easy for users to find the perfect image for their project.  Images can be added to a project folder, and the folders syncs automatically with the main site yaymicro.com. The app also supports in-app purchases, allowing users to download images directly to their iPad. The images are downloaded to your photo folder and ready to be used in your Keynote presentation, design or other document.

“It’s never been easier to use images in your iPad-projects. One click and the image is ready for your presentation or design project,” says YAY’s CTO Bjorn Sjogren.

Key Features:

• Keyword Search
• Color Search
• Made for Retina Display
• Project Folders / Lightboxes
• In-App Purchase
• Direct Download
• Royalty Free License
• Low Prices
• Works with Keynotes and other apps

To develop innovative mobile platform solutions YAY has partnered with PGS Software, and their first collaborative release is this iPad app. Several other releases are planned in the future. YAY is one of the world’s leading image agencies, with over three million royalty free images. Located in Oslo, Norway, YAY aims to be a world-leading provider of images and image technology.

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Photokore (www.photokore.com), Asia’s leading digital image provider, confirmed today plans to sell the company to an undisclosed Asian investment group. Sean Mooney, the founder and CEO of Photokore, confirmed the sale today.

Seoul, South Korea, December 15, 2012 –(source PR.com)– Founder of Photokore, Sean Mooney, will retire as CEO of Photokore (www.photokore.com), the stock photo ecommerce website he founded in 2010. Mooney sold controlling interest in the Asia-based microstock photo company this month to an undisclosed group of Asian buyers.

Mooney, who launched Photokore in 2010, quickly grew the company’s share of the Asian imagery market by offering localized image search in multiple Asian languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Bahasa Indonesian, Filipino, and Thai), and an easy-to-use website. With a diverse range over 2 million photos and illustrations from thousands of contributors from over 130 countries; the Photokore quickly grew in sales and reputation.

“Our success in growing sales throughout the Asian region in such a short time span brought me great satisfaction,” said founder and CEO Sean Mooney. “However, I believe I’ve proven what I set out to prove – that Asia is a great source of creativity, and has a strong demand for great images. Now, the time has come for Photokore to develop further, something that this new investment will allow.”

Under its new management, Photokore plans to continue to focus on enabling Asian image buyers to find high-quality digital images contents using the site’s localized Asian-language search engine. Photokore’s new owners announced that the company doesn’t plan any significant immediate changes in its operations.

Photokore is a royalty-free stock photography site dedicated to offering high quality global images to the Asian market, and unique Asian images to the world. Photokore’s website supports image uploads and purchases in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Visitors to photokore.com can also search for images in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Hindi, Filipino, and English. Landing pages are also available in Arabic, Hindi, Indonesian, Malaysian, Spanish, Thai, Russian, and Vietnamese.

All photos and illustrations on photokore.com can be licensed for creative use – whether on a personal website, or in a global marketing campaign – at prices ranging from US$1 – US$40.

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Depositphotos microstock agency has grown at a record pace in 2012, more than doubling its stock content library size.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida, December 11, 2012 – Depositphotos, the fastest-growing microstock agency in the world, hits 11 million files milestone.

More than 150,000 high-quality stock files are uploaded to Depositphotos’ website on a weekly basis. In December 2011, the agency’s library contained 5 million images; therefore, in the course of one year Depositphotos managed to more than double the number of files available for sale.

“The demand of our clients is growing, and our primary goal is to provide them with the biggest possible variety of photographs, vector images and videos. We are also continuing development of website functionality in order to make working with Depositphotos as convenient as possible,” says Chief Operating Officer, Igor Kaliuzhnyi.

“More than 11 million files in Depositphotos’ library marks the successful completion of a year. I would like to express our gratitude to all the photographers, illustrators and videographers who contributed to Depositphotos, as well as to our more than 800,000 customers. We are positive that in the next year Depositphotos’ pace of growth will keep on increasing,” says Vadim Nekhai, Chief Marketing Officer of Depositphotos.

About Depositphotos Inc.

Depositphotos is the fastest-growing microstock agency in the world. Currently, it offers over 11 million stock photographs, vector images, and videos sold under royalty-free licenses. Depositphotos’ library is increased daily by thousands of files, carefully screened and selected by moderators. The company is headquartered in Florida, USA, and has business offices in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Ukraine and Russia.

For more information, please visit http://depositphotos.com/, and follow Depositphotos on Facebook or @Depositphotos on Twitter.

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December 6th 2012. Image Source, today announced further industry-leading innovation for photographers that combines significant investment in its creative community, added Art Direction across USA, Europe, Japan and Asia, elimination of all service fees to photographers, all backed by a special royalty rate for photographers of 60% in North America.
Christina Vaughan, Image Source Chief Executive Officer commented “through our brands, Cultura and Image Source, we see that customers have a great appetite for premium images. As an industry, we want to see more quality imagery, we need to invest further in Photographers, we need to innovate. Image Source will lead the way.”

The royalty rate is one of the highest royalties in the industry, a significant move coming not from a start-up, but from an established brand combining an industry-leading international network as well as direct sales at imagesource.com. “Each month we receive a very healthy quantity of imagery produced in Europe which our agents and their customers both love. The merger of Image Source and Cultura Creative has also highlighted an urgent need from our Agents for North American imagery produced with a fresh approach. To assist us in quickly taking advantage of this opportunity and building out our North American collections, we are delighted to offer a royalty rate of 60% for all imagery produced there and accepted between Dec 1st 2012 and through to Dec 31st 2013. The bonus royalty rate will apply for the lifetime of those images”, added Anthony Harris, the Group’s Chief Operating Officer.

The recent merger of Image Source and Cultura has created an opportunity to maximize and build on existing benefits for the photographer community which include delivering industry-leading creative intelligence, to on-set art direction out of its European and US offices, to the ability to put photographers’ images in front of more buyers than any other company via an unmatched international network.
The move reflects the company’s dedication to industry innovation and photographic quality. “The increased royalty rate,” says Christina Vaughan, “reflects Image Source’s responsibility as one of the most respected and established stock brands in the world to create a virtuous circle of an active photographer community, industry leading photographer benefits, quality art direction, quality marketing and distribution. All this equates to greater value for our customers and agents, an investment in premium content and a greater return on investment for Photographers. It’s a win-win for all”.

About Image Source

Image Source is the world’s leading producer of premium royalty free stock imagery, motion and Cross-Media content. Headquartered in London, UK, with a regional office in New York, the company also supplies imagery through over 200 partners worldwide. This strong international sales network enabled the company to win the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2005. http://www.imagesource.com is currently the only platform in the industry able to showcase matched still images and motion clips displayed side-by-side for any given keyword search result, enabling creative art buyers to fulfill an integrated multimedia campaign brief in one simple purchase path. Search for royalty free high quality stock photos, images, video, footage, clips and Cross-Media content 24/7 on www.imagesource.com.

About Cultura Creative

Cultura Creative is the fastest growing producer of rights managed and royalty free premium imagery in Europe. It began in 2006 when former Vice President of Getty Images, Anthony Harris, brought together 21 founding photographers to create a very special agency. Cultura Creative’s stock image collections are available to purchase direct, and through a global network of leading agents. Cultura Creative delivers creatively consistent, impactful imagery that connects with professional media buying audiences from its headquarters in London’s Soho. To search for stock images by keyword, photographer or collection, click on www.culturacreative.com.

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SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Blend Images, the world’s leading multicultural stock photography agency, announced today the addition of Memento, a new camera phone stock image collection featuring strongly conceptual and illustrative commercial content. Memento images will be available for licensing at www.blendimages.com and stock resellers worldwide in early 2013.

“Thousands of professional commercial photographers are capturing compelling images every day with their camera phones. And image resolution is becoming less of a barrier for commercial licensing. Our goal is to provide new and unique options in visual media to our clients.”

“The quality of imagery being generated by iPhone^® and Android™ devices is astounding, and with the ever increasing use of imagery online, we believe the potential for licensing this content is tremendous,” said Rick Becker-Leckrone, CEO of Blend Images. “Thousands of professional commercial photographers are capturing compelling images every day with their camera phones. And image resolution is becoming less of a barrier for commercial licensing. Our goal is to provide new and unique options in visual media to our clients.”

Sarah Fix, VP of Creative at Blend, adds: “Ultimately, art buyers want compelling imagery that visually defines promotional or editorial concepts, regardless of the tool used to create it. In many ways, the camera function on today’s smart phone is the perfect device for capturing relevant, dynamic stock imagery. Both the increasingly exceptional technology of the camera phone and its tremendous portability allow for a spontaneity that often results in the kind of real-world, natural, candid images advertisers seek.”

Blend Images is now accepting imagery for Memento through the Blend Portal. Photographers who are interested in submitting images for the Memento collection can find more information at http://www.blendimages.com/memento.shtml.

About Blend Images

Blend Images is a stock photography agency that specializes in producing ethnically diverse business and lifestyle imagery. The Blend collection, which currently offers over 150,000 images and motion clips online, including royalty-free and rights-managed collections, celebrates ethnic and cultural diversity. Creative professionals can search, license, and download imagery directly from www.blendimages.com. Blend Images are also distributed through more than 100 agents worldwide, including many of the largest stock agencies in the industry. Blend Images is based in Las Vegas, NV, with offices in Seattle, WA, and Culver City (Los Angeles), CA.

iPhone is a registered trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Android is a trademark of Google Inc.

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