Author: Amos Struck

Press Release Introducing ThinkStock: a new kind of image subscription A complete image subscription product offering premium Royalty-Free imagery from Getty Images and Jupiterimages, and user-generated images from iStockphoto New York, NY – February 1, 2010 – Getty Images, Inc., the world’s leading creator and distributor of visual and digital media content, today launches Thinkstock (www.thinkstock.com), a new image subscription product that provides one of the most complete offerings available in the marketplace.  Developed for value-conscious creative professionals, Thinkstock is one of the only subscription products to offer this level of quality, simplicity and value all in one place, with…

Veer and Veer Marketplace integration plans for the 2010 Veer, announcing the success and the positive impact of the Veer Marketplace, is going to further integrate Veer and Veer Marketplace, giving a central role to Marketplace microstock model business. The microstock “war” still continues and Veer Marketplace will be put in the center of the main Veer site, giving evidence to its contents. Here some quotes from the Veer Marketplace Forum …These changes include: Veer will integrate the Veer Marketplace model and content into the broader Veer web site, making Veer more like Veer Marketplace overall. Veer Marketplace content will…

In the last newsletter, 123RF is inviting the contributors to upload Editorial contents with the intention to open the section to the market at the end of February 2010. Here some significant quotes: Yes, it’s good news for those of you who’ve been waiting for this moment. 123RF.com is now accepting editorial content. We would like to invite you to upload your editorial images or illustrations to us What happens next? Images will be accepted and reviewed now. However, they will not appear immediately on the site. Once we have sufficient content, we will then launch the editorial content on…

Press Release DELHI, India, January 18 – About ImagesBazaar.com World’s Largest Collection of Indian Images – ImagesBazaar.com and ShotIndia.com With over 800,000 images, www.imagesbazaar.com today has the world’s largest stock of Indian images where one can search, purchase and download as per need. The website has proved to be a great hit with small, medium and large businesses by providing them ready-to-use high quality images for advertising, marketing and publishing. In short, it slashes down the cost of producing a shoot from lakhs of rupees to a few thousands and the time from weeks to a few minutes. Advantage ImagesBazaar.com…

© DrGrounds – iStockPhoto.com This photo is one of the first iStockphoto results searching the keyword business and sorting by number of downloads. It’s a perfect stock photo, I can say a business cliché: a young, pretty, happy, successful business woman with a notepad, white isolation let the designers manage it easily in their layouts. I’d really love to have the craft, equipments, models and so on  to shoot like this! I’m using this image like an occasion to start to explain something different. The microstock production is growing fast in quantity and in quality and I assume that also…

Fotolia has just launched the Tax Center. As we’ve already seen for Shutterstock, Fotolia is announcing that “Selling creative content licenses is an economic activity and, as a Fotolia contributor, income derived from these sales in the US may be subject to U.S. IRS (Internal Revenue Service) withholding tax”. Using the Shutterstock experience, I can say that for most of us it will be necessary to fill the W-8 BEN form online:  submitting to Fotolia as an individual and resident in a country that has a tax treaty, it’s easy to submit Form W-8 BEN online without Tax ID (ITIN).…

The 2009 microstock year was closed by a quite sad news; following the silent disappearance from the web (and from the market, I guess) of Albumo, now it’s the turn of the Zymmetrical closing time. Here the leave taking of the Director, Keith Tuomi: It is with deep regret we must announce Zymmetrical is closed. The stock industry and the economy in general are a hard situation these days, and we have made the difficult decision to close the operation, preserving our health and future potential. We met a lot of friendly image producers & agents who are doing great…

From the PantherMedia Blog, a review of their “thrilling” 2009. — Dear photographers, 2009 was a very thrilling year. In our chronicle, we take the opportunity to sum up all important changes of this year and to give a brief outlook on 2010. „The one who is ignoring the market will ultimately fail“ There was a lot going in Germany. Many international microstock companies worked the German market with local subsidiaries and huge marketing spendings. Additionally, some new German microstock companies joined the market. Hence, we reacted quickly to these new developments. „Continuity gives us roots; change gives us branches,…

Fotolia has published the price structure for the next year. They are going to cut royalties but to increase prices with the result that “a majority of contributing artists will continue to see increases in the total dollar amounts earned as we are raising prices”. Royalties for videos and subscriptions plans will remain unchanged from 2009 pricing. Here I post the last Fotolia newsletter (with some good performance data) and then I’m going to compare the present structure with the new one. Dear Fotolia Contributor, 2009 has been an amazing year for all of us – through aggressive marketing and…

I’m pleased to publish an introduction to Photocase kindly written for us by Peter Read, Vice President at Photocase.com, with some additional thoughts about the vision for stock and how Photocase, playing a niche role, fits into it. Photocase.com was started in 2001 as a way for a small group of graphic designers to freely and easily share photos between each other. They shot their own photos, uploaded and shared them to create a little pool of reliable, unique, good-quality and -above all – free photos that they could use in any given project. It grew from a server in…