Author: Amos Struck

iStock has made an announcement yesterday, sending out a newsletter to contributors detailing the changes they are planning to introduce on September 13, 2014 which effectively changes the whole system how iStock is pricing images in the future. iStock co-founder and Getty manager Brad Ralph has also published an Open Letter on the PR site of Getty Images, detailing the past development and the reason for those changes. The changes in a nutshell “More customers need more content, for more projects, distributed in more ways and in more formats and on more platforms. This sets a great foundation for continued…

Alamy’s New Blog Exciting news for Alamy contributors and customers! In addition to the 50 million images milestone (below) this week, there’s also a new blog – a job well done to the designers. The blog is filled with new posts and great contents that will surely encourage buyers and increase the traffic in the site. What are you waiting for? Check out the new Alamy Blog now! Alamy Reaches 50 Million Images Alamy is adding to the list of recent milestones stock agencies has been hitting these past few months. Last Wednesday, August 27, the independent stock photo agency…

Dreamstime Surpasses 25 Million Images Dreamstime announced on Thursday that it has already surpassed 25 million uploaded images with a photo by Inga Dudkina.  Together with this new milestone, the leading community in stock photography is opening an additional office at 180 Sansome St. in San Francisco. The new office will provide the company an expanded presence in the Silicon Valley. Dreamstime has more than 15 million unique monthly visitors and hundreds of thousands of new images uploaded weekly. “Passing 25 million images in our library is an important milestone which speaks to the wide range of subject matter covered…

We tried to compile a list of commonly used terms and acronyms in the Microstock industry that might not be intuitive to understand for newbies, so we can always point them here when they ask “What does it mean?” In some cases these were written a bit tongue-in-cheek, so don’t take them all too seriously. 😉 Terms and Acronyms commonly used in micro stock discussions Acceptance Rate – Number of images accepted for sale in comparison to the images uploaded to an agency; rates depend on strictness of the agency and can range from below 50% (usually for beginners) to above…

The ‘Positives’ of Being into Microstock There has been a certain number of feedbacks recently from microstock contributors complaining that their sales are low or close to nothing at all. Some don’t even get accepted to microstock agencies right away. Photographers have doubts whether they can earn a living out of selling stock pictures or do they just waste their time and resources on shooting images that don’t sell at all. A poll on MicrostockGroup has been recently opened for contributors to answer the question, “Do you feel there are positives than negatives in this business?” On a happy note,…

Flickr’s New Licensing Program Flickr announced this last week of July their new licensing program describing it as a way for photographers to “partner with photo agencies, editors, bloggers and other creative minds who are seeking original content.” Some photographers may have already received emails via Flickr Mail, while others can still sign up for the program. The Yahoo-owned photo sharing and storage site lists media brands like The New York Times, Reuters, Gizmodo, Monocle, and BBC among the partners, as well as Getty Images. In addition, Yahoo will also possibly showcase photos in Yahoo News and Travel, plus Tumblr.…

Adobe Quietly Launches Creative Cloud Market for Royalty-Free Content With Autodesk’s acquisition of Creative Market earlier this year, a platform that allows creatives and developers to sell everything from photos, graphics to even Photoshop plugins and brushes, Adobe’s action would be to fall back on one of its acquisitions, the Behance site, to launch its Creative Cloud Content which is described as “collection of high-quality, curated assets for creatives by creatives.” If you are a Creative Cloud subscriber, you can access thousands of free items via your Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app but not directly via Photoshop. Here’s how Adobe…

SAP Lumira Partners with Fotolia SAP Lumira has chosen Fotolia to be content partners. The partnership will enable SAP’s customers who use Lumira to be able to search for Fotolia images to present their data in a more visually appealing way. SAP Lumira is a self-service solution that allows analysts to access, transform and visualize data. Before, for SAP users to be able to use images on their compositions, they have to import the images from the local file system to add them to the “images picker.” But now, they can already import using Fotolia services. It’s that easy. The new…

New York based stock media marketplace, Pond5, announced yesterday that it has raised $61 million in equity financing from Accel Partners and Stripes Group. The funding is the first institutional investment for the company and will be used for the company’s global growth, hiring and product development. Pond5 is a company that runs an online marketplace for stock video footage, photos, audio and other snippets needed to create media projects. Pond5 pays out 50% of sales to artists who upload their media to the website, a competitor to Shutterstock who pays 20-30%. “Our mission since day one has been to…

Alamy’s CEO, James West is back for the third time to answer some of your questions. Find out if he answered yours in the video below or here on Youtube. The team has boiled down hundreds of questions into top ten which they think represents the hundreds of questions that came in. So here’s some… Getty’s decision to give away 30 million images – “Getty’s announcement is interesting but it is not going to change our business.” Where Alamy is compared with the top 10 non-exclusive agencies – “If you look at the industry as being the traditional Rights Managed,…