Yahoo's Flickr site has deepened its relationship with photo-licensing power Getty Images so photographers can nominate their own photos for inclusion in Getty's Flickr Collection.
Previously, Getty decided which images it believed were commercially viable, and since the program launched in July 2008, it has put together a collection of more than 60,000 commercial images. Now photographers, instead of just being able to indicate that they're willing to be contacted by Getty, can actively submit a portfolio of images.
"A submission should include exactly 10 images that represent what you consider to be the best of your work. The Getty Images creative team will evaluate submissions based on style, subject matter, and technical skill," Andy Saunders, Getty's vice president of creative imagery, said in a statement. "If some or all of the photos--or other images from your photostream--are selected for the Flickr Collection on Getty Images, you will receive an invitation via FlickrMail. This invitation will clearly show Getty Images' initial selection of images and introduce the enrollment process."
The partnership is an interesting confluence between the old-school world of stock photography and the nouveau era of digital photography and the Internet. With digital SLRs and the Internet, high-quality photos are easier to come by, leading to the arrival of several "microstock" companies that sell photos on a royalty-free and relatively inexpensive basis. It's hurt professional stock photographers, but it's provided extra income to any number of enthusiasts and amateurs.
Flickr never launched its own microstock site, despite an abundance of enthusiasts contributing photos, but the Getty partnership does mix a commercial ingredient into the Yahoo photo-sharing site's operations.
The easy availability of photos at Flickr and other sites can lead to copyright infringement troubles. On Tuesday, Toyota USA apologized for using Flickr photos without permission:
Toyota apologizes for pulling images from Flickr without photographer permission. Images from a handful of photographers appeared on a Toyota site for five days. We're working quickly to reach out to the individual photographers involved. Until then, the images have been removed, and corrections have been made to the process of pulling images from Flickr.
So it's clear that some Flickr photos have business value, whether for their professional quality or their everyman snapshot flavor.
Getty and Flickr won't disclose any details about their business relationship, but here's what Flickr has to say about how the finances work for photographers:
Flickr has a business relationship with Getty Images, though we've never publicly discussed the specifics of the deal. Regarding the photographers, Getty Images will be the exclusive distributor of select Flickr members' content, and in turn, Getty Images will facilitate the license of such photography and will pay the royalties directly to the members. This will be a direct relationship between Getty Images and each Flickr contributor.
Flickr photographers will be asked to sign a Getty Images contributor contract, if they agree to have their images licensed for commercial use, that will specify rates for rights-managed and royalty-free royalties, as applicable. Rates for royalty-free imagery are 20 percent; rates for rights-managed (images) are 30 percent. These are directly in line with royalty rates that (Getty's) existing contributors receive.
Getty Images' Flickr collection is now live.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Getty Images, one of the stock photography powerhouses, has switched on a program by which selected Flickr photographers can license their images to paying customers.
In earlier days of the microstock business, in which photographers license images over the Internet for relatively low prices through sites including Getty's iStockphoto, there was speculation Flickr might jump into the market. After all, there's plenty of good material, and it's often already tagged for easier categorization.
Instead, though, Flickr and Getty announced a partnership in which Getty taps Flickr photographers it believes have potential to sell their photos through Getty. Invitations started going out in January, and now the Getty's Flickr collection is live, Yahoo announced on its blog Tuesday.
One complication, though: many photographers at Flickr offer their images under Creative Commons licenses that permit copying and redistribution of the photos.
According to the Flickr help section on the Getty program, Yahoo switches Creative Commons-licensed photos to all rights reserved if they're submitted to Getty:
Can I sell my Creative Commons-licensed content?
There is a chance one of your Creative Commons-licensed photos may catch the eye of a perceptive Getty Images editor. You are welcome to upload these photos into the Flickr collection on Getty Images, but you are contractually obliged to reserve all rights to sale for your work sold via Getty Images. If you proceed with your submission, switching your license to All Rights Reserved (on Flickr) will happen automatically.
If you're not cool with that, that's totally cool. It just means that particular photo will need to stay out of the Flickr collection on Getty Images.
Ben Metcalfe launched a discussion of the Creative Commons issue, pointing out that Creative Commons licenses are perpetual.
In response, a Getty Images representative said, "We would never expect anyone to revoke a license. We know that your image is being used with your permission by those who licensed it through CC (Creative Commons), which is why we are placing CC images we choose in RF (royalty-free licensing) only. We couldn't place it in RM (rights-managed) because rights management would not be possible. We came to this so as not to exclude inviting CC images."
As expected, iStockphoto launched its audio clip licensing service, called iStockaudio, on Wednesday.
The move marks another expansion for a site that pioneered the "microstock" business of inexpensive, royalty-free image licensing over the Internet. The company, acquired by stock art power Getty Images in 2006, also offers video, Flash animations, and vector illustrations.
iStock Chief Executive Bruce Livingstone announced the availability of the audio licensing Wednesday in a blog posting. The company has been accumulating audio clips over the last year, and now 10,000 are available.
"You can use our iStock tracks as many times as you like, wherever you like," Livingstone said. "Our tracks include public performance, synchronization, and mechanical licenses."
That means there are constraints on audio contributors, though, who may not be members of various professional organizations.
"iStockphoto has used reasonable efforts to ensure that the suppliers of audio content are not members of any performing rights, mechanical rights or any other similar societies (such as SOCAN, ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, PRS, MCPS, SACEM, SDRM, JASLAC, GEMA, etc.) and that no performing rights or other royalties are required to be paid to any such organizations," according to the iStockaudio license agreement.
When a customer licenses an audio clip--the noise of smashing glass or a background melody, for example--the company shares a percentage of the revenue with the contributor of the clip. Licensing fees range from 2 credits for a basic, simple clip to 25 credits for a long, elaborate one; credit costs range from $18 for 12 to $1,900 for 2,000.
SAN JOSE, Calif.--iStockphoto, which helped pioneer the "microstock" market for inexpensive, royalty-free imagery, plans to launch an audio-licensing business Wednesday.
The Getty Images subsidiary already offers photography, illustrations, Flash animations, and video. iStockaudio was a natural extension--one the company's customers had sought, iStock Chief Executive Bruce Livingstone said in a speech here at the User-Generated Content Conference and Expo.
iStockphoto CEO and founder Bruce Livingstone
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)"We're introducing iStockaudio on Wednesday this week," Livingstone said. The company announced the iStockaudio plan last May, but the actual arrival was delayed by a suddenly necessary overhaul to the site's search system, he said.
Initially, the audio service--think background music or the sound of a shattering window--will be available through public beta testing. Interface changes are possible before the final launch, scheduled for the South by Southwest conference that begins March 13.
So far, there are about 10,000 audio clips at the site, Chief Operating Officer Kelly Thompson said in an interview. "There's a lot of pent-up demand," he added.
Disruptive
iStockphoto, and the microstock industry in general, is an example of what can be done to harness the power of large numbers of people. Many in the traditional stock art business have been displeased that a bunch of amateurs willing to see their work sold for less than $1 a pop are eroding their business. But the hard economic reality is that microstock companies have put images on the market from photographers who are good enough to sell a few images now and again, even if not good enough--or devoted enough--to quit their day jobs.
iStockphoto now has about 65,000 photographers contributing to the site. Because Getty Images went private last year, the company won't reveal its 2008 financial results. The results were better, though, than in 2007, when the company garnered $71 million in revenue and paid contributors more than $21 million for their work.
The company is, of course, a technological phenomenon. It uses the Internet not only to connect large numbers of buyers and sellers, but also to help them view and distribute digital photography. "When iStock really started to take off is when the Canon Rebel came out," making it "affordable to shoot really good digital," Livingstone said.
Getty Images, which has a more traditional rights-managed image-licensing business, has a program to try to recruit new photographers from Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site, a partnership Livingstone helped set up.
Ups and downs
Thompson and Livingstone shared some of the ups and downs of their business' history at the conference. The lesson for companies such as iStockphoto that rely on user-generated content: pay close attention to what users and customers are asking for. They were asking for video, for example, and that now accounts for 10 percent of the subsidiary's revenue.
iStockphoto plans to launch its new audio clip-licensing site Wednesday.
(Credit: iStockphoto)The flip side is launching something people haven't asked for. Livingstone had the iStock Forumeter idea, for example. It let people label forum contributors as grouchy crabs, helpful superheroes, comedic clowns, and unconstructive trolls.
"The problem with this is, the community didn't ask for it, didn't want it, and it was too accurate," Livingstone said. "People didn't really want to know how they were seen in the forums. It was a flop. We got rid of it in about 30 days."
Another bad idea: the Buy Request program for setting up custom photography shoots. In the company's core business, "99.99 percent of our sales are done unassisted. This little brainchild was the exact opposite. We had to help customers 99.99 percent of the time. It just didn't work," Thompson said.
The company also has struggled to keep up with growth of its computing infrastructure.
"It's important to be wrong as often as you are right, as long as you learn from the mistakes," Livingstone said. And when things go wrong, it's important to tell your users you're sorry. "Sometimes, the community needs to hear you acknowledge that there was a problem and apologize for it."
Once, the site went down after a truck cut the fiber line to the company's headquarters in Calgary, Alberta. "We did manage to get a check out of the company that supplied the fiber optics. Instead of keeping it, we decided to disburse to the community--the people who would have sold photos. It wasn't a lot--maybe $45,000--but I think people really appreciated the gesture," Livingstone said.
Growth strains
"Mostly, we plan for a reasonable amount of growth. Too much bandwidth is costly, but not enough is a disaster, and we know," Thompson said. "Early in our life, we got a bit behind the curve, and it was tough to catch up."
The company pushes what the MySQL database software can do, but this year, it concluded that it just couldn't handle the site's search operation. So in what was something of an emergency, it rewrote it in the C programming language.
"Our search was failing. We had to put everything on hold, surgically extract search from our Web site, and put it back in," Livingstone said.
Now, though, instead of 30 overtaxed search servers, the company has a single machine handling the chore, with four backup machines to handle potential problems.
The company hopes that new software called Dexter, which lets customers license images directly without using the Web site, will offer further help. A Mac OS X version is in private testing with people who license many images now, and a version running on Adobe's AIR software foundation is under development.
Apparently, it wasn't as easy to launch a microstock site for lower-cost photography sales as Corbis thought it would be.
Corbis, one of the established powers in licensing stock photography, launched SnapVillage in 2007, arguing that the microstock market was still young. But on Thursday, Corbis announced that it will phase out SnapVillage by the end of the year.
Contributing photographers and illustrators, along with customers and existing imagery, will be moved to a new microstock part of Corbis' existing Veer property called Veer Marketplace. Veer, a stock art agency Corbis acquired in 2007, offers both royalty-free and rights-managed imagery.
"We recognize that as the market has rapidly evolved over the past two years, we need a bigger, better offering to achieve success in microstock," Corbis said in a blog post. "In the months ahead, we'll be inviting SnapVillage contributors and customers to Veer Marketplace. Once Veer Marketplace is launched and fully operational, it will become Corbis' only microstock brand."
SnapVillage competes with a host of microstock competitors that arrived on the market earlier. Those include iStockphoto, acquired by Getty Images; StockXpert, acquired by JupiterImages; Fotolia; Dreamstime; and ShutterStock.
For the first time, iStockphoto has revealed how much money it pulled in by licensing large numbers of photos, videos, and other imagery for relatively small fees, and how much it paid out to the producers of that content.
In a forum posting Tuesday, iStockphoto head honcho Bruce Livingstone said the Getty Images subsidiary had 2007 revenue of $71.9 million, and it paid $20.9 million to those who contributed the imagery it licenses.
That's a pretty interesting illustration of what user-generated content can sell for, at least in one context.
"We are now selling an image every 1.4 seconds through this industry-changing marketplace," Livingstone said in the posting.
Getty is in the process of going private in a $2.4 billion deal announced in February.
"One thing we've always had to keep close to our chest is our financials. Maybe it's our Canadian background, but we've always found it a bit cheeky and rude to discuss money," Livingstone said. "With the recent announcement that Getty Images is going to be a private company owned by management, employees, and Hellman & Friedman, you'll see lots of numbers floating around about iStock's financials."
iStockphoto, the Getty Images "microstock" subsidiary that sells low-cost imagery and video, will announce Monday plans to raise prices and therefore photographer revenue next month along with a number of promotional activities.
The company sells credits that give customers rights to use contributors' photos in materials such as advertisements, Web sites or brochures. The higher the resolution, the more credits an image costs, and the credit cost will increase from $1.20 to $1.30 on August 19, said iStockphoto Executive Vice President Kelly Thompson. (Credits are cheaper in bulk.)
Because photographers get a proportion of the credit cost ranging between 20 percent and 40 percent, the increase will mean a few more pennies at least per sale for photographers, too. That may not sound like much, but some popular photos sell hundreds or even thousands of times over, so there are economies of scale at work here.
iStockphoto pioneered the microstock business, but it competes with a host of start-ups and rival sites from the two large stock-photo companies, JupiterImages and Corbis.
The company also is offering some promotions to photographers who contribute pictures. On one day in the next three months, the company will give iStockphoto-exclusive photographers 100 percent of the proceeds. To keep people from improperly benefiting from the deal, the company won't announce the date beforehand, though, Thompson said.
Other promotions geared to make photographers happier include unlimited uploads for the weekend of August 19-20; lowered requirements from 500 downloads to 250 to attain exclusive status and the resulting higher payment rates; $40,000 worth of contest prizes; and expanded the access to higher-fee image licensing programs elsewhere in the Getty business.
iStockphoto sells vector art--that which can be scaled to print at any size--as well as video and flash animations. The company is raising prices overall for video, sales of which are "going beyond our wildest expectations," Thompson said. Previously, videos were available for $5, $10, $20, $35 and $50, but those prices now will move to $10, $20, $30, $40 and $50, he said.
However, vector art prices are dropping from $1, $5, $10, $20 and $40 to $1, $3, $7, $12 and $25. (iStockphoto vector art costs more according to its complexity.) In practice, though, prices aren't necessarily dropping, because the company is moving many $1 files to the $3 price.
Full pricing details are published at the company's Web site.
BigStockPhoto.com, one of a host of "microstock" companies that sells images to advertisers and others who need stock photography, has overhauled its search engine in an attempt to improve performance and usefulness.
(Credit:
BigStockPhoto.com)
The new search tools are faster and can filter images based on parameters such as vertical or horizontal orientation to narrow down searches more quickly, the Davis, Calif.-based company said Wednesday. It also offers the ability to show similar searches to more easily find new but related choices.
"This is...the first of many steps we're taking to dramatically improve BigStockPhoto's user experience," said of BigStockPhoto.com Chief Executive and founder Tim Donahue in a statement.
BigStockPhoto.com has 1.2 million images in its library. It competes with a collection of similar companies, including new entrant SnapVillage from Corbis and with Getty Images subsidiary iStockphoto. The latter announced Wednesday it's enlisted more than 2 million members. Collectively they download images at a rate of about one every 2.5 seconds.
Photo-sharing site Zooomr began a second try Monday to launch its third-generation photo-sharing Web site, attempting to combine social-networking features with unlimited photo storage and, eventually, the capability for photographers to sell their own pictures.
Zooomr's new Zipline chat and status feature
(Credit: Zooomr)The new site, when available, features a Twitter-like interface called Zipline that lets members tell their contacts what they're up to and hear the same from those contacts, according to a video demonstration by co-founder Kristopher Tate. It also lets members join groups and subscribe to discussions.
Zooomr had attempted to fire up the Mark III site in March, but instead bugs and migration issues kept the site was unavailable for nearly a week. The start-up rolled back to the earlier version and postponed the upgrade.
Founder Kristopher Tate estimated the new relaunch would be done within 24 hours. He and Chief Executive Thomas Hawk appeared on a late-night video feed Monday holding a two-man launch party and answering questions. (Hawk likes both Pacifica and Rolling Rock beer, has a bachelor's degree in political science, and gets "in sort of this Zen state when I'm out there with the camera shooting.")
Zooomr has had a rocky few months. Shortly after the relaunch snafu, its investor pulled out its money when the start-up's cash flow turned positive. That's delaying some new hardware purchases.
Then, just before Monday's second relaunch attempt, a database hard drive crashed and Tate and Hawk had to drive from San Francisco to Silicon Valley in the middle of the night to repair it.
Zooomr Mark III Take 2 will arrive in three weeks, but at the same time, the photo-sharing site may enter a "hiatus."
A screenshot of Zooomr's redesigned site
(Credit: Zooomr)In March, glitches forced the photo-sharing site to back off a redesign that would permit Zooomr users to sell their own photos and would lift storage limits, among other changes. The new version now is scheduled to arrive in three weeks--May 21--said lead programmer Kristopher Tate on his blog Monday.
Tate also said the company is looking for new investors.
"I have some breaking news to share that may create a period of hiatus for Zooomr: Our initial investor heard we were cash-positive and has decided to pull their money out of our accounts," Tate said.
The lack of funds will "hinder" the purchase of storage systems, he said, but Mark III will be launched nonetheless.
"In the above interests, we've started to look for fresh investment," Tate said. "We know there are angels, VCs and other investors reading our blog--so if you think you can help, please let us know!"
Tate also posted a screenshot of the redesigned Zooomr.
