If you want to buy an image…

Image is a historically prevalent facility for information transmission that has been long used by the mankind in a great variety of the life spheres. A single picture can convey the necessary idea more efficiently than a dozen of paragraphs of the written word. Image is an art and a business at the same time, on one hand it is used for expressing emotions and ideas to make others to reflect on important realities of our existence but on the other hand it can be used to increase sales of a company that wants to make its products more attractive to customers. In this article we would like to focus on the business aspect of the picture industry, mainly on the activity of the stock photography agencies. Their products are found each day in newspapers, magazines, advertising, films and books and on television and websites.

Modern photography business model was formed in the course of the technology revolution that brought a digital camera, a computer and Internet to serve the purposes and needs of both those who sell images and those who buy them. Today these are the main tools for most photographers to get their images into distribution. And before we start observing the main players in the sector I find it relevant to clarify a couple of terms.

"Stock images" or “stock photography” business owes its name to the fact that like nay other inventory they are held in stock. One more term that will be used further in here is “royalty-free images”. The term was born as a result of over saturation in the market with thousands of agencies and private photographers offering their image products. Making violent efforts to maintain revenue levels, and to revive sales of images that weren't moving at all, the industry introduced the concept. CDs with several hundred photographs sold for as little as $150 and the buyer had no restrictions on use. Royalty-Free content is licensed for non-exclusive use of an image or CD for a one-time flat fee while there is also Rights Managed content which is licensed for specific predefined usages. The usage fees are based on the usage requested.

The world of giants

There are dozens of companies selling stock photography competing with each other, but the largest are three: a public company formerly known as Internet.com, named Jupitermedia Corporation, a private company controlled by Bill Gates, named Corbis, INMAGINE® Corporation LLC and a stock photo agency Getty Images, Inc. We will start with the reverse order.

Getty Images

Getty Images, Inc. is a supplier of stock images for business and consumers, based in Seattle, Washington, USA, with an archive of 70 million still images and illustrations and more than 30,000 hours of stock film footage. It targets three markets — creative professionals (advertising and graphic design), the media (print and online publishing), and corporate communication departments for other businesses.

Getty has distribution offices around the world and makes its profits on the Internet and CD-ROM collections for distribution. The company also offers custom photo services for corporate clients.

In 1993, Mark Getty and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Klein co-founded Getty Investments LLC, which today is the principal shareholder of Getty Images. Mark Getty is the company's chairman. The newly founded company was named Getty Communications and in September 1997 it was merged with PhotoDisc, Inc. to form Getty Images.

Today, gettyimages.com serves an average of 3.2 billion thumbnails, 7.3 million visits and 4 million unique users in addition to an average of 175 million page views each month. Nearly 100% of the company’s visual content is delivered digitally.

The company repeatedly received industry recognition for both its photography and its business accomplishments. In 2005, American Photo Magazine acknowledged the company’s commitment to the photography industry, naming Getty Images’ co-founders Jonathan Klein and Mark Getty as number one of “The 100 Most Important People in Photography."

In 2004, Getty acquired image.net for $20 million USD. On February 9, 2006, the controversial microstock photo website iStockphoto was acquired by Getty Images for $50 million USD. In 2007, Getty successfully purchased its largest competitor, MediaVast, for $207m. The acquisition meant that Getty Images gained control of WireImage (Entertainment, creative, and sports photography), FilmMagic (fashion and red carpet photography), Contour Photos (portrait and studio photography) and a host of other subsidiaries including "Master Delegates" who include: Gallo Images in Johannesburg, Touchline Photo in Cape Town, Isifa Image Service in Prague, Laura Ronchi in Italy On October 23, 2008, Getty Images announced they are to acquire the Jupiterimages division from Jupitermedia for $96 million in cash. The acquisition is technically subject to the approval of shareholders and the receipt of certain regulatory approvals.

INMAGINE®

INMAGINE® founded in 2000 is a leading supplier and distributor of Royalty-Free digital stock photography in the world. The company has a base of more than 3.1 million Royalty-Free stock images from over 100 best-selling collections holding the most complete list of Royalty-Free publishers in the market.

Inmagine launched its first royalty free digital stock photography catalogue in October 2002.

Inmagines content covers both human and still-life conceptual photography. The initial plan of the company was to cover many Asian issues and faces to cover the niche in this area but eventually INMAGINE® was taking every effort to ensure that they provide a variety of cosmopolitan images for every images user worldwide. Inmagine publishes images which are cross culture and the East meet West concepts towards the target of being the main royalty free digital images publisher in Asia. INMAGINE® is now the worlds largest publisher of Asian royalty free images.

Other than stock photography, Inmagine have a good range of digital arts and illustrations. These products are layers of artwork combined to create an artistic image. Most of these images are created by some top digital artist and illustrators from Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia.

Currently INMAGINE® products are available via its distributors in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, China, Spain, Sweden, USA and Australia.

Other than publishing their own range of digital stock photography, INMAGINE® also represents a few top royalty free publishers (Stockbyte, BrandXpictures, Image100, Imagestate, Bananastock, Goodshoot, idreamstock and ImageDJ) thus providing all its users with a wider range of images.

Available in 8 languages, the website includes simple and advanced searches and a browse structure, a lightbox facility and a download centre, where images can be downloaded once they have been purchased.

Corbis

Corbis is a leading provider of image-licensing solutions and services to creative professionals and consumer products companies. As part of www.corbis.com, Corbis provides visual content and services to people around the world through innovative digital technologies. The company is based in Seattle, Washington. It has a collection of more than 100 million creative, entertainment and historic images, a comprehensive footage library, extensive rights and clearances expertise, and a roster of elite assignment photographers.

Corbis is privately owned by Bill Gates, who founded the company in 1989 under the name Interactive Home Systems (a name currently held by an unrelated, slightly older company based in Concord, Massachusetts). One major reason for starting the company was Gates's belief that people would someday decorate their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork using digital frames. The company's name was changed to Continuum Productions in 1994 and to Corbis Corporation a year later. "Corbis" is Latin for "wicker basket," which at the time referred to the company's emerging view of itself as a receptacle or storehouse for visual media.

The company collection includes contemporary creative, entertainment, iconic and historic photography as well as art and illustrations. Among its noted acquisitions were the 11 million piece Bettmann Archive, acquired in 1995; the Sygma collection in France (1999); and the German stock image company Zefa (2005). Corbis also has the rights to digital reproduction for art from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London.

SnapVillage offers two pricing models: Per-image pricing like Getty Image's iStockphoto, or subscriptions like those offered by ShutterStock.[

Jupitermedia

Jupitermedia Corp. is a U.S.-based corporation, established in 1994, and headquartered in Darien, CT. The company is a global provider of original information, images and digital content for information technology, business and creative professionals. JupiterMedia has two divisions: Jupiterimages and Jupiter Online Media.

In 1994, Alan Meckler, then CEO of Mecklermedia, created MecklerWeb as an addendum to his offerings in print (Virtual Reality World, CDrom World, and Internet World) and conferences (Internet World, Virtual Reality World). In 1996, as advertising-supported publishing emerged as a viable business model on the Web, the Website was renamed iWorld and began to publish content for the nascent Internet industry. As the Internet World conference prospered, iWorld set out on a strategy of acquiring successful Websites that were focused on technology content, such as Webopedia, SearchEngineWatch and WebReference. In 1997, the online division was renamed internet.com, after acquiring rights to the domain name from The Internet Company.

In 1998, Mecklermedia Corp. was acquired by Penton Media and the online assets were spun off into a separate company called internet.com LLC. Internet.com went public on the NASDAQ in the second half of 1999 (trading as INTM). In 1999, internet.com Corp. launched the Search Engine Strategies conference and in 2000, it acquired Earthweb and incorporated it into the JupiterWeb network. In 2002, the company purchased the Jupiter Research business from Jupiter Media Metrix and renamed itself from INT Media to Jupitermedia, with a new stock ticker symbol JUPM. In 2004, the company started acquiring image assets and developed Jupiterimages as a separate division. In 2005, it sold SearchEngineWatch to Incisive Media. In 2006, Jupitermedia sold its JupiterResearch division to MCG Capital Corporation. In 2007, the company operates as two divisions, JupiterImages and Jupiter Online Media.

In July, 2008, JupiterResearch was acquired by Forrester Research.

Jupiterimages is one of the leading stock photography companies in the world with over 7 million images online serving creative professionals. Jupiterimages acquired popular stock photography companies that include PictureQuest, Workbook Stock, Creatas Images, PictureArts, ArtToday and more.

Shopping on the stock photo market

Both corporate and individual customers searching images and photos online can face a challenge of overflow taking place in the stock pictures industry. On one hand this makes the selection procedure more time-consuming, but on the other hand this abundance provides a number of important things like the chance to embrace as many customer groups as possible fitting their peculiar needs and thus increasing revenues for photo selling agencies and the opportunity to find a photograph that best serves your goals.

While there are hips of outfits offering a large scale of royalty-free images to different buyers there are also multiple agencies and individual photographers that can offer you exclusive pictures that ideally reflects specific character of your projects. The latter can provide you with the proper licenses guaranteeing that the picture will not be used by any other person or company. You can become an absolute owner of any image you need to market your business.

Thus the price formation for image products occurs on the basis of the client’s needs and purposes. One qualified photography specialist who manages his own business notes: “A photo to be used in a 60 foot banner in Times Square would be pretty important, and the chosen image will not likely be chosen because it cost a few dollars less than another image from another source. Alternatively, a photo used as a portion of a ¼ page ad in a local newspaper is not perceived to be as valuable, leaving the lower-priced image as the likely winner.”

Hence, the question is not how much an image costs, rather the question is what is more important for a buyer: the valuable name-brand photo that is critical to a company's public image or price.

Getty Images, Corbis, INMAGINE® and Jupiterimages have similar pricing model. Their prices depend on such factors as royalty-free or rights managed usage. Royalty-free usage was already clarified above. As for rights managed images they are licensed on a use-by-use basis. The fee for using the product is calculated from several factors including size, placement, duration of use and geographic distribution. At the time you order a rights-managed product, you will be asked to enter information that will specify the usage rights to be granted. Apart from dividing images on royalty-free and rights managed Getty Images also offers such options as Creative and Editorial images. The latter category is intended for peculiar journalistic works covering such aspects as news, entertainment, sports and weather.

We decided to figure out prices and available picture sizes with all the three stock image providers. It should be noted that we haven’t a complete picture of all the sizes and prices as we just tested particular images. Thus the prices sited below are relevant only to the pictures mentioned and can serve as a reference. The prices of all the four companies are based on the collection and the pack you select. Sizes are cited according to the schemes presented on the sites of each company.

For instance we would like to order “Close-up of cello” at Jupiterimages. The smallest size of this picture for royalty-free usage available is 5”x7” 500KB. Such an image will cost you $39.95. Here you can see it. The largest size of the picture available is 11”x16”45MB and it costs $299.95.

“Woman holding Christmas gift “ is a picture that we supposedly want to buy from Getty Images. Its smallest size is 6.13”x5.36” 499 KB, 441 x 386 px and it is priced at $49.00. Its largest size is 14.88”x13.04” 50.0 MB, 4463 x 3913 px and it costs $399.99. The picture is shown below.

When we were in the gallery of Corbis we selected “Sunset over countryside“ for our alleged purchase. The smallest size available is 640KB priced at $50.00. Unfortunately they didn’t provide more detailed information on the inch and pixels dimensions. The largest photo is 50MB priced at $500.00. Here is the thumbnail of the picture.

Then we decided to try ‘Editorial” pictures offered by Getty Images. Our choice was Martha Stewart Book Signing. Before the system will be able to calculate the price you need to specify your preferences in the license details form. Thus, we set our preferences as follows:

Use: Editorial - Magazine cover
Size: Wrap around
Circulation: Up to 1 million
Distribution: Electronic distribution rights included
Start date: Nov 15, 2008
End date: May 15, 2009
Territory: United States
Industry: Publishing - Periodicals
Exclusivity: No Exclusivity

After submitting the form we had the system immediately calculate the price. It was $1,975.00.
Naturally, if we chose the picture to be exclusively printed in our ‘magazine’, the price would be much higher. Exclusivity allows you to prevent or limit others from using the same item(s) you select for the duration of your license.


In the INMAGINE® collection we choose “Close-up of rose bud” image out of “Nature” set. The smallest size of the picture we chose is 413 pixels x 413 pixels, 14.58 cm x 14.58 cm 0.5 MB in RGB format priced at $49.95. The largest size is 10002 pixels x 9998 pixels 84.68 cm x 84.65 cm 300 MB in RGB format priced at $ 699.99. Here is the image.

Apart from single image selling stock photo agencies can offer their customers a pack of the generic images on one CD for a competitive price, if of course the price is a critical factor for a customer. For instance, “Japanese garden” collection with PhotoAlto costs €699 for a CD. Here is an example out of this collection.

Besides, you can download images from a stock photo agency’s site if you pay for image subscription. Crestock.com offers 1 month. 3 month, 6 month and 1 year subscription for $179, $499, $959 and $1,799 respectively. The subscription allows users to download 20 images of their choice in any size everyday.

In addition a customer can order a Flexible License Pack. A Flexible License Pack allows you to use an image for multiple types of media without having to create individual licenses or provide precise license details, such as circulation or image size. Customized licenses offer unlimited usage, and unrestricted circulation and size, in the media, territory, industry and time frame you select.

A few facts in the end

In order to shoot a car ad, one needs a substantial studio space and lighting equipment that burns enough electricity, where the utility bill alone would be like small mortgage payment.

Most stock agencies pay 30% to the photographers of the income coming from their royalty-free images.

80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the clients; and 80% of the best-selling product comes from 20% of the suppliers.

Corbis and Getty don't just sell stock images they acquire from independent photographers. They also hire a staff of photographers who shoot (mostly assignment work) for the agency's clients. These photographers are typically paid a flat rate (salary). In fact, much of an agency's profitability comes from these assignments.

Getty Images uses a firm called PicScout to scan the web and Archive.org, for unauthorized and unlicensed usages of its protected images. Websites that are found to be in violation are queried via the Whois database and sent financial settlements that retroactively licensed the image.