microstock

Bruce Livingstone, who founded microstock powerhouse iStockphoto more than a decade ago and left it in 2009, is trying again with a new stock-art sales venture called Stocksy.

And he's doing it at a time when iStock is, if not necessarily vulnerable, the target of criticisms that it's out of touch with the army of photographers who contribute the imagery it licenses. To succeed, a microstock needs lots of customers licensing its photos, videos, and other works, and it needs a lot of contributors supplying a steady stream of fresh material.

It's these contributors Livingstone appears to … Read more

It's a challenge for anybody selling a wide range of anything online: how do you get the right products in front of the right customers?

Shutterstock, which sells stock-art photos and videos to customers such as ad agencies and PowerPoint presenters, has the matchmaking problem in spades. With 550,000 active customers and more than 23.7 million images, pairing the right buyer with the right photo isn't easy.

Which is why the New York-based company, which went public last October, is retooling how it presents its products to better compete with iStockphoto and other rivals.

Shutterstock has … Read more

LONDON--iStockphoto, a leader in the market for photos and other stock art, is expanding into premium-quality video under its Vetta brand.

The company announced the move at its weeklong iStockalypse event here, at which contributors take photos to sell, meet with peers, and learn tricks of the trade.

But this is not the only high-end video move under way at iStock. The company also expects to eventually offer high-end "2K" and "4K" video, which has roughly quadruple the resolution of mainstream 1080p video, iStock Chief Operating Officer Kelly Thompson said in an interview.

The video expansion … Read more

ProStockMaster for Windows sounds like it might be an investment tool or perhaps something to do with drag racing, but in fact it's a free digital photo manager that offers something extra for professional photographers: the ability to directly upload images from your PC to one of several stock photo agencies. Even if you don't have an account to access, you can use it to edit your image collections and data, including IPTC and EXIF data. It can even help professional photographers keep track of their earnings.

When we installed and opened ProStockMaster, a pop-up gave us an … Read more

DeviantArt, a social network used by 15 million artists, is adding a commercial component through a partnership with stock-art sales site Fotolia.

Under the partnership, DeviantArt members have options both to license Fotolia imagery for their own use and to sell their own works through Fotolia's system, the companies plan to announce today.

Some aspects of the partnership haven't been hammered out, but DeviantArt wants to launch special collections for those who want a more flavorful departure from traditional microstock imagery. The site also hopes to channel a larger fraction of the resulting revenue to artists than is … Read more

When crowdsourcing goes well, an army of contributors collectively can create impressively large-scale works such as Wikipedia's online reference site and iStockphoto's vast library of images that can be licensed relatively cheaply.

But there's a flip side, as iStockphoto is seeing this week: when you enrage your community of contributors, the wrath is on a correspondingly large scale.

On Tuesday, the Getty Images subsidiary announced a new payment structure for those contributors whose photos, videos, and other content it sells. But many fear the new plan--based on the contributor's performance during the previous year rather than the total images sold--will mean a significant cut in their payouts in 2011. iStockphoto stands by its forecast that the change will benefit most contributors, but in the meantime, those contributors lashed out in thousands of overwhelmingly negative forum posts in two days.

The clash offers a glimpse into growing pains that can come with a new generation of Internet businesses. The Web made iStockphoto possible, providing a global network to harness legions of amateur photographers and to reach countless customers. But when it's time for change, that structure and scale adds challenges that conventional companies don't usually face.

Reworking an ordinary company requires buy-in from employees and customers. For a companies such as iStockphoto, Digg, or eHow, though, the large group of people who supply the content also must be persuaded to make the change.

Pay cut? iStockphoto photographer Cat London, aka Stray Cat, is one of many who fears the worst from iStockphoto's new compensation plan, expecting to see her royalty rate to drop in 2011 rather than increase from her arduous work to rise through iStock's ranks.

"My math ain't good, but I know that 30 percent is lower than 40 percent, and I know when I've been cheated out of something I worked my ass off for years to get," said London in a forum post. … Read more

Flickr has added a new option by which people can turn their images at Yahoo's photo-sharing site into revenue.

In Flickr's initial partnership with photo licensing powerhouse Getty Images, Getty representatives cherry-picked Flickr photos and photographers they liked. Later, Flickr members could offer their own candidates for evaluation by Getty for licensing.

The new option, called Request to License, lets photographers nominate photos in a way that those who want to license figure into the transaction.

Here's how it works. A photographer can label a photo to be part of the Request to License program. When somebody … Read more

Shutterstock, a "microstock" company that sells royalty-free photographs for relatively low prices over the Internet, has acquired rival BigStockPhoto and a new sales method along with it.

Shutterstock had offered its photographs and videos through a subscription payment plan, but BigStockPhoto sells its individually with credits. Both rely on a large pool of photographers to supply them with stock photography used in everything from corporate PowerPoint presentations to tourist brochures.

"This addition will enable Shutterstock to better satisfy the diverse payment preferences of stock photo buyers worldwide," said Jon Oringer, founder and CEO of Shutterstock, in … Read more

iStockphoto, a Getty Images subsidiary that licenses photos and other content for relatively low cost, is hoping to benefit by reassuring customers concerned about violating others' intellectual property rights.

Adding photographs can improve advertisements, brochures, and other content, but getting sued for inappropriately using another company's trademark or violating an individual's privacy is buzzkill. As a result, iStockphoto has now begun promoting a legal guarantee under which the company will cover up to $10,000 in legal expenses in cases involving trademark, copyright or other intellectual property rights, and privacy rights.

It's included with any file purchased … Read more