MicrostockGroup
Macro Stock / Midstock => General Macrostock => Topic started by: Rage on November 06, 2019, 04:40
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Just got this in the mail some time back. Seems the champion of RM has fallen
Continued success of royalty‑free licensing and our plans for a phased retirement of rights‑managed creative images
Over the years, customers’ needs have changed. Complicated licensing models create friction and customers demand simplicity—they want the most simple and most flexible access to relevant, authentic imagery.
Royalty‑free (RF) imagery is now the preferred and dominant licensing model for our customers due to the simplicity, value and quality available. Licensing complexity has only led customers to other content, and in many cases, another provider as the broader industry is now essentially an RF‑only model.
We conducted extensive customer research and testing on RF versus rights‑managed (RM), including Market Freeze. We have confidently concluded that the RM creative image licensing model no longer meets our customers’ needs, especially given the flexibility demanded by digital marketing and the increasing reuse of imagery, and it actually reduces our overall competitiveness.
As a result, we plan to simplify our product offering through a phased retirement of RM creative images, moving to an RF‑only creative images offering during 2020. This will benefit customers and provide an opportunity to grow overall licensing volume and revenue for both Getty Images and our contributors:
When a customer uses GettyImages.com, they will have only one simple licensing model (RF) which contains all of our creative images.
Images appearing in customers' search results will be the most relevant—no longer will the results include RM, regardless of relevance—opening up more search exposure for creative RF.
Our customers will be able to focus on the one thing that matters to them—finding authentic quality content that connects with their target audience.
We see this fundamental change in our business model as key to furthering our growth and increasing the accessibility of amazing content to new customers and new markets.
Your RM creative images
By the end of January 2020, your RM images will be removed from single image licensing (sometimes called à la carte) on GettyImages.com. Customers will still be able to complete renewals and purchase RM creative images for at least the following 30 days after that. Premium Access customers will still be able to access RM images until November 6, 2020.
When RM is fully retired, you will be able to distribute your RM images as you wish, with the exception that you must not license any RM images (or similars) in a way that conflicts with any active, unexpired exclusive licenses. We will contact you again in November 2020 to confirm that RM has been fully retired and provide a report detailing such licenses.
We will stop accepting new RM creative images on November 6, 2019 at 11:59pm CET/ 10:59pm GMT/ 5:59pm EST/ 2:59pm PST. You can find out more in our FAQs, below.
RF opportunity
We encourage you to grow your RF portfolio with new fresh imagery to meet current customer demands, which you can do under your existing agreement.
For guidance and inspiration, you can review our creative briefs, which identify the most needed subjects for our customers and enable you to respond to gaps in our RF collection. Our briefs reflect the research of our industry‑leading Creative Insight team, including market trends and customer licensing data, and are available on the Contributor Community Website and our Contributor app.
If you have any questions or need to contact us, please refer to the frequently asked questions below and regularly updated in our online contributor forums on the Contributor Community website.
Best wishes,
Paul
Paul Banwell
Senior Director, Contributor Relations
Getty Images | iStock
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Thanx for sharing!
"...more search exposure for creative RF" ;D ;D ;D
Next step : "Continued success of completely‑free licensing..."?
Customers’ needs will change again, they will need FREE
Googleized "royalty free images".
1 - unsplash.com
3 - pixabay.com
4 - freeImages.com
...
There goes the market
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That’s the beginning of the end for Getty, as RM people realize they can make more by spreading their work around.
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The writing has been on the wall for a long time...just that some contributors chose to ignore the market reality.
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the big problem, is that rm is completely dying , so what will left for those artist who sold very high quality rm so far? simply inundate rf market, micro stock and all with exceptional quality images, so diluting even more the earning per image and per authors. unfortunately we won't see the truth, that this is a business ended in 2016, who probably can still give money for some years.
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Of course buyers want cheap, unlimited and simple over expensive, limited and complex.
Maybe they should have come up with a simplified RM model. On my website RM is nearly as simple as RF but is single use.
Of all of the subscription models across movies, music, etc RF photos is the only one I can think of where it's nearly unlimited usage even after your subscription ends.
Plus even higher cost RF seems to be dying due to micro and subscription which shouldnt be a surprise to anyone.
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Of course buyers want cheap, unlimited and simple over expensive, limited and complex.
Maybe they should have come up with a simplified RM model. On my website RM is nearly as simple as RF but is single use.
Of all of the subscription models across movies, music, etc RF photos is the only one I can think of where it's nearly unlimited usage even after your subscription ends.
Plus even higher cost RF seems to be dying due to micro and subscription which shouldnt be a surprise to anyone.
Although I don't doubt it, what is your evidence for higher cost RF dying?
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Of course buyers want cheap, unlimited and simple over expensive, limited and complex.
Maybe they should have come up with a simplified RM model. On my website RM is nearly as simple as RF but is single use.
Of all of the subscription models across movies, music, etc RF photos is the only one I can think of where it's nearly unlimited usage even after your subscription ends.
Plus even higher cost RF seems to be dying due to micro and subscription which shouldnt be a surprise to anyone.
Although I don't doubt it, what is your evidence for higher cost RF dying?
Personal experience and I've also seen other contributors commenting about it. I used to get large royalties from the several hundred dollar RF sales. Over time these have been replaced with a few cents from their subscription model. I havent had a large sale in a long time. Why would anyone spend $500 on an image that they can get either through a subscription model or find a similar "good enough" image on a micro site.
I keep wondering where the bottom is to where supply starts dropping and these sites are forced to reverse the downward trend on contributors. Given the record profits of the sites and the massive amount of new contributors who are okay earning peanuts, seems to be a long long way off. Or maybe there is no bottom and stock photography is replaced by something else like AI to where we're no longer needed.
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Of course Getty wants to migrate all their buyers on to the premium access model, because profit seems to matter more to them than total sum.
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Of course Getty wants to migrate all their buyers on to the premium access model, because profit seems to matter more to them than total sum.
Of course. It's a win-win. Buyer wins and Getty wins. Contributors continue to lose more as always. But hey, it's contributors fault. These sites continue to make changes that don't benefit contributors. Existing contributors stick around and gazillions of new contributors join daily to submit gazillions of new images. No reason to improve things for contributors.
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Of course Getty wants to migrate all their buyers on to the premium access model, because profit seems to matter more to them than total sum.
gazillions of new contributors join daily to submit gazillions of new images
...but a big part trash images
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Also the announcement mentioned a steady decline of RM. I wonder how much of that came naturally vs the fact that they effectively hid RM images by making RF images the default in the search. They changed it to where there was no longer a mix of RM and RF. If you wanted RM you'd need to go into the filter and add RM to the search. Seems that this could cause the RM decline or at least accelerate it.
I get RM is clunky. When I've tried using it it's a pain navigating through all of the choices. That doesn't address the fact that there's a big difference in earnings of RM vs RF which mostly now seems to be subscriptions. Maybe there are certain contributors who have unique content that's still earning large amounts from RF. It just seems to be a big gamble to shoot for their content needs lists where production costs can be very high and the return may, or may not, be more than a few cents.
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I keep wondering where the bottom is to where supply starts dropping and these sites are forced to reverse the downward trend on contributors. Given the record profits of the sites and the massive amount of new contributors who are okay earning peanuts, seems to be a long long way off. Or maybe there is no bottom and stock photography is replaced by something else like AI to where we're no longer needed.
The bottom is obviously free and it's booming, everyone is a photographer these days it is said and many are even willing to give away their copyright. The only reason to pay an agency is to purchase the indemnity, the images no longer have any value. So the bottom of microstock is determined by the cost of indemnity.
Mid priced premium RF is the only place to put your images now if you want a decent return, but that is usually by invitation only and is getting crowded with all the agencies chasing that market.
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Of course buyers want cheap, unlimited and simple over expensive, limited and complex.
Maybe they should have come up with a simplified RM model. On my website RM is nearly as simple as RF but is single use.
Of all of the subscription models across movies, music, etc RF photos is the only one I can think of where it's nearly unlimited usage even after your subscription ends.
Plus even higher cost RF seems to be dying due to micro and subscription which shouldnt be a surprise to anyone.
Although I don't doubt it, what is your evidence for higher cost RF dying?
Personal experience and I've also seen other contributors commenting about it. I used to get large royalties from the several hundred dollar RF sales. Over time these have been replaced with a few cents from their subscription model. I havent had a large sale in a long time. Why would anyone spend $500 on an image that they can get either through a subscription model or find a similar "good enough" image on a micro site.
I keep wondering where the bottom is to where supply starts dropping and these sites are forced to reverse the downward trend on contributors. Given the record profits of the sites and the massive amount of new contributors who are okay earning peanuts, seems to be a long long way off. Or maybe there is no bottom and stock photography is replaced by something else like AI to where we're no longer needed.
You make valid points, and too a large degree, let's face it, in many cases you can find low cost RF that is as good as premium high priced RF content. I guess the high price collections save users time in not having to wade through zillions of images. Of course some business person will come up with a solution that does that for the user....much like hotel aggregation sites....a gatekeeper of some sort that filters out "non-premium" images so the buyer can buy quality imagery at a lower price.
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Of course buyers want cheap, unlimited and simple over expensive, limited and complex.
Maybe they should have come up with a simplified RM model. On my website RM is nearly as simple as RF but is single use.
Of all of the subscription models across movies, music, etc RF photos is the only one I can think of where it's nearly unlimited usage even after your subscription ends.
Plus even higher cost RF seems to be dying due to micro and subscription which shouldnt be a surprise to anyone.
Although I don't doubt it, what is your evidence for higher cost RF dying?
Personal experience and I've also seen other contributors commenting about it. I used to get large royalties from the several hundred dollar RF sales. Over time these have been replaced with a few cents from their subscription model. I havent had a large sale in a long time. Why would anyone spend $500 on an image that they can get either through a subscription model or find a similar "good enough" image on a micro site.
I keep wondering where the bottom is to where supply starts dropping and these sites are forced to reverse the downward trend on contributors. Given the record profits of the sites and the massive amount of new contributors who are okay earning peanuts, seems to be a long long way off. Or maybe there is no bottom and stock photography is replaced by something else like AI to where we're no longer needed.
You make valid points, and too a large degree, let's face it, in many cases you can find low cost RF that is as good as premium high priced RF content. I guess the high price collections save users time in not having to wade through zillions of images. Of course some business person will come up with a solution that does that for the user....much like hotel aggregation sites....a gatekeeper of some sort that filters out non-"premium quality" images so the buyer can buy quality imagery at a lower price.
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The end of an era... Check Mate.
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Any advices where can we put RM? don't want to sell it for Getty's low RF prices
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try plainpicture
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try plainpicture
thank you. I will research them. As I understand they also represent Cavan, Westend, Tetra, etc. I've found some of mine. Did not recieve any RM license but their Rights Simplified (as I see it's the same as RF) is quite good. USD 250-560. Not bad.
And no discussion about them within this forum(