Features
Trends in Stock Licensing: Visual Search
In the midst of an economic downturn that’s clearly having a dramatic impact on our industry, I think it’s an interesting time to think about how a few emerging technologies, combined with the ongoing shift from print advertising to Web-based advertising, might affect stock licensing in the coming months:
As visual search technology improves, especially in conjunction with increased Online ad spending, it will be very interesting to see how it will be integrated (or not) into the process of licensing images and footage. Toronto-based Idée recently launched a Firefox plugin for their TinEye visual search engine which allows potential image buyers to quickly review an index of all of the Online instances of any image it can find. Idée’s blog recently featured a few posts related to stock photography and the ubiquity of certain models and images, including the model featured in this iStockphoto image, shot by Yuri Arcurs. In anticipating whether visual search technology will have an impact on the licensing process, it’s important to ask (especially in a case like this) if it matters to companies like GMX (a high-profile German Email and news company) and Deutsche Bahn (Germany’s national railroad) if their “spokesperson” is the same person? Or, perhaps more importantly, if it would matter to them if they could easily see countless examples of an image like this (which has been licensed 9,522 times) in use Online before licensing the image?
Of course, it’s nothing new in the world of Royalty Free for multiple uses of a given image to appear across various industries, but the question is: Will instant access to increasingly comprehensive and accurate visual search have an impact on how images are selected, valued and licensed?
Posted in: Features, Trends in Stock Licensing, Visual Research
Comments(1)
post a comment »Leila Boujnane, April 09, 2009 [#]
Derek: thanks for the wonderful mention of TinEye. We are very excited about the future of search using image recognition technologies. Of course you would not expect anything less than that from our firm! I believe TinEye is already having an impact on image search on the web. We have seen countless examples of TinEye being used to find out where an image has appeared, to track down the creator of an image so as to provide proper attribution or to simply track down copyright infringements.
What is really exciting for us is that TinEye is introducing transparency and accountability in image use as well. What I mean is that it will be easy for a user to find out if an image is fake or real and it will certainly become easier to ascertain the authenticity of an image. That said: I am glad that the first thing we are helping brands accomplish is figuring out if the image they are about to license will help strengthen their brand and should even be associated with their brand before they make their purchase. Game changing!