JupiterImages' New Subscription Service . . .
Stock Asylum Staff Report
August 24, 2005
Six months ago Alan Meckler promised that his company would defend its
position as the top supplier of subscription stock photography. Now,
just days after Getty Images unveiled its own subscription service,
Meckler's words are proving to be more than just corporate posturing.
JupiterImages has announced what is very likely the world's largest subscription photography offering with over 330,000 images from the company's Comstock, Brand X, Creatas, Goodshoot, Thinkstock, IT Stock Free, Photos.com, Ablestock and PhotoObjects collections.
All of the images are wholly owned by JupiterImages and all are available in multiple resolutions from 1 megabyte to 75 Megabytes. The company has worked on this offering for about six months, according to Edward Grossman, JupiterImages' vice president of e-commerce and marketing.
Dubbed JupiterImages Unlimited, the service ups the ante in this new end of the stock photography market. JupiterImages' service lets subscribers download as many images as they want.
Getty's service, which launched with 50,000 images, allows just 50 downloads a day for use in advertising, graphic design and other communications projects. Both companies plan to add more images over time.
Like Getty's offering, named Creative Express, JupiterImages Unlimited offers two levels of participation. The less expensive ($2,500 per year) level offers low resolution image files for web, multimedia and other small uses. The more expensive ($10,000 per year) service lets subscribers download images at all resolutions. All images in the collections are available at both price levels.
Photos in the JupiterImages Unlimited collection remain available through their original collections, meaning that subscribers to less expensive services like Photos.com may still download images from that collection, said Grossman.
Images at brands like Comstock and Brand X, previously available only as royalty-free, can still be purchsed individually, Grossman added.
"We are doing this to give customers the freedom to buy in the way that they want to buy," he said.
Getty's competitors in subscription stock have not been kind in their assessments of Creative Express.
Bahar Gidwani, chief executive officer of Index Stock, said in his DIMdump blog that, "We worried that their new product would undercut the market we are part of, or would be overwhelmingly wonderful in some new and exciting way."
Gidwani, whose company has its own subscription service, added that "We were pleased to see that the new Getty subscription product is weak."
Likewise, Jeffrey Burke, JupiterImages senior vice president of product strategy and former owner of the PictureArts stock photography agency, was unconcerned about the Getty competition.
"Their subscription service has a lot of similars and old materials. My creative team reviewed it the day it was launched and they were not impressed," Burke commented.
It should be noted that the somewhat undiplomatic level of these remarks might stem from a public conference call earlier this year in which Getty CEO Jonathan Klein slipped and called images on other subscription services "crap."
Klein said the services offered too many similars and a lot of inferior photography. He asserted that Getty would do a better job.
JupiterImages Unlimited is at: http://www.jiunlimited.com
Creative Express is at: http://www.gettyimages.com/express
Gidwani's
DIMdump blog is at: http://www.dimdump.com/dimdump
