Results

A recent study by The Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (ACSIL) determined that the global stock footage industry generates approximately $282 million in licensing revenue annually. Data on estimated revenues, content type, Web functionality and region was collected from 67 key footage companies.

The 259-page report provides a comprehensive and detailed examination of the issues and challenges faced by leaders in the footage-licensing field and covers a broad spectrum of critical topics including: the state of digitization; the nature of current license agreements and rights packages; the emergence of new markets and customer types; changes in order volume; and current approaches to marketing and new business development.

“This report allows individual companies to understand their own performance within the context of the broader industry,” said ACSIL Co-President David Sheehan. “To have so many participants share information is one of the many delightful outcomes of commissioning this study.”

The global survey takes a bottom-up approach to estimating the dollar size of the total footage industry, focusing specifically on a group of 355 active, commercial footage companies/departments identified as part of the study. The estimate of total industry annual revenue ($282 million) is built from the sum of the individual revenue estimates applied to each company.

“There is so much information in the report and the synthesis is really a joy to read,” said Peter McKelvy, Vice President of Footage and Music Services, Discovery Communications Inc. “For me, educating an executive team in a large company about the footage sales business, this report will be invaluable.”

The industry was also analyzed based on a variety of other aspects including geographic distribution. For example, 48 percent of the companies analyzed in the global survey are based in the United States, accounting for $170 million in gross revenue or 60 percent of the global market. 24 percent are based in the U.K., accounting for $63 million.

You can obtain a copy of the report here.