A21 Acquires Ingram, Giving It A New RF Subscription Service October 12, 2005 By Daryl Lang Photo District News Another stock agency has gotten behind the royalty-free subscription model. A21, the parent company of SuperStock, announced today that it has acquired U.K.-based Ingram Publishing, a provider of royalty-free images and CDs. With the acquisition, a21 is launching an RF subscription web site called Ingram Stock, which lets customers pay a flat monthly or annual fee for unlimited access to 100,000 images. Ingram Stock also sells a discounted plan that offers ten downloads per month. Ingram primarily targets European markets, but a21 is developing an RF subscription service to be sold through SuperStock in the U.S. That service will be an extension of the PureStock brand called PureStock X, says SuperStock president Haim Ariav. PureStock X will offer a different image library than Ingram Stock, but there will be some overlap with the Ingram service, Ariav says. A21 declined to say how much it paid for Ingram, saying that the disclosure paperwork is still being filed. But last week, a21 announced that it had raised $3.2 million in a stock sale, a move that was related to this acquisition, says company spokesman Joe Gavaghan. Ariav says SuperStock is seeing growth in its revenues and its number of customers, and the new subscription service will give customers another choice in how they buy images. "Traditional royalty free is still on the upswing," he says. "Subscription is just another type of offer customers are looking for. It's just another pricing structure." Subscriptions are generally aimed at designers who use a lot of images and want to keep their costs predictable. Smaller imaging companies have offered RF subscriptions for some time, but the larger stock agencies have only recently embraced the model. In August, Getty Images and JupiterImages each announced a new subscription service; both were careful not to tag their offerings "royalty free" since they apply some restrictions to the use of the images. Notably, the second-largest stock photo agency, Corbis, has not announced an RF subscription product. Ariav, who has a background as a photographer, says the new SuperStock service will benefit photographers by expanding SuperStock's appeal and offering more channels for image distribution. "We're still known as a rights-managed collection," he adds. SuperStock is currently recruiting new photographers, billing itself as "another alternative outside the big boys in Seattle," Ariav says. © 2005 VNU eMedia Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Photo District News.