27 Jan 2016 Leadership Changes at Videoblocks

Videoblocks has just announced the appointment of TJ Leonard, formally Chief Marketing Officer, as their new CEO.  He takes the position of founder CEO Joel Holland who moves to Executive Chairman where he’ll focus on strategic partnerships.

Under this new management, the company will be re-focussing on their two-front business strategy of both adding products and content to their unlimited library and getting more premium content for their marketplace through distribution partnerships.

A Great Year for Videoblocks

In 2015 the company launched their contributor-sourced, on-demand marketplace paying 100% royalties. After just 9 months they’re reporting having over 1M clips and having paid out over $1M in royalties. They also boast having paid royalties with six figure totals to top contributors.

Subscriptions to their wholly-owned unlimited downloads collection, on which their business is based, have grown to over 130,000 members, adding 50% more subscribers in the last quarter of 2015 than in any previous period. In 2015 the company expanded the model adding music and graphics collections as separate offers. Across all  assets members have downloaded 60M files in the past year.

Growth of the collection has been faster than all predecessors and they’re currently growing faster than all other stock video collections. While this is great progress, it’s much easier to catch up as new contributors coming online upload their portfolios that have been on the competitor sites for a long time. They’ll have serious boasting rights if and when their collection surpasses the others in total size.

New Management

As Chief Marketing Officer, TJ Leonard was directly involved in the development strategies that delivered 2015’s successful results. In his new role, Leonard will be leading the company’s growth strategy by enhancing the introduction of products and content into the unlimited collection –like the addition of 75K photos to their graphics offer at the end of last year– strengthening Videoblocks’ position in the market.

As Executive Chairman, Holland will focus on strategic partnerships and deals like the recent deal closed with the Discovery channel which took their collection to 1M clips.

Videoblocks is a serious threat to the established and mostly inactive establishment of Shutterstock video and Pond5.  Pond5 has had recent leadership changes of its own and has initiated a plan to mimic the Videoblocks business model, and still has that $60M on hand, so Videoblocks is not without its own threats.  Yet they’ve proven themselves innovative and nimble, so are widely expected to continue growing and taking their place in the stock media market.