CartoonStock: Conversation with Joel Mishon

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  Joel Mishon is the co-founder and co-director of CartoonStock Ltd. Prior to starting the business more than 10 years ago, he was a freelance cartoonist in the UK producing work for national titles such as Private Eye, The Times, Readers Digest, and The Spectator. He lives and works in Bath, UK.

In this conversation, Joel discusses the CartoonStock website.

Geetesh: Tell us more about CartoonStock, and how the media provided by your site can be used in PowerPoint presentations.

Joel: CartoonStock is the world’s largest cartoon library that allows instant licensing and downloading of cartoons. We represent more than 500 professional cartoonists and animators from around the world and license their work to everyone from major international publishers and advertisers to private individuals and organizations for education and presentation use. We work with artists whose work appears in well-known titles such as Reader’s Digest, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The Times so presentation clients wishing to utilize our collection have access to some of the best cartoons and cartoonists in the world at fees that reflect the more modest usage. To license the use of a top-quality cartoon for presentations for up to a year costs just USD20. There are more than 150,000 cartoons to choose from and they are all searchable and downloadable instantly at CartoonStock Ltd.

Cartoon used with permission from CartoonStock

CartoonStock started as a company specializing in print cartoons for publishing and presentation use. However as the demand for more multimedia content has increased, CartoonStock now offers professional animations as well. This means that clients can enliven their presentations not just with still images but with full professional animations. Before the service existed there was no easy, reasonably priced, legal way for clients to give presentations to gain access to this sort of material so we are creating a new market, and hopefully providing a very useful service.

All our images are high-resolution JPEG files and animation files can be downloaded at the resolution and in the format you choose, so both can be slotted into a PowerPoint presentation in seconds.

Geetesh: About your foray into cartoon animations, how is it a win-win situation for users and creators of these animations?

Joel: Users gain access to very good quality animations for presentations. This is the sort of high-quality content they wouldn’t have had access to previously. Creating animations is a very expensive and time-consuming process that requires a great deal of talent. It would be very rare that someone could afford to commission new work from an animator, but for a small fee, they can now legally use appropriate work.

Cartoon used with permission from CartoonStock

New technology has allowed animators to create more content more quickly than they did before but it remains a time-consuming and expensive process and the new work that has been created previously had no obvious outlet and had been hard to monetize. Animators might display it for free on sites dedicated to animation or might wait for the work to be picked up by one major media client, but with a service like CartoonStock’s they can now make lots of smaller sales rather than

1. only allowing viewing, or
2. waiting for one broadcast client.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.