As fewer and fewer stock photographers earn enough from the licensing of their photos to justify continued production, some suggest that instead of letting stock agencies pay them 20% to 30% of the small gross fees collected to use their images, they should sell their images directly to customers. In this way they would get higher prices and keep 100% of what the customer pays.
On reader asked, “Why don't you write something about how individuals could "re-track" and sell images themselves, keeping 100 percent with zero for the spiders...you'd do a real service if you could...”
While sticking with the stock agencies may not be a satisfactory answer, going it alone also has problems.
The first step, of course, is setting up your own site where customers can view your work. There are companies like
PhotoShelter.com that will help with this. However, once you have a website with a few hundred photos, how will potential users find your site?
You may have a list of a few organizations that use the kind of work you produce. You’ll need to find email addresses for the people within those organizations who do the purchasing of photos. Then you’ll need to regularly send them email’s to remind them who you are and the kind of work you do. You’ll probably need to send them sample pictures so they can see exactly what you do.
There is a big question as to how often you should send such emails. Many image buyers are so swamped with emails that they delete almost everything without reviewing it if the email doesn’t come from someone with whom they already have a working relationship. Certainly, getting emails too frequently may be a turn off.
When potential customers need a photo will they search several individual web sites, or do a blanket Google searches. If they do use Google will your images be the ones Google delivers? With any keyword search Google delivers about 1,000 images out of the hundreds of thousands their algorithm probably found. How do you get your images into that top thousand?
You could pay for Google ad words. That might generate some interest if you have high quality work in a targeted specialty, but it is hard to predict how much that might cost and how many image you might need to license just to cover your advertising cost. One thing to keep in mind if you decide to go the ad words route is that Shutterstock spends about $150 million a year on advertising and marketing. A significant percent of that is spent on ad words. So if someone is searching for an image to use in their project there is a good chance an image from Shutterstock will be shown long before yours.
In 2018 this advertising helped Shutterstock license rights to about !75 million images. However, in the last 3 years they have seen very little growth in the number of images licensed annually despite spending roughly the same amounts in advertising and promotion every year.
Demand is not growing.
Another thing to consider if you’re emailing pictures or posting them on Facebook, Instagram or other websites is whether you should watermark them. If you don’t watermark they may get used without credit or compensation. On the other hand, a watermark may distract from the power of the image.
Pricing
Suppose a customer wants one of your images. How do you establish a price for your work? You know what it cost to produce the image. You have a rough idea of how many images you’ll be able to license annually and how much profit you need to earn in order to justify continued production of new images. That should help you establish a price-per-single-usage. But the customer may not want to pay anywhere near that much. There are probably a lot of other similar photos easily available to the customer for much lower prices.
One pricing guide that many professional photographers have used for almost two decades is
Cradoc fotoSoftware. However, the vast majority of today’s customers aren’t willing to pay these prices unless they really need the specific image, and there is no reasonable substitute to be found anywhere.
In 2016
Petapixel published some price suggestions, but in many cases they may not be high enough unless the photographer can generate a huge number of sales.
Another option is to go to the stock agency websites and check out what they are charging. However, the reason you decided to sell directly and not use the stock agencies is that even if you were to be able to keep 100% of
what they charge in most cases that would still not cover the costs of producing the images. If you check out pricing on the Getty Images website some of it will seem reasonable, but Getty usually offer huge discounts to the listed prices.
Getting Paid
Once you’ve settled on a price with a customer you might upload a hi-res digital file and expect the customer to send you a check. Most customers don’t want to be bothered with the administrative hassle of making separate payments each time they need a new image. That’s why they like the subscription and Premium Access deals the stock agencies offer. They can make one payment a month and then download many images from many different photographers until their subscription runs out.
In addition, they usually know that each photo will cost the same regardless of subject matter, or who created the photo. If they go to individual photographer’s for the images they need everyone will be charging something different.
A very high percentage of photos are purchased via subscriptions. For this reason alone it will be very difficult to get most customers, particularly the
big users, to turn away from the large agencies that offer subscription deals and a variety of imagery from tens of thousands of different creators.
More on a possible solution to this dilemma later.
Assuming that your customers would be willing to make a separate transaction for each individual use, most would prefer to use a credit card. You could set up a Pay Pal account that will enable customers to pay by credit card, but that will cost you $30 a month, plus a percent of each transaction.
In China, WeChat Pat and Alipay have developed a pay-by-phone systems using QR codes that enable virtually all small businesses to accept instant payments from anyone who has a phone. Eventually, such systems will undoubtedly make it easier for individual photographers to receive payments directly from customers, but currently that is not anywhere near as widely available in the Western world as in China. In addition, when the West decides to adopt this strategy it will likely be resisted by the banking community.
Completing Transactions 24/7
For stock photographers most of the transactions do not take place in your local community or even in your own country. Only about 30% of the images licensed worldwide are licensed in the U.S. The percentage of uses in other countries is even less. Thus, if you hope to maximize sales worldwide, you will probably need to be able to respond to customers, agree on a price and deliver the image 24/7 anywhere in the world.
Customers usually have very tight deadlines. If you are out producing new images, or doing something else, you may not be able to respond in a timely manner when the customer needs the image. That is sure to quickly turn them off.
Thus, you will probably need a system of fixed prices for various types of uses and a way to automatically deliver the hi-res image immediately after proper payment has been credited to your account. This will require a much more complicated search and delivery system than just building a simple website where your images can be viewed.
Solving The Subscription Dilemma
What is needed to replace the efficiencies of the stock agency system in the eyes of customers is a one-stop site where many photographers could place hi-res versions of their images. Then customers would still have only one place to go to find a broad cross section of images from many photographers. Each photographer would also need to be able to establish his or her own prices for the work.
When uploading images, it should be possible for each photographer to stipulate a set of fixed prices for various types of uses. To make it easier a few standard price lists might be supplied for new contributors to choose from. The photographer might choose one set of prices for his easy to produce images and higher prices for images that cost more to produce.
In any event, when an image is chosen by a customer, the price schedule the photographer has chosen for each specific image would be shown to the customer. In some cases, customers might also be supplied with the image creator’s contact information enabling them to negotiate, but in such cases it might take several days to complete a transaction. (Some of the exclusive deals stock agencies currently negotiate with customers require several days of back and forth to complete.)
Each customer would be able to pay a fixed amount of money into an account, in much the same way as they purchase subscriptions now. Once they have chosen an image they want to download, the amount specified by the photographer would be deducted from the customers account and paid directly into the photographer’s account (minus a small transaction fee). This operates in much the same way as Pay Pal currently works. Customers would also have the option of making separate payments by credit card each time they want an image, rather than setting up a fixed account.
(This payment system would also operate in much the same way as Blendle.com operates today. Each day I get brief summaries of stories from major publications around the world. I establish a Blendle account for $10.00, but only pay between $0.15 and $0.49 for the specific stories I want to read. I don’t need a regular subscription to any of the publications. When I’ve used up most of the money in my account I get a notice to “top up” my account. I don’t pay for anything I don’t really want to read.)
Of course, there would be some cost in setting up and operating such a system. There would be marketing expenses to make potential customers aware that the system exists. A standard percentage could be deducted from the amount paid the photographer for each transaction in much the same way the stock agency system currently works. The fees deducted might be less than a current stock agency royalty share, particularly if the organization was operated as a non-profit.
For the image creators there would be two major advantages.
(1) They would be able to set their own prices.
(2) Their share of the payment would be transferred to their bank account instantaneously whenever a customer makes a purchase.
While such a system might provide image creators with a fairer return on investment, someone will have to go to the trouble of building the technology, recruiting photographers to participate and make potential customers aware of the site’s existence. It seems unlikely that will happen quickly.
In the meantime, and assuming most photographers need to earn enough from their work efforts to support themselves, photographers might want to look at something other than stock photography as a way of earning their living.