If you’ve got quality digital image files that have been sitting around for a while and earning little or no money, there may be a way to get some cash for them.
GraphicStock, owned by
VideoBlocks, is paying a small one-time fee for non-exclusive rights to image collections. For this one-time fee they receive the right to license the images to customers non-exclusively, in perpetuity. No additional royalty will be paid to the creator for such sales.
Each deal is a separate negotiation, but indications are that the fees paid are in the range of $3.50 to $4.00 per image accepted. Obviously GraphicStock will be somewhat choosy in the images they accept, but there are indications that they often accept a fairly large percentage of the images submitted from professional creators.
Photographer can continue to license these same images on a non-exclusive basis through any other site they choose.
GraphicStock offers customers unlimited access to as many images as they want to download for a flat subscription fee of $49 per month or
$99 per year. Customers may use any of the images in the GraphicStock library commercially, but according to GraphicStock, “they must add substantial value to them first, essentially ‘making their own work.’ Any use of the content for commercial purposes without adding substantial value is strictly prohibited.” (It is hard to understand how “substantial value” is interpreted or enforced.)
GraphicStock also has a term in its RF license agreement that states that customers must verify with the contributor (and NOT with GraphicStock…or at least not assume that the agent has cleared rights) on trademarks, releases, etc in the files. The files thus could have logos in them, could be unreleased, and it would be up to the buyer to verify the content.
Many of the images in the collection are never downloaded, but some may be downloaded hundreds of times. The risk to photographers is that customers that have finding their images on other sites will start going to GraphicStock for the images they need. In such a case the photographer’s overall revenue might decline.
Some photographers who are doing these deals are withholding their best selling images from GraphicStock and only offering seconds, or images that have been sitting in collections for some time and have never sold.
Currently Graphic Stock has a
collection of about 80,000 photos and expects to have 130,000 by the end of the year.
To see if Graphic Stock might be interested in your work send an email to
http://support.graphicstock.com/customer/portal/emails/new or call 866-788-9225. The company’s address is 10780 Parkridge Blvd, Suite 70, Reston, VA 20191.