After my story last week on “
High Level Thoughts On The Stock Industry” John Fowler asked, “Have you found any encouraging information at all from any RM photographers? There must be some folks doing something that works for them.”
The short answer is NO. I’m not hearing anything encouraging from RM photographers. Most have seen
80% to 90% declines in their annual earnings since 2007. Even the few for whom declines aren’t so bad, are still seeing declines, no matter how hard they work at producing more and better images.
The simple fact is that almost no customer wants to deal with RM licensing anymore. According to my calculation less than 1% of the images licensed annually, worldwide, use an RM license.
And the revenue generated from RM image licensing declines further each year.
Of course, this calculation of based on stock agency sales. I have no way of knowing how many individual photographers license images from their personal collections and charge fees based on how the image will be used. Of the 250 to 300 million total images licensed annually through agencies, I believe fewer than 2.5 million of them are licensed based on usage. I suspect sales by individual photographers don’t change that number very much.
Here are some of the reasons for the declines:
1 – Today most customers cannot anticipate at the time of purchase all the possible future uses they might want to make of the images. They don’t want to have to go back and re-negotiate each new use. Therefore, they want very flexible rights to use the images they purchase in any way that might develop.
2 – There is plenty of choice among RF images. Customers don’t have to turn to RM to find a good image.
3 – The time customers have for image search is limited. Thus, rather than having to research and remember which individual photographers have specialist collections in particular subject areas, they want to go to a single source that has a broad cross section of the imagery they might need.
4 – Most of the major agencies that still offer RM images have adopted strategies that allow their major customers to have whatever rights they need to RM images for whatever price the customer is willing to pay. This results in some very low prices for significant uses of RM images.
5 – Getty’s default search now is for RF images only. If customers want to review RM they must go to the “Prestige” collection, but that only shows the customer a small, edited percentage of all the RM images available at Getty. To review all the RM images, the customer must search for “All” images, but at that point the customer is shown one RF image for every RM image shown. Getty is recommending to a lot of its RM suppliers that they convert most, if not all, their RM images to RF because most of their customers are only looking for RF. Most other agencies that offer RM will eventually follow Getty’s lead.
Something Unique
If an individual photographer is going to get customers to come to his website, I would think that he would have to offer subject matter that is very unique. I can’t see a customer seeking out an individual photographer’s website to search for general pictures of people, the environment, agriculture, health & wellness, food, money & finance, etc. At the few major sites there are way more choices of this type of subject matter than anyone has time to review. Why would anyone bother going to a smaller outlet?
Maybe, if someone had seen an image published somewhere, and they really wanted to use that specific image, they might go to the trouble of trying to find the photographer. But, I think that is very rare. In addition, most uses aren’t credited these days so it is often very difficult to learn who the photographer is, or get any contact information.
While you certainly have some good images (see
here) I would expect that you get very few requests for the more general and common themes I’ve listed above. My guess is that the customers who come to you are usually looking for your macro shots of Butterflies, Moths, Beetles, Spiders, Ticks, Centipedes, Worms and maybe Birds Fish, Reptiles & Amphibians, and Mushrooms. People who need this material might have more difficulty in finding what they need at the major stock agencies.
I decided to do a few search at Shutterstock, Alamy, Adobe Stock and Getty Images for subjects you have that I thought might be rare and hard to find. The subject matter I searched for were: Arctild moth, Columbia Giant Silkmoth, Columbia Egg, Columbia Larva, Notodontid moth, Darkling beetles. Here’s what I got. If a particular subject is not listed under the agency I got nothing at that agency.
Shutterstock
Columbia Giant Silkmoth 3
Columbia Larva 1
Notodontid Moth 27
Darkling Beetles 292
Alamy
Columbia Egg near exact match to your image
Columbia Larva 15
Notodontid Moth 20
Darkling Beetles 309
AdobeStock
Columbia Giant Silkmoth – maybe (but lots seemed irrelevant)
Notodontid moth 13
Darkling Beetles - maybe 54
GettyImages
Arctild Moth 3
Columbia Larva 22
Notodontid Moth 21
Darkling Beetles 32
Given the relatively small number of choices, customers may not find what they need at any of these agencies and may seek out a specialist who they suspect has paid more attention to careful identification. However, I’ve got to wonder how many customers really need this type of imagery.
Thinking Like A Customer
But there are two other options that customers are tending to use more and more when they can’t easily find what they want at the major agencies, or when they want to deal directly with an image creator.
Flickr
I believe more and more customers are searching Flickr for the images they need. They have 13 billion photos from 120 million people. A small percentage of these people are interested in licensing rights to their images and Flicker is doing a pretty good job of bringing the photos of these people to the top of the search return. It’s easy to search the collection using keywords. It is for the most part fairly easy to find out how to contact those creators that are interested in licensing their work.
I have done some stories on
Todd Klassy. Most of his customers find his images by searching Flickr and he licenses his images based on usage. He has been quite successful for several years.
Here’s what I found when I did searches for these subject on Flickr.
Harnessed Tiger Moth 258
Columbia Giant Silkmoth 8
Columbia Larva 1,597 (all types of Larva)
Notodontid Moth 224
Darkling Beetles 3,174
In the process of searching for these subjects I also came across two photographers with huge collections that I suspect are doing well in sales. John Horstman’s (itchydogimages) work can be found
here and Nicky Bay’s (nicky@bay.to) images are
here.
It should also be noted that Getty has culled the Flickr collection and has accepted over one million images from Flickr photographers that have chosen to work with Getty.
Google
Google is another place where more and more customer are looking for images. Google delivers a very high quality selection of images on most subjects. The Google image search algorithm has gotten better and better over the years. However, one of the problems customers face when searching on Google is that only the URL where the image can be found is listed. It can often be impossible to identify where someone interested in licensing rights to use a particular image would need to go to get permission.
Google does show a lot of images from Shutterstock, Getty Images, Alamy, Flickr and PhotoShelter. So if a customer doing a search sees that the image they are interested in comes from one of these organizations a single click will take them to the agency where they can license usage.
When I searched for Arctild Moth, Harnessed Tiger Moth, Columbia Giant Silkmoth, Columbia Egg, Columbia Larva, Notodontid Moth and Darkling Beetles I found that Google offered a broad selection of images of each subject.
It is also worth noting that Google will only show 500 to 1,000 images for any search no matter how many images it finds when it searches the entire Internet. How they choose which to show first is part of their secret sauce, but it is safe to say that it is highly unlikely that any image from an individual photographer’s collection will appear.
PhotoShelter
Compared to Flickr and Google, PhotoShelter is a disaster. I can’t imagine any customer actually using it to search for images. It is even difficult for customers to figure out how to begin a search. It only works for photographers who rely on customers finding their images through a Google search, or for those customers the photographer can bring to his site through his own self promotion.
Working Together
I don’t think there is much likelihood that photographers will be able to “work together” to build traffic to their individual web sites. There would need to be a search engine like Google or Flickr that delivers thumbnails from all participating photographers, in some type of random order, whenever a keyword or set of keywords is entered. The site would need to have a very broad cross section of subject matter in order to compete with the existing stock agencies. The images must be delivered in a consistent and easily reviewable format. While Flickr and Google have easily reviewable formats, their weakness is that the creators of many of the images they deliver are either not identified or have no interest in licensing use.
There must be some economic incentive to create and market such a central source. It is hard to imagine how that would work other than to function as a stock agency.