ImageBrief: The RF vs RM Question

Posted on 11/12/2014 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (0)

ImageBrief has updated its rules regarding RF and provided a long explanation here.  Evidentaly, many ImageBrief (IB) contributors have been asking “Why is ImageBrief adding so many RF briefs?” IB’s answer is, “We’re responding to client demands and listening to the market.”

Probably a better explanation is that more and more image users are finding that promotion and marketing uses are no longer static, one-off, stand-alone projects. There may be an initial idea of how a promotion will be shaped and where it will be shown, but no sooner has the first idea been exploited than other ideas for expanding the promotion’s reach pop up. Consequently, even when the original concept is very narrow, project developers need total flexibility to re-work and re-purpose the project in any way that might later pop into the minds of their bosses. Thus, to protect their company legally, they must have the flexibility of RF.

In many cases the project will never be used beyond the simple definition of the brief, but it is better to be safe than sorry, or to have to come back and re-negotiate an additional fee.



Since many contributors seem to have decided that submitting images on a $250 Basic RF brief is not worth the trouble, IB has instituted an RF Premium price at $650 per images. From the creators point of view it seems that the only difference between a $250 and $650 brief is that for the $250 brief the image can also be available on another RF site but for $650 the image should only be available through ImageBrief. However, the availability of a $650 option probably gives the IB salesperson the chance to tell the customer:
    “We want to let you know that many of our photographers won’t bother to contribute to a $250 brief so you’ll probably only get a limited selection of images. We’ll be happy to list your brief at $250, but if your budget can afford to go to our Premium level of $650 your brief will probably attract the interest of a much larger group of contributors.”

Microstock


IB seems to believe that most of their contributors never try to market their images through any distributor other than IB and they never show their great images to anyone until one of IB ‘s clients sends in a specific brief.
    “Our buyers believe that ImageBrief is an untapped pool of new, fresh images from photographers who weren’t happy with the less-than-fair terms offered by the main stock houses. And they’re right! They come here because they’re tired of seeing the same images on the other sites. For that reason, we don’t ever want to see images that are available as microstock, on ImageBrief. If you have images listed as RF elsewhere, you can submit them to the $250 royalty free briefs.”
They are reluctantly willing to accept images for the $250 Basic briefs that have been posted on other RF sites so long as they have never been available on a microstock site. The problem with this logic is that many stock agents and individual contributors are now marketing their best RF images through both microstock, and the traditional sites. This rule eliminates a huge number of good images from consideration. Many of these images are of better quality, and may be more appropriate to a particular brief than a lot of the images that are currently being submitted.



The fact than an image is available on a particular site doesn’t mean that customers going to that site and searches for a term that the creator used as a keyword will actually see the creator’s image. Today, there are such an over-supply of images on the major sites, of virtually any subject you can think of, that no customer has the time to look at even a fraction of those returned in any search. Just because the image is there doesn’t mean it has been seen.

One of the big incentives for customers to use a site like ImageBrief is that they get to bypass the agency search algorithms and go directly to image creators. The creator knows if he has an image requested in a particular brief. By uploading it he can be sure that the customer, who is looking for that subject right now, will see his image. And the customer doesn’t have to spend a lot of time wading through images that don’t fit his current brief.



The idea that the customer might be turned off from using IB because she might occasionally see an image submitted to one of her briefs that she had already seen on another site is a false notion. What the customer really wants is to see the broadest possible collection of images that are specifically targeted to her brief. When she goes to any stock website she is forced to wade through a lot of images that don’t really fit her brief in order to hopefully find a few that work.

To this end, it seems that IB is missing the boat by not accepting microstock images. They have ruled out working with the majority of today’s most active producers. In general the quality of microstock images is equal to that currently being submitted to various briefs. In many cases it is superior to what has been submitted to some briefs.

Some might say that if a customer knows a particular image is available on a microstock site why would they pay $250 for it if they could go to the microstock site and purchase it for $10 or less. The first answer is that it highly unlikely that they would know that a certain image is also available as microstock and on which site. In addition any image that is being marketed today as traditional RF or RM may be licensed to one client for several hundred dollars and the next client for $10 or less. Today, in the traditional market there are no fixed prices that apply to everyone.

If IB were to allow submissions of images that have been offered as microstock they might need to monitor and edit submissions to keep truly poor quality work from being shown to their clients. But if they encouraged microstock contributors to submit that would undoubtedly result in a broader, more comprehensive choice to show their customers, particularly those customers with $250 briefs. It is also hard for me to imagine that the photographers who have been responding to the $1,000 and $5,000 briefs would stop responding just because microstock shooters were let in to door.

Image Brief’s problem is getting quality images to attract buyers to play at all, which may explain why briefs that are “ending soon” seem to not have a response for days and days or weeks at a time.  


Copyright © 2014 Jim Pickerell. The above article may not be copied, reproduced, excerpted or distributed in any manner without written permission from the author. All requests should be submitted to Selling Stock at 10319 Westlake Drive, Suite 162, Bethesda, MD 20817, phone 301-461-7627, e-mail: wvz@fpcubgbf.pbz

Jim Pickerell is founder of www.selling-stock.com, an online newsletter that publishes daily. He is also available for personal telephone consultations on pricing and other matters related to stock photography. He occasionally acts as an expert witness on matters related to stock photography. For his current curriculum vitae go to: http://www.jimpickerell.com/Curriculum-Vitae.aspx.  

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