List Prices Mean Nothing

Posted on 7/5/2020 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (2)

Owen Franken sent me his image (shown below) of sliced duck in a Paris restaurant as it appears on the Getty Images website. The list price on Gettyimages.com for a large file is $475 Euros. If all the customer needs is a very small file, only suitable for online use, the price is only 50 Euros.

Getty licensed this image to a customer in Canada for $0.14 and the photographer received $0.03 for his work. The photographer’s royalty share of the gross sale price is 20% so actually the photographer was only entitled to $0.028, but in a moment of generosity Getty rounded the payment to the next highest cent.




At these prices what's the point of contributing images? In theory, if the photographer could make a huge number of sales of an image at $0.03 a transaction it might eventually represent a significant amount of money. But, that's not happening. Getty currently has 28,669,086 images in its Creative collection. Based on my calculations, I think they license about one use annually for every 2.5 images they have in the collection, or something between 10 and 12 million uses licensed annually.

Sure, very occasionally they license a use for $475 Euros, but the odds that they will license one of your images for that price are astronomical. About one-third of their licenses are for prices below $5.00 and as we can see some are as low as $0.14. At these prices very few photographers will ever earn enough to cover their costs of production, let alone actually make a profit for time invested.


Copyright © 2020 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

Comments

  • Tibor Bognar Posted Jul 11, 2020
    A typical and representative Getty experience. Many contributors will tell you that most of their sales are like this.

  • Jim L. Olive Posted Jul 11, 2020
    Pathetic is the 1st word that comes to mind when reading this post. I understand the world is awash in stock photos because the bar is so low on submissions, however, there should be a minimum amount established per categorical use. Right now it appears to me that the buyers are dictating prices and that needs to turn around to photographer's getting paid a reasonable rate.

Post Comment

Please log in or create an account to post comments.

Stay Connected

Sign up to receive email notification when new stories are posted.

Follow Us

Free Stuff

Stock Photo Pricing: The Future
In the last two years I have written a lot about stock photo pricing and its downward slide. If you have time over the holidays you may want to review some of these stories as you plan your strategy ...
Read More
Future Of Stock Photography
If you’re a photographer that counts on the licensing of stock images to provide a portion of your annual income the following are a few stories you should read. In the past decade stock photography ...
Read More
Blockchain Stories
The opening session at this year’s CEPIC Congress in Berlin on May 30, 2018 is entitled “Can Blockchain be applied to the Photo Industry?” For those who would like to know more about the existing blo...
Read More
2017 Stories Worth Reviewing
The following are links to some 2017 and early 2018 stories that might be worth reviewing as we move into the new year.
Read More
Stories Related To Stock Photo Pricing
The following are links to stories that deal with stock photo pricing trends. Probably the biggest problem the industry has faced in recent years has been the steady decline in prices for the use of ...
Read More
Stock Photo Prices: The Future
This story is FREE. Feel free to pass it along to anyone interested in licensing their work as stock photography. On October 23rd at the DMLA 2017 Conference in New York there will be a panel discuss...
Read More
Important Stock Photo Industry Issues
Here are links to recent stories that deal with three major issues for the stock photo industry – Revenue Growth Potential, Setting Bottom Line On Pricing and Future Production Sources.
Read More
Recent Stories – Summer 2016
If you’ve been shooting all summer and haven’t had time to keep up with your reading here are links to a few stories you might want to check out as we move into the fall. To begin, be sure to complet...
Read More
Corbis Acquisition by VCG/Getty Images
This story provides links to several stories that relate to the Visual China Group (VCG) acquisition of Corbis and the role Getty Images has been assigned in the transfer of Corbis assets to the Gett...
Read More
Finding The Right Image
Many think search will be solved with better Metadata. While metadata is important, there are limits to how far it can take the customer toward finding the right piece of content. This story provides...
Read More

More from Free Stuff