In response to my story
RM Licensing No Longer Makes Sense Peter George Unger commented, “I have 9,200 images with Getty and every single one is RM. I am making on average $15,000 per year from them. Can you honestly tell me I can make more money than that on pathetic RF prices? for which they pay $0.25 cents per download. Which library would pay more then 15K on RF prices?
Check out
this story and what Steve Heap is doing. Also check out
his website. He sells nothing but RF through Microstock agencies and earns about $35,000 per year. He has a collection of a little over 10,000 images and sells non-exclusively through multiple agencies (about 28 of them). His three biggest sellers are
Shutterstock,
AdobeStock and
iStock. Together they represent over $20,000 of his total annual royalties.
It is a lot of work managing all those distributors, but it may be worth it.
Quite a few photographers who only shot RM 5 to 10 years ago are now distributing at least some of their images as RF, and through multiple agencies. The market has changed dramatically. Getty’s Creative RM collection is no longer the world leader when it comes to revenue. You need to keep in mind that the gross annual revenue alone for Shutterstock is more than twice that of Getty’s Creative collection and the Creative collection includes both RF and RM images.
It is also important to recognize that over 98% of the images licensed around the world are RF. Most customers won’t even bother to search RM collections anymore because they don’t want to take the risk that sometime in the future they might make an unauthorized use of an image that they had licensed for a very specific use. You might earn somewhat more per image licensed with RM (although often not that much more), but you won’t license anywhere near the number of uses of RM images as you would license is they were available as non-exclusive RF.