Direct Selling Of Stock Images

Posted on 1/25/2019 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (3)

The stock agency sales model no longer works for most photographers trying to earn a portion of their living from the images they produce. Prices for the use of photos have declined so dramatically that it no longer makes much sense for professional photographers to spend much time or effort producing stock images on speculation.

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Comments

Michael J Clark Posted Jan 27, 2019
This idea of a direct selling agency already exists. Photoshelter allows photographers to offer their images for sale on the website and the entire website is searchable. Photoshelter takes 8 to 10% of the sale I believe. I have been using Photoshelter for years as an online backup. They are great to work with and the photographers have full control over pricing and which images are available.

Brian Smale Posted Jan 28, 2019
Yes, it definitely sounds like Photoshelter.com to me. I've had very good experiences with PS over the years. A few years ago there was another company similar to PS that looked pretty good, although I don't recall the name. They even had a method of splitting up the revenue from sales... for example if you did a stock shoot where you had a model (or other contributor) working for a share of the sales, you could designate a percentage of a sale to go to that person. I set up an account to test it out, but since I was already deep into PS, I didn't continue.
PS now has a (free) service called Lattice, that looks pretty similar to Pinterest, where photographers can assemble groups of images for researchers to more easily find. I've only tested this out briefly, but I think I will make a few more and see what happens.
Brian

Tim McGuire Posted Jan 28, 2019
www.picturengine.com, if only photographers would move all their work there.

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