Photographic activities that produced the highest average revenues were advertising and brochure, consumer editorial and architectural assignments.
There were some very surprising results when we compared U.S. photographers with those residing elsewhere. Average U.S. stock photographer revenues appear to be substantially below those generated by shooters living elsewhere, apart from the few U.S. respondents earning in excess of $500,000.
Everyone wants to know the best strategy for marketing their images. The numbers from this year's income survey show that more people used the rights-managed strategy than any other, and that their average gross revenue was the highest at $56,326. However, image marketers should not be too quick to jump to the conclusion that rights-managed is necessarily the correct approach.
The average annual earnings of photographers responding to the 2008
Selling Stock self-employed photographer income survey are $110,409, leaving out the top five producers whose earnings are uncharacteristically large. Of this, the average annual stock income was $65,475, which means that 41% of photographers' freelance revenues come from something other than the licensing of rights to stock images.
The results of Selling Stock’s 2008
self-employed photographer income survey compared to the
2007 results are disappointing on several fronts. First, we only had 136 responses this year compared with 238 in 2007. Many factors could have contributed to this, but the 2008 data must be viewed as having less validity. Nevertheless, as we parse the data there are some interesting nuggets of information.
PantherMedia's proposed credits-per-day subscription plan is structured so customers who need larger files for print uses pay more reasonable prices for their images than is the case with existing subscription and microstock plans.
Given the rapidly changing trends in the stock photo industry, photographers need to pay close attention to the duration of new contracts they are being asked to sign.
The number of traditionally priced transactions is declining, as is the average price per image.
Selling Stock estimates that the Americas are responsible for 41% of global stock-licensing revenue, while 49% come from Europe, the Middle East and the Arab world, and the final 10% from the Asia Pacific region.
U.K. technology company Capture will debut its image pre-flight utility Greenlight to the U.S. market at this weekend's PACA Symposium in Chicago. The first version of Greenlight has been designed primarily to enable agencies to quickly analyze image files and generate a report of common errors.