Royalties
On Saturday
Visual China Group (VCG) shut down
500px Marketplace and replaced it with a distribution partnership arrangement. China users will be able to license the images through VCG who
acquired 500px earlier this year. Getty Images will handle all licensing in the rest of the world.
In two recent stories
Know Your Return-Per-Image and
Stock Photo Production Costs I discussed two very important issues for anyone trying to earn a portion of their living from stock image production. The issues boil down to
(1) clearly understanding the cost of producing your images and
(2) the return you’re receiving from sales of those images. No business can survive if it spends more to produce its products than it earns from sales.
One of the hardest things for stock photographers to calculate is their actual costs of stock image production. As in any business it is critical to understand your costs if you hope to eventually earn a profit from their production. This story will provide an outline of some of the things that need to be considered when determining costs. It will also provide some average costs figures that some leading professionals work toward.
Stocksy United, the artist-owned photography + cinematography co-op that has tightly limited its membership since its founding in 2012, has made a decision to open its doors to new contributors. Stocksy has seen continued strong growth since its founding due to careful selection of new contributors, tight editing and licensing fees considered reasonable by customers, but still fair to contributors. In 2015 revenue was
$7,928,745, up 126% from $3.5 million in 2014. By the end of 2017 revenue had grown another 26% in two-years to roughly
$10.7 million.
I would like to encourage every stock photographer to begin to calculate, on an annual basis, their Return-Per-Image (RPI) for each agency they work with. This is particularly important for those photographers who hope to realize a profit for the time and expense they invest in producing stock images.
In 1968
Andy Sacks, a 20-year-old University of Michigan photographer covered Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign stop in Detroit for the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. This is a story about how the photos he captured that day ended up getting used hundreds of times 40 to 50 year later and he received no credit or a reasonable share of compensation for their use.
Recently Alfonso Gutiérrez, CEO of AGE FotoStock told one of my readers that a "professional" stock photo collection in an agency should be returning to its contributors a minimum of $1.00 per-image per-year. The photographer noted that his returns from AGE were way below that number and he wondered whether many photographers are seeing that kind of return.
Photochain is raising funds to build a blockchain based stock image platform that is excepted to go live by the end of 2018. Artists will be able to define the price for their work and receive “up to” 95% of the price they set (depending on the business model). The platform takes a commission to maintain the platform, and to offer support, marketing and other services.
Blockchains are being touted as offering great future economic benefit for stock photographers. Photographers will be able to set the price for their work. No waiting weeks of months to be paid the photographers share of the sale. Once the image is licensed virtually 100% of the revenue will be transferred immediately to the photographer’s account. “Technology” has removed the need for middlemen and their costs. Blockchains will keep such great records on every transaction that consumers will be unable to steal without getting caught. Any unauthorized used will be immediately identified and the infringer will be pursued.
Is it all really that good? Check out this story.
A few months ago in an interview promoting his new book
The Good Fight: America’s Ongoing Struggle for Justice, Rick Smolan was asked “How has technology disrupted photography.” Rick has been an editorial photographer since the 1980s, shot for Time, Life and National Geographic and may be best known for his “Day in the Life Of” series of books. The first
six minutes of the interview is worth a listen.
Does anyone know. who owns the copyright to image
607387712 of Marilyn Monroe on Gettyimages.com. Evidently Getty doesn’t. It seems that Getty has the rights to license the image for “Standard Editorial Rights,” but that does not include commercial use rights or print cover rights. Evidently it also doesn’t include the right to license a use for wall décor because Getty will not license the image for that purpose.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s stock photo agencies began placing more and more copies of the images they represented with distributors around the world. Initially, this resulted in significant increases in revenue for the image creators and the primary agencies. The Internet and agency consolidation has changed all that, particularly for the image creator. Now, in many cases the distributor system has simply become a way to siphon off a bigger portion of the gross fee paid by the customer to middlemen before the image creator gets his share.
Some
Masterfile contributors report that the
BIA restructuring of the company last year hasn’t solved Masterfile’s financial problems. Once again the company is falling behind on paying current royalties on new sales. I asked Steve Pigeon, CEO of Masterfile, for clarification and an explanation of the problems. The following are his answers.
Getty Images has announced that it will be retiring Thinkstock.com in mid-2019 and taking steps to transition Thinkstock customers over to Getty Images and iStock. Getty says this move will make way for a newer and overall improved experience for Thinkstock customers on Getty Images and iStock.
I was talking to a photographer recently who has both RM and RF collections with Getty Images. The question he faces is whether to put new images into the RM or RF collections. Getty is pushing many of its photographers to move many of their images from RM to RF. Certainly, there is a much better chance that an image will get used if it is available for licensing as RF rather than RM. But, if the photographer’s goal is to maximize revenue, will images offered as RF earn as much revenue overall as those offered as RM?
Depositphotos, a global stock photography, stock footage and editing tools provider, has launched the
Focused Collection, a marketplace of more than 400,000 premium images by selected artists which have previously never been available on stock photography platforms. The company partnered with 500px, Image Source Premium, Westend61, StockFood, MintImages and other major agencies to bring to life this collection of rare and authentic images, aiming to serve the needs of editors, websites, advertising agencies and corporate clients.
After publishing several stories on blockchain technology as it relates to image licensing, it has been unclear to me how customers with dollars in their pocket would conduct a transaction to license use of a photo and how the image creator would actually gets dollars they can use to buy groceries.
Broadly, there are two different categories of photographer who produce stock images. I believe way less than 7% of Shutterstock contributors are earning enough annually to view stock photography as a career. A contributor probably needs a collection of at least 20,000 images to earn a reasonable amount of money by U.S. standards. At least 93% of Shutterstock contributors have fewer than 1,000 images in the collection and their average income is less than $200 annually. See the breakdowns.
It was recently called to my attention that EyeEm has 3,494,298 images in the Getty Images collection. Add to that the 2,755,731 in the Moment collection (from Flickr photographers) and these two collections represent 29% of the combined RM and RF collections currently on Gettyimages.com, and 41% of the RF collection alone. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the current number of images each brand has at Getty.
One of the interesting questions raised by the chart in the
previous story and the chart below is the annual revenue each collection might possibly generate. Certain specialized collections may have provided very few images and thus generate much less than the larger collections. However, by using the attached chart brand owners may be able to get a senses of whether their images are selling as well as those of their competitors.
The question for today is: “Does adding to an image collection automatically grow revenue?” and the companion question “Must an image be NEW to be useful to a customer?” Shutterstock supplies some detail that is instructive and worth reviewing.
Photographers placing images with agents that seek to license uses at higher prices ($100 or more), and generate a lot of their sales via distributors, need to think hard about whether such an approach is in their best economic interest.
According to sources
Getty Images has reduced the royalty share of sales for all commercial RF collections supplied by agencies and distributors to
15% of the gross sale price.
Getty has sent its photographers a new Custom Content assignment for T-Mobile. “T-Mobile is looking for photography shot on mobile phones* that is the total opposite of stock images.” (*The images don’t actually have to shot with a mobile phone, and most of those submitted probably won’t be.)
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.