Pixiq

Can you make money marketing your images as photo stock? Yes. How much money? Probably much less than it cost you to take the pictures. Why? Two major factors: supply greatly exceeds demand, and in that climate, the opportunity for artists to realize profit from their work has declined, particularly in the last five years.

The Image Stock Market

Most photographers market their images through agencies (such as Getty Images, Corbis, or Photo Researchers, to name only a few of the largest) or on-line cooperatives (such as PhotoShelter or SmugMug, because the buyers are so widely dispersed and the competition so massive that it’s nearly impossible for a single photographer to reach potential buyers on his or her own. Let’s talk about the options.

Rights Managed. There are essentially three basic formats being used to offer copyrighted images for sale. The first is Rights Managed (RM). These images are offered to clients by the photographer, or the agency that represents the photographer, under specific conditions that protect everyone involved. The client chooses an image for a specific purpose, and the photographer/agency grants the client use of the image for a single purpose for a defined period of time. If the agreement is for exclusive use, the buyer is assured that the image, or similar images by the same photographer, will not be sold to any other client, particularly in competing sectors of the buyer’s business. Because the client is essentially taking the image off the market, the price for using the image exclusively and commercially is quite high, often in the thousands of dollars. The photographer’s cut might be only one-third of the sale price, but it’s still a nice paycheck. In the past, a photographer whose work was accepted by a major agency could stipulate that his/her images would be sold only under the Rights Managed strategy, and this has been the method I’ve used with all the agencies I’ve dealt with in the past.

Royalty Free. The second method of marketing images is Royalty Free (RF). In my opinion, the advent of this sales method was a death blow to photographers. Under the RF format, the agency/photographer markets images to a broad spectrum of buyers, with no protections in place for anyone in the deal. Prices are low because the image is not exclusive; that is, it may be purchased and used without limits by many buyers simultaneously. The image is often priced by the size of the file sent to the client. A small file to be used on the Internet might bring a few dollars, where a large file (around 40 MB) might bring a couple hundred dollars, with 30-40% going to the photographer if the sale is handled by an agency. Obviously, for a photographer to make much money on an RF image, it has to be sold many, many times, and the competition in RF arenas is keen. Initially, most examples of RF images were of poor quality, so if a client wanted top-notch content and technical excellence, the RM marketplace was still the only source. But as more photographers produce more images they are able to market only in the RF arena, the quality and content has improved enormously, leaving exclusivity as the only benefit of an RM purchase.

Micro Stock and Subscriptions. Another sales option is a form of Royalty Free marketing called Micro Stock (It has many names, some I can't repeat). Here the agency compiles large collections, often from amateur and non-professional photographers, and sells access to all or a specific number of the images in the collection for very low prices—a few cents is not uncommon. Another version of RF Micro Stock is to sell access to a collection by subscription where, for a designated period the buyer can use as many images in the collection as they want, however they want, and as often as they want. In another variation, the client might buy the right to use 500 images each month for a year. One agency charges a $1,000 fee for this option, which produces a payment of about $.20 for each image no matter how many times it is used. The photographer gets, on average, around 40% of those sales. It takes a lot of 8-cent commissions to get even a dribble of return. Yet another variation on this is a group licensing of images from one agency to another, where the photographer’s images become part of a collection being remarketed elsewhere. In this case, the photographer gets an even smaller percentage of the sale, since at least two other entities are taking their cuts first.

The ways in which top agencies secure images for their collections has changed also. One has searched Flickr files, mostly images created by non-professionals and posted on line to share with friends). Another has set up its own teams of photographers charged with securing particular kinds of images, in direct competition with the contracted contributors submitting new stock for consideration.

It’s pretty clear that the old Rights Managed model is (or was) much more beneficial to photographers. But if the photographer is using an agency to market his/her images in that way, the agency is free to revise the terms of the commission or licensing agreement whenever the photographer’s contract comes up for renewal. Excellent discussions of these issues from a photographer’s perspective can be found at http://asmp.org/articles/getty-images.html and at www.pro-imaging.org. 

Do-it-Yourself Stock Sales

So if the agencies are not doing photographers any favors, why not sell direct? Many photographers represent themselves, because they gain 100% of the sale price and control the use of their images. If you’re a truly famous photographer, clients will come to you seeking your name and photographs for which you have achieved widespread recognition, and you will earn sufficient funds from your images to hire a staff person to manage all of this for you. But for most photographers, self-marketing means posting images on a web site and waiting for clients to look through the billions of images on the Internet to find theirs.

 Another way to self-market is through what I’ll call a cooperative. PhotoShelter (www.PhotoShelter.com), LicenseStream (www.LicenseStream.com), and SmugMug (www.SmugMug.com) offer a range of examples. A cooperative can be large or small, selective or completely open. Photographers who want to join the cooperative pay a fee to post their images on a search site; they upload their files and complete all of the file data and keyword information, specify the conditions under which the image can be sold, and the posted images become part of a larger, searchable database that is accessible to clients seeking pictures. Depending on the structure of the site, the prospective buyer might be referred directly to the photographer, or a management organization might handle the transactions for a small fee. This can be a very effective way for individual photographers to market their work, particularly if the cooperative is selective about maintaining quality of submissions and key wording so that a search of the files brings up only relevant and high quality images. If buyers have to wade through a bunch of irrelevant junk, they won’t come back.

Cost versus Sales Strategies

Given this new marketing environment, how much is an image really worth--to a photographer, to an agency, and to a buyer? Some projects are relatively inexpensive in direct costs. A flower study done in my studio involves only the cost of the flowers and my time. (The indirect costs of cameras, lenses, lighting, stages, computers, and so on—those are the costs of doing photography as a business.) A session at a nearby zoo or community park (Colorado Springs has some incredible ones) is an inexpensive, but not very exclusive, endeavor. A photograph of a wild fox taking a squirrel on a snowy morning, right outside my studio: priceless. But there are other serious projects that are very expensive to undertake. Photography in a remote, little-known location requires airfare, vehicle rentals, guides and interpreters, living expenses, and an investment of sufficient time to make the travel worthwhile, along with top of the line camera gear, backup camera gear, and assistants. A couple of years ago, Kathy and I traveled to Northern Patagonia to apply the newest digital technology to a set of water-bound marble caves that could not have been professionally photographed in film days. The cost was about $8,000. I have thus far made all of it back, but not by selling the photographs; rather, Kathy and I have sold several articles about the challenges of photographing the caves and how the latest technology made it possible. Note that I’ve made the costs back, not a profit.

How often can I front that kind of trip, and how many new places are there to photograph? Like any businessman making an investment in a new project, Kathy and I have to consider the potential marketability of any proposed shoot. Is it unique? Has it been photographed well already? Can I improve on what I or other photographers have already done with the subject? If so, will the results be significantly marketable within our own portfolio of products, either as image stock or print sales or as articles or books? Sadly, only lastly do we ask ourselves the more subjective question of whether the project must be undertaken because it inspires my creative attention—whether I am compelled to pursue it even if there is no likelihood of ever making any money from it. But we do ask that question, and sometimes answer it in the affirmative, because if you are an artist, and not just a technician, you must let yourself be driven by creative passion. Some of the projects I undertake for that simple reason are commercial failures, but some of them have been great successes. That’s the best.

 Notwithstanding the many obstacles, there are photographers who continue to be very successful at stock photography. My friend and colleague Darrell Gulin is a perfect example. Darrell is successful because he is an energetic, prolific, excellent photographer; takes creative and high-quality images that stand out from the rest; keeps a low overhead (he and his wife do all the work); and is with the best agencies in the world. He grows many of his own insect and flower subjects, and gets himself to exotic locations by leading tours and teaching workshops. And finally, Darrell is a savvy businessman, marketing his photographs across the spectrum of outlets available to him, making placement decisions based upon each image’s unique quality and content. Darrell Gulin gives seminars about marketing image stock, so check out his website at www.GulinPhoto.com to see where he’s teaching next.

 The Value of Teaching

 I know this discussion of the image stock market has been a bit of a downer, but I’m giving it to you like it really is, and I’m trying to give you some information about what is working in image marketing these days. The next installment of this series will talk more about income from conducting seminars and leading classroom and field workshops on nature photography. I promise to be a little more positive in my tone!