Selling Files

[limr]

It is hard to imagine why someone would want to sell an image just once when they could potentially sell it hundreds of times OR keep licensing it and have someone else do the work of making money for them. *shrug*

Because selling a license for one, single exclusive use is worth hundreds of times more than selling it onsey-twosies over the next God-knows-how-long. It's not like you're selling exclusive rights to MegaCorp for the same price as selling one-of rights to Mom-And-Pop down the street.

If someone agreed to pay you $50,000 for exclusive rights to one of your images, you'd turn it down and take a chance it will never sell in the future? Not me. Gimme enough money, and that image is off the market.




(Although I do insist I reserve the right to use the image for my own promotional use.)

Did you miss the second part of my post - the part where I said "...OR licence it"?

You could license it once for a big pile of cash, or put a time limit on it, and if the image is making that company money, it's worth it to them to pay to renew that license. If not, you've still got the money from the first license.