Stock photography rates and commissions

[SpaceBeers]

Hi,

I found this board when researching stock photography sites and their commissions, rates etc for a project I'm trying to decide whether to start or not.

I work for a design agency in Brighton who recently sourced 7 images for a client at a total of around £3.5K. I'm a web developer so when I was told the photographer would only see less than 20% of that I was quite surprised at how low that was and how unfair it seemed.

I've been looking to see if this is how all the site's work and in general they all seem to be heavily weighted towards keeping all the money and giving the photographer a fairly small percentage or a slightly bigger percentage but charging a annual fee.


My question is this: Would photographers selling stock images use a site that either:


A: Charges a small fee to upload an image but then gives back 100% of the sales to the photographer?


Or


B: Takes a flat fee (say 25p) per download and the rest goes to the photographer?

Or

C: Offered a choice of the two models above.


Seems a bit unfair that for just hosting the images they get to keep so much of the proceeds.


Thanks. I appreciate any comments, help, constructive criticism etc. I'm just trying to get real photographers opinions really at the moment.

 

[KmH]

There are 2 kinds of image use licensing: RM and RF.

The RM - Rights Managed - use license is very much more intended for commercial use and as such is costly. RM is used almost exclusively by the large Stock photography houses like Getty, Corbis, and Alamy.

The RF - Rights Free - use license usually prohibits commercial uses and costs a lot less. RF is used almost exclusively by Microstock agencies.

You could look at the information the stock agency web sites have available for photographers that explains how the stock house pays photographers.

I am afraid there is nothing photographers can do to change the current stock photography business model that highly favors the stock agency over the photographer.

There are far fewer stock agencies today than there were 15 years ago. Getty Images in particular bought up a lot of of independent stock agencies. That consolidation of the industry has seriously diminished phtographer earnings potential.

However, do not overlook the fact that by submitting an image to a stock photography agency, the same image can be licensed repeatedly and to a wide range of buyers generating income for the photographe many times over.

Certainly, the stock agency is entitled to a portion of the sales price for maintaining the large databases of images, advertising/promoting the image database, collecting and disbursing the money, and the all the other business management aspects made on behalf of all the photographers that contribute images.

In fact, it's quite common that the more a photographer's images sell, the % the photographer receives from each sale also goes up.