Talk to me about Royalty Free Non Exclusive licensing

[vintagesnaps]

Of course they want people to license photos as royalty free, that benefits the company not the photographers. It's not fair compensation for the work. As long as people continue to use that model it keeps making it that much harder I think for photographers to license and sell their work at a fair price.

 

[unpopular]

ok. But for Royalty Free don't I still get paid for each time the image is used?

BTW - Getty and Flickr have parted ways.

 

[coastalconn]

ok. But for Royalty Free don't I still get paid for each time the image is used?

BTW - Getty and Flickr have parted ways.

It is my understanding that flickr sells the image, RF, each customer can use the image as many times as they want. You would get paid a small commission. When I was emailing with the curator it seemed they had no set price in mind. So say they sell it for $50. You would get $25 for each new customer that wanted to purchase that image. Each customer could then use that image millions of times for as long as they want...

 

[unpopular]

or it could sit in my flickr account and never be used at all. seems silly to get greedy over an image that has no value...

 

[KmH]

Most RF licenses have a usage limit, though it may be up to 499,999 uses for the regular cost.
If a customer wants more usage the stock house usually offers an extended RF license and the customer pays some amount more.

 

[W.Y.Photo]

or it could sit in my flickr account and never be used at all. seems silly to get greedy over an image that has no value...

Not when the potential value of the image is far greater. Hypothetically, if National Geographic wanted to buy the image, if the image is unavailable to them except through Coastalconn then they will be willing to pay a premium price for it along with the possibility of a certiain percentage of royalty for each magazine sale or for website revenue. If they can buy the picture for $50 from flickr, why bother doing business with him at all?

Selling the rights to 100 images on flickr is far less profitable or worthwhile than selling one to National Geographic on your own.

 

[vintagesnaps]

Exactly.

No, I don't think typically you'd get an additional payment from the same person who licensed a photo, but you could have more than one person license it.

Usually they can sublicense (depending on Terms on the site) so can keep reusing/reselling your photos(s) from now til' freakin' doomsday. (OK, maybe not really that long, but if there's no limit, they can keep reselling your photo over and over.) So who will end up making most of the money from your photos? probably them not you. I think they're taking advantage of people.

 

[W.Y.Photo]

There is actually a huge profitable aspect to stock photography, and that's selling the images you otherwise don't care about. I know people who make a lot off of stock photography by selling their Worst images through stock photo sites. I don't think anyone should ever sell their best photos using stock prices or releases though.

The thing about stock photography is that it started as a way for photographers to make money off their otherwise non-profit worthy imagery then the companies got greedy and basically said "Hey everyone, start selling us masterpeices for pennies and dimes!! Maybe you can make a whole dollar one day."

 

[CygnusStudios]

The thing about stock photography is that it started as a way for photographers to make money off their otherwise non-profit worthy imagery then the companies got greedy and basically said "Hey everyone, start selling us masterpeices for pennies and dimes!! Maybe you can make a whole dollar one day."

Absolutely correct. For a few years everyone was jumping on the stock bandwagon and then Time Magazine bought their cover shot for something like $30 and it opened the flood gates. This was when Getty was buying up everything in sight and photographers by the thousands were inputting everything they shot.

Some people made some decent money going this route and opened up some new avenues for beginning photographers. Today, most have gone back to more traditional RM licensing.

If someone wants to put their lowest quality work or generic work out there and get paid a few bucks, I don't see the harm in it, just go into with open eyes.

 

[unpopular]

Selling the rights to 100 images on flickr is far less profitable or worthwhile than selling one to National Geographic on your own.

That's such a silly way to look at it, especially for the kind of work I do.

 

[W.Y.Photo]

Selling the rights to 100 images on flickr is far less profitable or worthwhile than selling one to National Geographic on your own.

That's such a silly way to look at it, especially for the kind of work I do.

I'm just using NG as an example. It goes for any field of photography unless you are specifically shooting for stock sites. It doesn't matter what the subject matter is.. If I take an exceptional photo of a model at a runway show or a mountain in a national park, there is going to be someone more profitable to sell that image to than a stock photo site. The model or the national park will be willing to pay a lot more than $50-200 for exceptional work, but if I throw it up to a stock website I essentially just tossed away a large chunk of that images profitability.

I'm not saying stock photography is bad for every photograph, just that its not good for many photographs.

That's not to mention how stock photography kills the value of good photography in general.

 

[KmH]

Time used that iStockphoto micro-stock agency stock photo back in 2009 (April 27, 2009 issue).
Getty (and Corbis) started buying up independent stock photography houses in the late 1990's.
In 2008 Getty Images was bought by Hellman & Friedman, a private equity firm.
Flickr announced a partnership with Getty Images in 2009.
By 2009 the consolidation of the Stock Photography industry was pretty much complete.

Time paid more than $30 to use the photo. Time had a weekly print run of about 3.5 million magazines around then.
The amateur photographer, Robert Lam, got a check for $31.50 from iStockphoto.com. Apparently $30 for the Time cover image, and $1.50 for something else of his that got licensed that month.
At that time, creation of a Time Magazine cover photo by a professional photographer cost Time about $3,000.

You can buy a copy of that April 27, 2009 cover from Time. An 11 x 14 print matted in a 14 x 18 satin black metal frame only costs $99.95.
You know how much of that $99.95 the photographer gets? $00.00.

 

[unpopular]

But the question remains, would time have used that image at all if it were $3,000?

I sincerely doubt it.

 

[CygnusStudios]

Time had bought micro stock images before that one... If memory serves (sometimes it doesn't) a baby shot was the most famous stock photo purchase, but even that one wasn't the first.

 

[CygnusStudios]

Just read this: Take a look at the numbers, more than 40,000 images added daily to the collection. That's just them...