Getting Photos To Market

For photographers there are basically three ways to get photos where customers can see them. The first is setting up a searchable site. This can be costly and tends not to work well unless the photographer has a broad niche image collection, and a solid base of customers. Being recognized as a leading light in the niche helps.

The hardest part is getting customers to look at the site when there are so many larger, well publicized sites with a broader range of content. They may even have a deeper selection in the photographer’s niche than he has. Before deciding to build your own site, take a hard look at what Gettyimages.com, Corbis.com, Jupiterimages.com and Alamy.com have to offer in your niche. If your imagery isn’t a quantum leap better than theirs in quality and you’re not a recognized industry leader, don’t expect much from your personal site.

To solve the technology barrier of building a custom site, take a look at: ipnstock.com and photoshelter.com.



Traditional Agency and Microstock

The other ways are traditional stock agencies and/or microstock. At first glance it appears that photographers will earn much more by dealing with traditional agents because they charge much higher fees for uses and usually pay a higher percentage of the use fee to the photographer than is the case with microstock distributors.



However, sales volume and the real percentage of gross fee charged needs to be taken into account. With regard to sales volume, in 2007 iStockphoto licensed rights to 35 times the number of images that Getty Images licensed as RM and 18 time the RF images. In 2007 RM images at Getty licensed for an average fee of approximately $500 while the average for an iStock license was $4.10. Big separation, but when you factor in the 35 times, one $500 fee at Getty is equivalent to $145.50 at iStock. Getty photographer get 35% of the gross fee on average while iStock exclusive photographers gets 40%. iStock’s non-exclusive photographers get 20%.

Taking Alamy as another example, in 2007 the company licensed rights to about 169,000 images or one license out of every 64 images in file at year end. Average price for an editorial usage was about $133 (75% of sales) and average price for commercial was $370 (25% of sales). Alamy pays photographers 65% of fees collected. The numbers are now getting closer to one another.

More important than royalty percentage or unit price may be the number of sales you can make compared to the number of images you have in file and the cost to produce those images.



Getting Images In To Play

It still sounds like the best deal is getting your image accepted by a traditional agent, but it is getting much harder to get a traditional agent to accept anything.

Before going further I need to define “agent” and “distributor”. An agent takes in images from photographers, may make some sales directly to customers, but also may place the images with a distributor who deals directly with customers and takes a significant percentage of the gross fee off the top for his services. Some organizations serve as both agent and distributor. Many distributors only accept images from other agents and do not take in images from individual photographers.

The major agent/distributors have cut way back on accepting images directly from photographers. Now, due to the high cost of managing lots of individual suppliers, they are looking more to other agents, large production companies or consolidators to get the images they distribute. They want suppliers who can provide them with 5,000 or more ready to market, cleaned up and keyworded images on a regular basis and relieve them from needing to deal with lots of individuals. It used to be that a photographer would put his images with an agent and the vast majority of the sales would be made directly by the agent. Currently, most agents make a significant portion of their sales through distribution arrangement. Even Getty makes a significant percentage of its sales through distributors so the gross fee they report, and use to calculate the photographer’s percentage, is not always what the customer paid.

This means that most photographers must accept a second or third cut in the commission in order to get their images seen at all. Often it’s not easy to figure out how the chain works, but as an example if an image is licensed for $200 by a distributor, not the agent the distributor takes 40% off the top and pays the agent $120. The agent keeps 60% ($72) and pays the consolidator $48. (In the case of RF the agent sometimes keeps 80%.) The consolidator keeps 50% to 80% and pays the photographer between $10 and $24 for the $200 sale.

Links: Gettyimages.com http://www.gettyimages.com Corbis.com, http://www.corbis.com Jupiterimages.com http://www.jupiterimages.com Alamy.com http://www.alamy.com digitalrailroad.net ipnstock.com http://www.ipnstock.com/join.shtml photoshelter.com http://www.pa.photoshelter.com