Owen Franken sent me his image (shown below) of sliced duck in a Paris restaurant as it appears on the Getty Images website. The list price on Gettyimages.com for a large file is
$475 Euros. If all the customer needs is a very small file, only suitable for online use, the price is only 50 Euros.
Getty licensed this image to a customer in Canada for
$0.14 and the photographer received
$0.03 for his work. The photographer’s royalty share of the gross sale price is 20% so actually the photographer was only entitled to $0.028, but in a moment of generosity Getty rounded the payment to the next highest cent.
At these prices what's the point of contributing images? In theory, if the photographer could make a huge number of sales of an image at $0.03 a transaction it might eventually represent a significant amount of money. But, that's not happening. Getty currently has 28,669,086 images in its Creative collection. Based on my calculations, I think they license about one use annually for every 2.5 images they have in the collection, or something between 10 and 12 million uses licensed annually.
Sure, very occasionally they license a use for $475 Euros, but the odds that they will license one of your images for that price are astronomical. About one-third of their licenses are for prices below $5.00 and as we can see some are as low as $0.14. At these prices very few photographers will ever earn enough to cover their costs of production, let alone actually make a profit for time invested.