Founding editor Jim Pickerell has reacquired Selling Stock, which has been owned by Fadner Media Enterprises since late 2006. Selling Stock’s daily coverage will remain unchanged, and Pickerell is also launching a companion Web site, PhotoLicensingOptions.com, which will offer paid access to stories on an individual basis.
With the addition of a new six-month subscription to augment the annual offering, Selling Stock will continue to focus on news and issues of interest to stock photographers, agencies, image libraries, distributors and investment analysts. Coverage—written by Pickerell, managing editor Julia Dudnik Stern and the occasional guest author—will analyze sales and revenues, marketing strategies and other trends in what has become a rapidly changing industry.
PhotoLicensingOptions is broader in scope, covering all the myriad ways of making a living by licensing images. While it will at first be populated largely by Pickerell’s own articles, the goal of the site is to amass contributions by various writers, with a particular focus on photographers and industry pundits.
The site’s business model is simple: PhotoLicensingOptions invites contributions and offers these for sale on a single-article basis. First-time authors need to be approved; future articles are published without moderation, though the site does reserve the right to remove content for legal or other similarly straightforward reasons. Authors who join before July will receive 75% of each article’s revenue (subsequently joining writers will receive 65%), with PhotoLicensingOptions retaining the remainder as commission. Those already posting to the site include longtime image industry insiders Ellen Boughn, John Lund and Paul Melcher.
PhotoLicensingOptions offers a free weekly email that summarizes all the newly added stories. To read full stories, site users will need to purchase credits, starting at 20 credits valued at $25. Stories are typically priced at 1-2 credits each.