PressFoto, has launched
ImageRent, a new service that makes more than 3.5 million stock photos immediately available for commercial, editorial or personal use online at a minimal cost. The maximum file sizes available are 72dpi, 600x600px web size images.
Rather than purchasing the images outright, customers pay a very modest “rental fee” for the rights to use the image. The fee is based on the number of times the image is actually viewed by visitors to the customer’s web site with a minimum fee of $1.00 for 100,000 views. While 100,000 views seems like a number that the vast majority of web sites will never reach there are also discounts for even higher numbers of downloads if the user anticipates a lot of activity.
| Image Views |
Price |
| 100,000 |
$1.00 |
| 550,000 |
$5.00 |
| 1,100,000 |
$10.00 |
| 11,100,000 |
$100.00 |
To use the ImageRent service, customers set up an account with PressFoto and purchase a
rental credit package. At that point, customers are able to embed any image (or images) they choose from the PressFoto catalog into their websites or blogs.
Unlike Getty’s
embed offering, PressFoto customers can easily adjust the image size and cropping. The editor can also be used to add copy to an image. Thus, customers can easily fit any images they purchase into their layout rather than having to adjust their layout to fit the image. In addition, there is no distracting credit line or PressFoto logo under the images.
This service will directly compete with Getty’s
embed tool launched last month. While Image Rent's selection of images is only about 10% the size of Getty’s 35 million images in many ways it is a much better deal for the consumer.
Unlike Getty’s system where an image can disappear from the users web site if the image creator withdraws it from the collection with PressFoto the customer continues to get access to the purchased amount of views and is able to renew a subscription.
“There are plenty of people around the globe creating online content who aren’t willing or able to spend the money required to purchase stock but don’t see theft as an acceptable alternative,” said Dmitry Shironosov, CEO of PressFoto. “ImageRent is the perfect solution. It provides legitimate and cost-effective access to a massive library of great images at an exceptionally reasonable cost.”
If the rental fees ever reach the purchase price of a particular image, no further fees are assessed and the renter now owns the web size image outright. Should a customer’s Image Rent account be exhausted, a watermark will appear on all rented images, but the images will remain. The watermark will be removed when additional credits are purchased.
The images that are provided by ImageRent service are visually indistinguishable from any other image that is not provided by ImageRent. This is one of the ways we differentiate our offering from Getty’s Embed -- our goal is to be as unobtrusive as possible.
User Data
PressFoto counts all web page loads so they will know which images and which kind of subject matter are of greatest interest to consumers. This is data that other microstock agencies that license web sized images at $1.00 to $3.00 don’t have. With a normal RF license the microstock agency knows how many times an image has been licensed, but they have no idea whether a dozen or a million consumers have actually viewed the page on which the image appears.
PressFoto also knows the web address of the customer who has embedded an image. At present they are not tracking other activity of visitors to the customers’s web site. At some time in the future it would also be possible for them to record the URL of visitors to the page where their image is being displayed.
Eventually, this kind of information could be of great value to advertisers who want to place their ads on sites with lots of traffic and who want to know what kind of things customers are viewing.
Look for other microstock sellers to follow this strategy as in most cases it would not decrease revenue in any way, but it would provide them with additional data that could be very valuable in the future.
Royalties
PressFoto pays contributors 50% royalties from everything they earn. Since Getty is not collecting any money for embedding there is no money to pay royalties to contributors. Contributors won’t even know if their image has been embedded.
Getty says, “If and when we earn revenue associated with an embedded image (e.g., ads placed in the embedded viewer), we will report that revenue to contributors through existing royalty reports.”
For a step-by-step process of how Image Rent works see
here.
About half the images on the PressFoto site are from image partner agencies. These images are not available for renting. About 10,000 contributors, not including the partner agencies, provide images for the PressFoto image collection.