I was recently asked: “If you were shooting stock (hey, maybe you are…), would you be shooting for rights-managed, royalty-free, microstock or some combination?”
Personally, I think rights-managed licensing is on the way out. It would be nice if customers were willing to pay to use an image based on the value they receive, or to some degree on the cost of production. But that day seems to be passing. No matter what the subject matter, too many good alternatives are available at much lower prices. Why should customers pay more? Part of the theory behind rights-managed licensing is that customers need exclusive rights to certain images. Some do, but there are entirely too many similar images competing for those occasional exclusive sales.
Exclusive sales make sense if the photographer is producing something that fulfills a specific need for the customer, and a fee has been negotiated upfront, before the work is done—such as the case of an assignment. But they make no sense when the photographer is shooting on speculation and trying to produce what some unknown customer will want sometime in the future and when the photographer has no idea how many other photographers are simultaneously producing something similar.
Thus, rights-managed images must also be licensed for non-exclusive use, and because the price is negotiable, agencies often license rights-managed images for prices far below non-exclusive royalty-free images. The other problem with rights-managed licensing is the need to track all image use to ensure the ability to license exclusives when requested; this makes it much more difficult to broadly market an image through multiple distributors.
Royalty-free licensing has a market advantage over rights-managed because the former is non-exclusive. Thus, it is much easier to offer it for licensing through multiple distributors. However, it is much harder for the average photographer to effectively participate in the royalty-free market. Selling royalty-free images through one distributor only—which many photographers do Alamy—is not a wholly satisfactory solution, because the photographer fails to reach out to all the customers who deal with other distributors.
In addition, most royalty-free production companies want to work with a few very experienced photographers who are prepared to produce high volume. Consequently, most photographers find it very difficult to participate effectively.
The other problem with traditional royalty-free licensing is that microstock will eventually cannibalize it, because microstock offers the same unlimited use and is cheaper.
As a photographer, I have a problem with both royalty-free and microstock, because they price based on file size rather than how the image is to be used. File size has very little to do with the value the customer receives when using an image.
The use of microstock will continue to grow, while the use of images priced using the rights-managed and traditional royalty-free models will decline. However, microstock prices are so low, and the share of the fees paid to the photographer so small, that it is hard to see how a photographer can earn a reasonable amount of money for his efforts. In addition, the volume of images being added to the collections is growing at such a rapid pace that most photographers will never earn enough to justify the effort they put into producing the images and preparing them for market.
Microstock is trying to find ways to raise its prices without losing its base. It has defined different bodies of work as being of higher quality and priced these images at a higher level. The problem with this strategy is that the higher priced images will never be used by customers with limited budgets. Thus, those who only license their images at the higher prices lose potential sales. The system works for distributors, because they do not care which images sell, as long as every customer goes away with something, but on average, it does not work to the advantage of photographers.
Microstock has defined a few types of uses as requiring extended licenses, which in some cases may be negotiated. More use types should fall into the extended license category. Even as it is now, the microstock pricing system has grown into something much more complex than the pricing system for traditional royalty-free imagery—and it promises to get even more complex.
I believe we need a pricing system that makes every image available at all price points rather that arbitrarily assigning each image to a particular category of use based primarily on price. Above a certain base level, I don’t believe it is possible to define certain image groups as being of “higher quality,” because quality is in the eye of the beholder. Often, very basic images are used in ways that justify a high price and the supposed “high quality” images are just what people with small budgets need. We should forget about licensing rights to stock images for exclusive use. When someone needs exclusive rights, let them hire a photographer on assignment.
I favor a system that licenses images based on how they will initially be used, but also offers unlimited future uses. Customers demand this kind of flexibility, because they are unwilling to accurately predict or track future uses. Such a system is not perfect, but it is better than the alternatives we have today. It would be open to some misuse, but no more than the today’s misuses. It is not fair or reasonable to charge businesses the same to use an image as someone who uses it for a personal blog or a school project.
I want to believe that most customers will be honest in disclosing, to the best of their knowledge, how they intend to use the images they license. However, I also recognize that this may no longer be the way most people operate in today’s society. PicScout provides a service to search the Internet for images represented by certain agencies. The company finds that 85% of the uses it finds are unauthorized or go beyond the original license. It has also come to the attention of many in the industry that, for more than a decade, major book publishers have been printing many more copies of books than they licensed rights to print. Given these examples, perhaps there is no way for photographers to get reasonable compensation for their efforts. Maybe the whole idea of licensing stock images as a business is no longer practical for a photographer.
When I first got into stock photography in the 1960s, the idea was that stock images were outtakes from assignments, or occasionally something you shot when you had nothing better to do than sit around drinking beer. There was no great expectation of earning money from such images, but if you did, it was a windfall and not something on which you should base a business.
Most stock photographers need to return to this way of thinking. If you have the images and do not mind the extra administrative work necessary to make them available for marketing, than put them into the market and see what happens. (The administrative work was not as big a problem in the 1960s as it is today, because all you had to do was ship the raw film to your agency, and you received 50% of any sale made.) But do not expect any return and look at what you get as a windfall. If your goal is to earn a living taking pictures, then focus on projects that provide a guaranteed return when the images are delivered.