Chris Barton, a photographer and the managing director of Photographers Direct, has written an article highlighting multiple uses of the same microstock image and asking why a reputable company would do this to itself.
Barton’s company represents what he believes to be “fair trade photography.” It keeps only 20% of the licensing revenue, connects buyer and seller in a direct negotiation and typically averages $200 per license. Photographers Direct offers non-exclusive representation with one exception: the same images cannot be made available through microstock sites, which the company views as “the antithesis of fair trade.”
Barton recently took a look at the use of a microstock photo in Web sites ranging from a German consulting firm to a keyword-spamming plastic surgery domain. The photographer describes the photo as a “perfect-people perfect-world lowest-common-denominator cookie-cutter pile-them-high sell-them-cheap image” and asks: “Why would a reputable company want to be associated with those words?”
There are numerous answers, and most are so mind-bogglingly simple as to make anyone wonder why stock-industry insiders are still having this meaningless debate.
The image—probably shot by Yuri Arcurs, if one were to guess by the style—is quite far from the crap with which Barton equates it. Unfortunately, the esteemed photographer has let his philosophical bias affect his judgment. This photo is so widely used because it meets all the criteria for a top stock seller: it is technically flawless, beautifully composed and topically in demand from the model and situation perspective. To an image buyer without Barton’s unique personal experience and insight, this photo says “business success”—or numerous other similarly positive concepts. [April 6: With apologies to Lise Gagne.]
Further, nobody looking for a loan is going to plug the header image of a financing Web site into TinEye to see if the loan company is reputable, or if its competitor is using the same photo. Nobody cares. The use of an image by one business does not, in any practical way, change the effectiveness of the same image to advertise a non-competitive business.
There have also been plenty of competitors who opted for the same rights-managed image without paying for exclusivity. While it makes for a terrific industry anecdote and may have gotten an ad agency fired now and then, it has probably had little impact on the normal course of business of the end client.
As has been pointed out before, buyers tend to find comfort in the fact that others used the same images. The fact that an image is widely used is apparently a positive to buyers, whether or not photographers like it.
And to be completely skeptical, many photographers tend to view multiple uses of the same image as a negative only when the image is by another photographer. Everyone welcomes multiple uses of their own shots and the accompanying revenue.
It is not that Barton is wrong, per se. In fact, most everything he writes is on the money—but it does not matter. Barton and many of today’s photographers make a critical error in judgment by expecting buyers to see the world from a photographer’s perspective. Buyers live in an entirely different world. To earn a living, photographers need to understand and cater to buyer motivations, because endeavoring to change their views has historically failed at every instance.