Last week I wrote about the
Top Suppliers to Getty Image and pointed out that EyeEm has significantly more images in the collection than any other agency supplier.
For those who might be thinking about contributing to EyeEm photographer Michael Jay who lives in Germany and is a contributor to EyeEm as well as many other stock image collections has written an in depth blog post entitled “
Six things to know about the EyeEm Market.” It is well worth reading to get an idea of the role EyeEm may play in the future of stock photography.
He points out that while you can license images through EyeEm, “their main purpose is not selling licenses. They are a community platform for photographers, more like Instagram than Shutterstock.”
He says,“EyeEm prefers authentic, natural looks over staged, clean images,” but then that’s what everyone wants these days. To get that “natural look” situations often need to be staged with models that can be controlled, but the end result must look like it just happened naturally.
Michael Jay says the average royalty for him is “well above $10.” This is surprising. I’ve examined the sales reports of a number of Getty’s major producers and the average gross sale price per download for RF images has tended to be around $45. I assume EyeEm gets 20% of that number, as is the case with most other agency suppliers. That would be $9.00 for EyeEm and I presume they only pay a percentage of that number to the contributor. Based on the sales reports I have examined 70% of all sales are for gross prices under $20 and 50% for gross prices under $10.