Royalties

Drastic Royalty Cuts Change Photogs View Of 500px

By Jim Pickerell | 749 Words | Posted 4/21/2016 | Comments
In 2014 500px introduced (500pxprime.com), a licensing arm of its global online photography community that was launched in 2009 for the purpose of sharing and discovering images. Initially, prices were $50 for web use and $250 for print uses. The royalty share started out at 70%, but now it has been cut to 30%. Photographers are not happy with the pay cut.

Videoclips Sales At Getty

By Jim Pickerell | 506 Words | Posted 3/24/2016 | Comments
A videographer wrote recently complaining that two of his video clips had been sold by Getty Images to Viacom for a broadcast show on Comedy Central. This show also appears on the web. These two sales were made through a Premium Access deal and netted the videographer a whopping $8.46 for the two sales.

Good News, Bad News: For Corbis Photographers

By Jim Pickerell | 147 Words | Posted 2/23/2016 | Comments
The Good News -- Getty has started offering some Corbis contributors who also have an existing contract with Getty the chance to have their Corbis images migrated to Getty. The Bad News – One contributor was earning a 40% royalty on his Non-Exclusive RM contract with Corbis. Now Getty has offered him an agreement that gives him a 25% royalty.

More On Corbis Sale

By Jim Pickerell | 941 Words | Posted 1/29/2016 | Comments
The good news for Corbis photographers is that there will be no third cut before their royalty share is calculated. However, there are still a number of issues that aren’t clear. This story offers some additional clarifications and insights and a number of questions that are still unclear and need to be answered.

Shutterstock Lowers Royalties For Enhanced Licenses

By Jim Pickerell | 526 Words | Posted 1/23/2016 | Comments
Shutterstock is not making enough money so they have decided to lower the royalties paid for Enhanced Licenses. Here's what it means for image creators.

Pond5 To Launch Video Subscription Offering

By Jim Pickerell | 283 Words | Posted 1/19/2016 | Comments
Pond5 is in the process of creating a collection of video clips that can be offered through low priced subscriptions. Contributors have the option of nominating their low-selling files for inclusion in the collection and will receive a minimum monthly royalties of $0.50 per item for every clip in the collection, regardless of downloads and usage.

Tandem Stock, A Business Model Clients Seem To Like

By Jim Pickerell | 2745 Words | Posted 11/20/2015 | Comments
Many stock agencies are consolidating and downsizing, but not Tandem Stock. Founded in 2010, they have been growing at an average rate of 45% per year. Specializing in Outdoor photography, they currently have a tightly edited collection of 115,000 images from 930 contributors. They have discovered that the needs of their clients are extremely specific and they specialize in supplying images that cater to those needs.

Masterfile Struggles

By Jim Pickerell | 1361 Words | Posted 11/9/2015 | Comments
For decades Masterfile has been a leading provider of stock imagery to advertising, design and corporate communications. The company represents the work of many of the worlds leading image producers. Its collection is well edited and its website offers very efficient search. Currently, more than 70% of the company’s revenue comes from sales in North America and more than 80% comes from the advertising, design and corporate communications segments of the market that presumably need the highest quality work and have the budgets to pay for it.

Scoopshot Launches Assignment Service For Pro Photographers

By Jim Pickerell | 664 Words | Posted 9/4/2015 | Comments
Scoopshot has launched a new initiative that every professional photographer interested in working on assignment ought to consider. Their “Everyone’s Private Photographer” initiative makes it easy for customers to input a location, anywhere in the world, where they need a photographer and immediately see a 9-image portfolio of each photographer operating in that area who might be able to perform a photo assignment.

Adobe Offers Discounts: Commissions Unaffected

By Jim Pickerell | 155 Words | Posted 9/1/2015 | Comments
Adobe Stock has announced that it is running a promotion from September 1st to September 20th that will discount the cost of images by 50%. For this limited period single images purchased will cost $4.99 instead of $9.99. Normally the royalty percentage might be expected to be calculated on the lower price, but to the huge relief and appreciation of image creators Adobe has announced that “regardless of this discount occurring, your commission will be unaffected and you will continue to generate royalties at the current rate.”

CreativeMarket Pays 70% Royalty

By Jim Pickerell | 595 Words | Posted 8/31/2015 | Comments
Creative Market allows you to place your photos in front of over 1 million members. You set your own prices and earn 70% of every sale. The arrangement is non-exclusive so you can simultaneously market the same images through any other outlet you want. There is no approval process. Everything you submit is uploaded.

Earn Money When Your Images Are Photocopied In The UK

By Jim Pickerell | 459 Words | Posted 8/27/2015 | Comments
Every year millions of images are photocopied and used by commercial organizations around the world without any direct compensation to the image creator. Often this is because there is no practical way to track such usages, or because the creator cannot be easily identified. Nevertheless, commercial organizations recognize that they have an obligation, and a liability, to compensate creators for such uses.

Imagewiki Wants To Help Photogs Get A Share Of Online Ad Revenue

By Jim Pickerell | 1638 Words | Posted 7/27/2015 | Comments
The interests of the multi-billion dollar social media sites and photographers may finally be coming together thanks to DMCA and imagewiki. The safe harbor provision of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) says, “Online Service Providers (OSPs) cannot receive any financial benefit directly attributable to infringing activity.”  Thus OSPs cannot place ads on user generated content unless they can identify the image’s owner and use policy.

Future Of Subscription Licensing

By Jim Pickerell | 856 Words | Posted 7/24/2015 | Comments
Subscription licensing is in for some dramatic changes. We know that a significant number of the images subscription customers download are used in the designer’s “creative process,” but never find their way into a deliverable end product. Traditionally, creators of all the images downloaded – whether used in a deliverable product or not – have received an equal royalty share of the revenue paid for the subscriptions.

Image Brief To Launch MyMarketplace

By Jim Pickerell | 1035 Words | Posted 7/16/2015 | Comments
ImageBrief will be adding a stock search aspect called MyMarketplace in the near future. Right now they are reaching out to their premium photographers to collect images for this service. It is unclear when the actual service will be available for buyers to search, but it will add stock search to the briefing and finding a photographer they can hire directly features they already enjoy.

Declines In Average Royalties At Shutterstock

By Jim Pickerell | 1290 Words | Posted 5/14/2015 | Comments
If the blogs are any indication more and more Shutterstock contributors seem to be complaining about declining revenue. While individual royalties may not have been as high as some would have liked, for several years they were at least going up steadily month to month to month, or compared to the same month a year earlier. Within the last year or so an increasing number of contributors are complaining about revenue stagnation or decline.

Shutterstock Contributor Earnings

By Jim Pickerell | 494 Words | Posted 3/9/2015 | Comments
Shutterstock has put together a very interesting Infographic related to Contributor Earnings. Everyone engaged in stock photography -- regardless of whether they have ever licensed an image through Shutterstock, or any other microstock distributor -- should examine this Infographic carefully. It contains a lot of important insights.

Eleven-Year Trends for RM and RF Sales

By Jim Pickerell | 1281 Words | Posted 10/13/2014 | Comments
Using numbers from Getty Images it is interesting to look back at the RM and RF unit sales and revenue trends over the last decade. Between 2003 and 2007 when Getty was a public company they provided investors with very precise gross revenue and average price per image figures. This made it possible to make a reasonable estimate of the number of images licensed in each category.

Search Online For Your Name

By Jim Pickerell | 357 Words | Posted 9/26/2014 | Comments
Search for your name on Images.Google.com or Images.Bing.com. You may be surprised at the results. And there may be money waiting for you.

Stocksy Pays Photographers Almost $200,000 A Month In Royalties

By Jim Pickerell | 324 Words | Posted 6/5/2014 | Comments
Launched in March 2013, Stocksy continues to grow dramatically. The company is paying out almost $200,000 a month in royalties and is on tract to generate something in the neighborhood of $5 million in gross revenue in 2014.

iStock To Pay Contributors 100% Of May 14th Sales

By Jim Pickerell | 109 Words | Posted 5/12/2014 | Comments
iStock has named May 14, 2014 “100% Royalty Day.” As part of it’s efforts to celebrate Small Business Week in the United States iStock will pay all exclusive contributors 100% of all revenue collected on May 14, 2014 through cash and credit card file downloads.

PressFoto Introduces ImageRent

By Jim Pickerell | 813 Words | Posted 4/28/2014 | Comments
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.

Getty Photographer Get Surprising Insights Into Pinterest

By Jim Pickerell | 861 Words | Posted 4/21/2014 | Comments
Getty photographers are getting some surprising insights into the use of their images on Pinterest as they review their Getty sales reports this month. For many photographers over half the reported sales are for “Pinterest/Portal” usage. The gross fee paid to Getty for such usages is $0.03 and the photographer’s royalty share is $0.01.

Permission Machine

By Jim Pickerell | 1170 Words | Posted 4/8/2014 | Comments
The Permission Machine (PM) is a startup in Belgium that is trying to educate social media users that they need permission to use the images they find on the web and provide them with a simple, easy way to license uses.

Got To Keep Producing

By Jim Pickerell | 753 Words | Posted 3/28/2014 | Comments
Recently, on the “Stock Photography, buy and sell your images” group on LinkedIn photographer Pierre Charrlau complained that his Getty Images sales have “greatly diminished” and wanted to know if others were having the same experience.