Photo Selling Options

Katy von Brandenfels, of BigCheesePhoto won €100 our May/June PhotoLicensingOptions’ contest designed to encourage those interested in the business of producing and licensing rights to images to sign up for this FREE weekly email every Saturday.

More and more people are producing pictures of a quality sufficient to satisfy the needs of many who want to use pictures. Thanks to the Internet -- and to a great extent microstock -- it is much easier than in the past for those who would like to earn a little money from the images they have produced to make contact with customers who might want to use them.

One of the first things to do if you want to sell your still photographs is to understand who the individuals and organizations are that might want to buy your images. You also need to be aware of the changing trends taking place in each market.

As little as five years ago, approximately 98% of all stock photo revenue came from print uses. There was little or no Internet and small business uses. Today about 20% of industry revenue comes from Internet and small business uses. The needs of these new customers were hardly addressed five years ago, as all traditional sellers focused on the high end of the market. Consequently, when someone wanted an image for these purposes they either took the picture themselves, or copied something off another Internet site and paid nothing for its use. In the last five years the demand for images that will be used electronically has grown dramatically.

Ed: Shannon Fagan was one of the speakers at the New Media Conference held in conjunction with the June 2010 CEPIC Congress in Dublin, Ireland. Fagan has been in the stock business for a decade, is represented by most major agencies and is the president of the Stock Artists Alliance. He shares his observations about the state of the industry with PhotoLicensingOptions readers.

Veer has relaunched its Web site, billing the new treatment as uncomplicated. While Veer still carries traditionally priced stills, it is certainly catering to the no-hassle customer segment with simplified licensing and prices that span the gamut—starting at $1.

Looking for some vacation reading material? Here are some suggestions. If you want to know how successful stock photographers do it, here are links to a series of interviews done over the last couple years. There are lots of different strategies. Some of these photographers are among the world’s most successful. Other’s like Todd Klassy and Holger Mette are relatively new to the business, and have adopted unconventional strategies that may be the wave of the future.

We received 251 individual responses to the online survey, posted in May, that was designed to measure photographer income trends. 81% of the respondents were from the U.S. and Canada. Almost 6% were from the United Kingdom. No other country had more than 5 respondents. For 133 of the 251, revenue was down more than 5% in 2009 than in 2008 (probably in most cases a lot more than 5%).  For 56, revenue was in the plus or minus 5% range and for the remaining 62 revenue was up more than 5%.  Forty-one of the 62 were in the early stages of their careers (1 to 4 years) when revenue can be expected to grow.

The stock-licensing industry remains in the midst of a profound change affecting image production, quality, pricing, distribution and use. Some trends, such as the downward slide of average image prices, have held for years, but there are also newer, paradigm-shifting developments. These include a middle market finally taking shape, the long-predicted microstock shakeout, the fascination with touch computing and all things Apple, a change in the overall content mix and, perhaps most importantly, an evolution of the traditional stock business model from client service-driven boutique to online content-delivery platform.

A 14-month review of data from the leading microstock supports the theory of the fastest-growing industry segment having reached a plateau, with flat unit sales and revenue growth resulting from price increases. The top 198 iStock contributors currently have a combined total of 567,324 images, or about 5.2% of the total collection. In the past six months the collection of this group has grown by an average of more than 10% per contributor with a total of 52,449 images added. Images belonging to these contributors represent 29% of total downloads in the last 14 months.