Yesterday, I received a call from a travel photographer who recently started contributing his work to Getty Images. He has about 200 images from various locations around the world in the collection. He just received a sales report for 3 Premium Access sales, each for
royalties of under $1.00. He wanted to know who he could contact at Getty about such ridiculously low royalties.
I recommended that he contact his Getty picture editor, but he hasn’t been assigned one. He simply uploads his images to the Getty site and waits to see what happens. I’m sure he has signed a contract, but I haven’t seen any details of that document. He has been given no information – and can’t seem to find any information on the website – about who to contact if he has a question.
He was aware that Getty had been
sued by contract photographers for its use of Premium Access pricing and wanted to know how that suit was progressing. I had to tell him that the suit was filed back in 2008 and dropped shortly thereafter due to the likely legal costs of pursuing it. At least one of the major plaintiffs is now out of the business.
I had to tell him that his $1.00 royalties were not unusual. Based on my analysis of the sales of some of Getty’s major contributors at least one-third of 2018 sales were for gross fees of
less than $5.00, about 73% of sales for gross fees of less than $20 and the average overall of all sales was
about $29.
What Are Getty’s Normal Prices
I asked him what he had expected the normal price for the use of one of his images to be? He said $500.
He pointed me to the price schedule next to his images on the Getty site. It says the fee to license a Large file of the image is $499 and an Extra Small (which is all many people need for Internet use) is $50.
| Extra small |
$50 |
| Small |
$175 |
| Medium |
$375 |
| Large |
$499 |
I had to tell him that the only customers who pay those prices are ones who have never purchased an image from anyone before and who also believe it is highly unlikely they will ever need to license an image again. They know nothing about the stock photo business.
Anyone with any kind of regular need for images knows enough to call Getty and negotiate a Premium Access deal.
Initially
Premium Access deals were for those few customers who spent over $10,000 a month with Getty. These customers would get more images than they normally purchased for a slightly lower price.
But Getty has steadily lowered the basic monthly buy-in and increased the number of downloads allowed to the point that virtually everyone can get whatever volume of images they need for whatever price they are willing to pay.
Most of the other Subscription offerings in the industry are for a fixed price for a certain number of images per month. If the customer needs more images, then she needs to purchase a different subscription package. There are usually a small number of fixed price packages.
I have never actually negotiated a Premium Access deal with Getty, but I think each deal is unique. That’s great for the customer. Not so good for the image creator. Here’s how I think PA deals work. The customer says, “I may need up to X (lets say 50) images a month and I can afford to pay Y (lets say $400) a month.” The Getty sales person says, “OK,” pretty much for any offer. The sales person may try to push for a little better price, but he doesn’t want to lose the customer. The big problem, of course, is that there in no bottom line. No price is too low.
Getty keeps track of the number of images the customer actually downloads (say 40) and divides that into the gross revenue collected (say $400). Thus, each image earns $10. Getty keeps 80% ($8.00 per image or $320) and pays out
$2.00 to each contributor.
As we ended the call I think the photographer had decided not to upload any more images to Getty and probably remove the images he has there if he isn’t prohibited from removing them by contract. I suspect that many of the more recent contributors have come to the same conclusion.