Jorgen Udvang
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 p.2 #10 · She sold image for $1.60 and is now complaining! | |
If I was an artist, I would care about the value about my work, but I try to make a living from this, so I care more about the profit. I currently do traditional stock as well as micro. If I had to choose one, I'm afraid I would have to choose the one that pays my rent, my food and my cameras. If that is called undervaluing my work, so be it.
If I become a better, more clever photographer in the future, that may change, but at the moment, I'm not clever enough.
A few additions to all this: I'm not particularly fond of selling images cheap, and I disagree strongly with the policies of some microstock agencies (20% commissions, subscriptions etc.). However, that doesn't change the realities:
- The micros are here to stay
- They are taking over certain parts of the stock photo market
- They have opened up new markets, markets that would never pay hundreds of dollars for a photo anyway
- Microstock represent an excellent profit possibility for a lot of photographers
- Most photographers who do microstock have never even tried traditional stock, and they couldn't care less if the old marketplace is undermined
- Most of those who do sell through traditional stock agencies as well as micro agencies, make a much better profit (dollars per image per year) from the micros than from the traditional ones
When a publisher publishes a book, the photos in that book live for years, and for x number of reprints. Now, a photo on the internet lives for a couple of months, weeks and sometimes only for a few hours. For that kind of usage, expecting the same pay per photo as 20 years ago is naive. The money isn't there and/or the buyers aren't willing to pay.
You can of course always start negotiating, and tell the website owner that he should buy your photo for 400 dollars instead of some p&s maniac's photo for 10 bucks, but before you have even started negotiating, he is in another place, looking for another photo, and the guy with the p&s has added 2 or 3 or 5 dollars to his stack of silver coins. while you get nothing.
There are obviously lots of exceptions to the rule, and babies being thrown out with the water, like a recent front page of Time, that contained a manipulated version of a microstock photo. Not only did the photographer get a minimal pay, but he wasn't even credited. Bad, bad, bad.
At the current rate, a couple of hundred thousand images are added to the microstock agencies every week. And here we are, discussing if it's good for business or not. I don't think it helps.
Edited on Jul 27, 2008 at 12:47 AM
|
Maybe we need to use aliases?