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Getty's Flickr Sales, Money Spinner Or Ripoff?
Barence writes "Photo-sharing site Flickr is offering photographers a new way to cash in on their work. The 'Request to License' scheme allows renowned photo agency Getty to sell photos on behalf of Flickr members. Once part of the scheme, all of the user's photos will carry a Request to License link (users can't select certain photos to license in this way). People wishing to buy the photos are directed to Getty's staff, who 'will help handle details like permissions, releases, and pricing,' according to Flickr. However, the last time Getty sold images on behalf of Flickr members, it led to complaints that photographers were being exploited, with commission on photos as low as $1. So who's doing best out of the deal, photographers or Getty?"
It is good for all concerned !!
It's like Lenin says: you look for the person who will benefit and, uhh.... I'd like to think that those photographers who don't have any representation at the moment and have HIGH QUALITY work to offer will benefit, those with medium and low quality work will suffer. The problem is that those with high quality work would be more likely to have representation outside of the internet, thus leaving the majority of people left to fend for themselves on flickr getting the short end of the stick from Getty. You can't pay them more just because they have low quality work and there are more of them, this is not social welfare. Those that opt in need to understand that there are better ways at getting financial representation for their work. But for those that need a little bit of cash from works they aren't making any cash from, this works fairly well.
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The only value that Getty Images could add would be offering legal services to those who photos are used in violation of whatever the licensing terms are. Any photographer can monetize their photos under a particular license. Unless they are willing to spend time and money to collect royalities that they are due, the license is worthless. Now if Getty Images offers some sort of revenue tracking services, that's a different story. If I were a photographer and Getty Images want to take 10-20% to list my photos in their catalogue and also manage the collection of royalities for me, that would be a good deal.
When I used to consult I worked at an accounting firm that tracked royalities for music artists. That was a labor intensive business.
If the artists get to set the price and the Getty's margin isn't too outrageous, then it would be nice. But I think they were taking a 400% markup last time, which seems rather excessive.
Why don't they just introduce a new tag, 'gettylicense', with everything after the colon being the minimum amount owed.
e.g. 'gettylicense:$5.00'
And maybe another colon for specifiers: 'gettylicense:$5.00:noads' for something that can be licensed for $5.00, isn't available to be used in ads.
Put a set of standard tags together like this, link to them on an FAQ page about the whole scheme, and let people decide on a per photo basis whether or not they want to allow commercial reuse like this.
Doing this with tags instead of something new and separate would expose the ability to upload these permissions along with the photos using whatever tools integrate with Flickr.
Indeed!
Not good news for professional photographers. Yes, many beautiful images are shot by people with access to cool photo equipment, but there is a lot that goes into framing context and theme for a photo that relates to a story, or even an event. This is a money grab by Getty's new owner (In February 2008 it was announced that Getty Images would be acquired by Hellman & Friedman in a transaction valued at an estimated US$2.4 billion). Pro photographers are going to have to start looking for ways to add value to their traditional services. This is a purely disruptive technology and service offering that is going to hurt the professional ranks. Flickr is also making out on this deal. Digital has democratized access to, and creation of, the photographic image. Add Photoshop and it's a whole new world. I know a few professional photographers who have been put out of business by these new technologies. I see this profession going the way of professional writers, who are still trying to figure out how to surf this powerful, disruptive wave of change. I would love to see some ideas posted on this thread about how professional photographers can adapt to these changes, and continue to put their well-honed skills into play to make a living.
This is the market speaking, when photography took days to developed and there was no clearing house for photographs of current events sometimes a shot of a famous person committing a gaffe, a natural or man-made major disaster or some other noteworthy event could make an entire year's salary in a single snapshot. Those days are long since past as there is a glut of digital pics usually within 15 minutes of something happening being uploaded on Flikr or some other site. The same has been happening with news reporting and especially opinion columns that have been outmoded by increasingly well written blogs, aggregate news sites and comments on both that often enough are more insightful than the talking heads on scrolling news channels and op eds by all the but the top tier of news organizations and what people claim is wrong with citizen journalism, namely the amount of noise is becoming far easier to cut through with increasingly sophisticated and reliable moderation systems.
Here is the PDF of the agreement:
https://contribute.gettyimages.com/olc/agreement/sample_agreement
The royalties (that they pay to you) are 20%, 25%, or 30%.
However, that's the price for the ease of use. Basically if you want to sell your photos, nobody is stopping you. You can have your own site, where you sell prints for whatever price yo like, under the terms you like. This lets you do more or less "One click sales." That's a nice feature, but it means you are at the mercy of the person who sets the terms. You have do decide if it's worth it to you.
who is michael, and why do we care?
Just don't license the images via Getty. There, the problem is fixed. Users can easily direct someone to their own site and negotiate sales completely outside flickr. Why is Getty's extortion a problem?
About a year ago I was invited and signed up with Getty through the initial program with Flickr. I had many discussions with friends who are professional photographers about whether or not I should sign up, and most echo what is being said here: the royalty rates are too low. This is a fair assessment; Getty pays between 20% to 30% commission for photos(depending on the license type), far below what most stock and micro-stock agencies will pay. For me however, the other advantages far outweighed the lower royalty rates. Having Getty handle everything is for me worth the fat cut they take. They are a large agency, and do attract a huge amount of customers, most being corporate-use type who are use to paying high amounts for photos. They will go after cases of infringement of photos licensed through them. Finally, I get bragging rights to be able to say I contract with Getty (this makes my pro photographer friends very mad. Now we have an understanding not to mention the "G" word). Basically, once I sat down, counted the cost and the other options, I decided it was worth signing up for. I've made enough money to keep me happy and be able to support my expensive photography habit.
Getty itself is in a interesting position here. For the longest time, stock photography was the domain of professional photographers. With the advent of digital photography, there's a new wave of pro-amateurs that have flourished in sites like Flickr. At the same time, traditional photographers worked themselves into a conformable niche shooting increasingly cliche photos. Creative professionals eventually started noticing they could find more creative photos on sites like Flickr and negotiate dirt-cheap rates directly with the photographer cutting out agencies like Getty out altogether. The deal between Getty and Flickr was smart play from Getty to keep themselves relevant in the changing market. There's still a need for a photo agency to do the middle-man work of contracts, licensing, releases, research, etc., at least for now.
So, in summary, this move is good for Getty, good for non-professional photographers, and not good for existing professional photographers.
btw, if anyone is interested, here's my small catalog on Getty and a shameless plug for my site on Flickr
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
He was also the webmaster of censorware.org (cofounded with Seth Finkelstein, Jaime McCarthy, Bennett Haselton, and others). He generally acted like an asshat deleted the site contents (twice) and hijacked the domain.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
What does getty have to do with photography?
This is a good thing. The whole market for commercial photography is enlarged when a huge number of images ranging from good to excellent becomes available at affordable prices. A few photographers may make less money now, but a far vaster number will make a little money they never would have had. Nobody will mourn most of yesterday's canned, overpriced "stock" images.
I'd settle for pennies per use for my photos depending on the use. If it's a one-time use in a small-circulation disposable brochure like a church bulletin, I'd even prefer "my share" of an annual flat-rate-for-access scheme like the one CCLI offers for music. The artists get paid but the customers don't get nickled and dimed and dollared to death.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Digital cameras aren't the first time something once available to professional photographers became available to everyone.
A century ago, the Brownie camera brought photography to the masses. The coming decades would see at-home developing and printing systems and by the mid-century instant film cameras were becoming available to the masses.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The ideas you speak of - good composition, good artistic sense, and the like - are in the mind of the photographer not the tools he holds in his hands.
At least, they are until we get a good AI inside camera. Then watch out.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Actual recent example: someone's writing an academic book and needs a bunch of 2-by-2-inch stock photos
Taking photographs for my upcoming book so I don't have to pay a stock agency ... I thought that's what underpaid grad students were for. *cue rimshot*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What does getty have to do with photography?
That depends, how many hours before someone adds it to CHDK?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Most photographers in my field who've been open enough to discuss it with me are on a 50/50 deal with their agency. So this is a pretty poor offer.
It's a particularly odd turn of events in concert photography. Whereas those of us who do it with a pass are tied to 3 (or less sometimes) songs, no flash, from a particular shooting position and potentially restrictive contracts, the kid who sneaks an SLR in, or happens to get good shots can apparently now license their images in a way that wasn't authorised and as pros we wouldn't be allowed to.
Maybe they'll crack down on cameras at concerts. Who knows?
...the ego is so much more.
If you feel the love you'll fork out the $25 to flickr to be "pro" which means that you'll have an even larger capacity to exhibit your work. Others may be motivated by the desire of a vocation or creative challenge, in a flat job market. Vanity Press offerings will tie in nicely with this type of professional incentive.
If great painters have to die to be valued then semi pro photographers must go broke buying pricey apparatus. Its a pay to play incentive to get hooked into that annual pro fee.
Stock images are usually boring, uninspired snapshots used to occupy otherwise empty space. Using a photograph of high artistic quality can inspire people to imagine beyond the text; I don't think enough people take the time to understand and respect that.
Well said, as long as you don't overdo it and don't ignore the value of space-filler photos.
If I'm a high school teacher teaching math, I don't want a boring book with boring diagrams that bore kids, but I don't want a book filled with high-excitement, high-draw photos that collectively distract from the lesson.
Even if every photo is dead-on-relevant to the lesson and is a high impact photo, one on every page would be like too many spices in a 5-star restaurant dinner.
You need the right balance between pages with no pictures, "space filler" pictures, pages with relevant but non-high-impact pictures, and the occasional very high impact, very relevant picture so the book serves its intended purpose without anything distracting from that purpose.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Getty is in the business of making money, they might dress it up with the "need to inform" or "supplying power visual media", but at the end of the day shareholders need to get paid, if they can do this through some cheaper means and still make the cash they need, they will. So my big prediction; flickr users are going to get used!!!
at work. Low quality drives out high quality.
doesn't it?
"Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century."
Great way to sell your soul for a few bucks.
I shoot editorial content for WireImage / Getty Images and can most assuredly say that I get 50% of net royalties on whatever they license. In the last twelve months, I've earned $2832 in royalties; not my most productive year but, then again, I've only shot eleven events for them in that period... probably a a total of one weeks worth of work on aggregate.
Also, on three other occasions I was asked to file a set of images as a "stringer" - that's a short way of saying "work for hire" i.e. I'd get a one-time fee for the pictures which Getty would then wholly own. I was paid $225 for each time I worked on such basis.
http://www.ripoffs.org/gettyimageslawsuit
Photography is easy. Seriously really easy. It is to art like golf is to physical sports. Sure there are a lot of extra things you can learn to get a great photo BUT to get a pretty nice photo it really doesn't take much talent at all. Often an eye for art and colour a little info on composition and you are there, buy a nice camera and learn some Photoshop touch up techniques.
There is only room in the world for a handful of full time photographers. And the majority of the reason they are the people making money isn't intrinsic ability but the skill to sell BS. There are 4.7 billion pictures on Flickr. That more than faaar more than covers the need for most photographs. Need a picture of stonehenge? You have 32,200 pictures to choose from. Look at only the top 1% of those, assume the rest is garbage. You've got 322 to choose from for the angle/lighting you want. Maybe there will be 5% of them in the right set up. You have 15 artists now with similar pics to compete on price. One of them likely took it without really giving a shit and will let you use it for a buck or nothing.
Photography is going to die. As everyone gets cameras the law of a million monkeys comes into play (AND old pictures aren't going anywhere). Within 10years flickr will probably have 20billion pictures to chose from.
You are dealing with supply and demand here. Supply is increasing exponentially while demand is very slowly moving upwards. Get over it.
OT: Music will follow this trend eventually given a big enough population and people in wealthy enough positions to spend time learning instruments. (Youtube music is the start of this trend). Only a tiny fraction of people that can play an instrument will make money. Likely a much higher % than photographers due to logistics but the trend will happen.
Unless they are willing to spend time and money to collect royalities that they are due, the license is worthless. Now if Getty Images offers some sort of revenue tracking services, that's a different story. If I were a photographer and Getty Images want to take 10-20% to list my photos in their catalogue and also manage the collection of royalities for me, that would be a good deal. http://latestnewscheck.blogspot.com/2010/06/tel-launches-suns-world-cup-song-from.html