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Strategies for Successful Stock Photography, Part 4 |
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Written by Richard Weisgrau
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Friday, 10 March 2006 |
 The preceding article in this series outlined a long-term strategy for the stock photography business. That strategy is not one that an individual photographer could adopt, it is only one the individual could support, if and when agencies have a mind to adopt it. It requires a sea change in the stock photography marketplace.
I also promised to offer individual photographers some strategies for making more revenues from their stock photography. This article and the next three articles will each deal with one of the four types of stock photography: rights protected, rights managed, royalty free, and micro stock.
In installment 2
of this series I wrote: “Rights protected refers to licenses that have
some level of exclusivity. For example an exclusive license to use a
photograph might be for consumer magazine advertising in North America
for a period of two years. That means you cannot license the same photo
for use in advertising in consumer magazines in North America until the
two-year term expires.
With the exception of
the exclusivity rights protected licensing is the same as rights
managed licensing.” However, unlike rights managed stock, to engage in
rights protected stock photography licensing you must assure the
management of four important functions:
1) You must know the previous licensing history of any image that comes into the rights protected collection.
2) You must have a system for perpetually tracking and/or recalling on
demand all rights licensed before and after any image comes into the
collection.
3) You have to find the clientele that needs your images and sell them.
4) You must be prepared to negotiate one-on-one and not be limited to automatic licensing systems.
Since you understand the nature of exclusive licensing the first two functions listed above must be perfectly clear to you. Tracking and recording rights is critical to exclusive licensing so you never license conflicting rights. If you do, you have infringed your own copyright rights that you have transferred exclusively to another party.
Number 3 has all to do with finding who is a likely prospect for rights protected stock. Generally, the best prospects for making sales of exclusive licenses are advertising agencies that are serving large corporate clients who in turn are selling intangibles and services. Products are usually advertised by showing pictures of the products. Intangibles and services are more often pictured by showing pictures of the benefit or the results. The happily insured family, the pest free house, the mountain you ought to climb, etc. are all examples of photographs that might be used to sell intangibles or services.
The fact is that most stock agencies do not look for rights protected sales. Their systems are not set up for that. They are high volume/low to medium price operations. If and when they license exclusive rights it is usually because a prospect found the agency. If the agency has the rights history, and can regulate the future licensing of the image, then it might make a sale. That is not the way to engage in rights protected licensing.
Any photographer with a bit of initiative can market and license rights protected stock him or herself. Is it worth doing? It is if you do it right. And you ought to do it, if you are a serious stock photographer even if you are represented by agencies for rights managed, royalty free, and micro stock. You ought to do it because a good business strategy requires that you diversify your operations. Royalty free is high volume/low price. Rights managed is medium volume/medium price. Rights protected is low volume/high price. The marketplace is diverse, and you can only capitalize on that diversity by going after business at every level. Leave the high volume work to agents. You cannot make money on it after you take the actual cost of doing business into account. If you want larger profits, then go where the larger profits are, low volume/high price licenses.
Here is an example of how I sell rights protected stock photographs. Each year for a decade I spent a summer week in southern New Hampshire vacationing and photographing. During that period, I photographed Mount Monadnock, a local attraction that many thousands of tourists climb and hike every year. There is only one place where you can get a truly dynamic composition of the Mountain. Unfortunately, the lighting on the Mountain is usually bad from that vantage point. You need a perfectly clear day with few clouds and a bright sun to get the color and texture to show properly. During the ten weeks over ten years I experienced that day one time. I made what might be a perfect shot of the mountain and the huge pond at its base on the south side. Did I place it with a stock agency? No, of course not! Why? It was too good a shot to be wasted on a brochure for $150. Instead, I researched all the business in the region that used the word Monadnock in their name. There were lots of them. Then I solicited them offering the exclusive use of the photograph for a limited number of years. A few companies showed interest. Negotiations began, and in the end I licensed the photograph for five years of exclusive use to one company for $7500 for regional advertising use. I had no agent’s commission to pay, and I had little marketing work to do. The critical steps were finding a prospective client and negotiating the deal. I estimate that the photograph might have earned as much as $2500 in a rights managed collection and less in a royalty free collection. Of course, I would have seen only 60 to 20 percent of that amount. Logically, I preferred the deal I made myself.
Understandably, making rights protected sales requires initiative, negotiating skills, and a prospect in need of an iconic photograph that symbolizes something that the prospect wants to sell. I’ll bet you have photographs like that. The question is what are you doing with them?
Go to Part 5
(c) 2006 Richard Weisgrau [contact] [bio]
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Last Updated ( Monday, 20 March 2006 )
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