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Strategies for Successful Stock Photography, Part 6 |
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Written by Richard Weisgrau
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Wednesday, 22 March 2006 |
 The name Royalty Free ought to give anyone buying it pause because it is a gross misrepresentation of the truth. I have sometimes wondered whether it is a violation of the truth in advertising laws. A royalty, is a sum of money paid for the use of intellectual property that is protected by patent, trademark or copyright law. Since users are paying to use any photograph in a royalty free collection they are paying royalties. The naming of the royalty free stock model only demonstrates one or both of two things. These who did it intentionally decided to mislead the user, or they are not too educated. You pick!
OK, now that we have established that I don’t like the royalty free licensing model, let me say that it is here to stay until a new model replaces both it and rights managed as I wrote about in part 3 of this series. So, the question is what strategy can you adopt, if you choose to participate in royalty free? First, get it into your head that participating today in royalty free is not contributing to the decline of the business. Royalty free has already done that without your help. The business is what it is. Next, decide whether your situation is a good fit with the royalty free model. Let’s look at who fits with that model.
Royalty free is a high volume business. Much of it is being methodically produced by a relatively few photographers. Some hire models and rent or build sets to shoot for a day or two on a certain theme. Others turn high production shooting assignments into inventory. The former type is easy to understand. It takes capital to finance shoots, some project planning skills, and an insight into what will eventually be in demand from buyers. It’s a risk, but the savvy photographer can make money that way. The latter type is less risky but not easily achieved because it requires access and client support. But it can be done, and one photographer I know has done it.
He shoots winter sports. He acquires assignment clients who set him up to shoot events that they sponsor. He provides the client with one year of exclusive use to the images, and he shoots for perhaps two or three days in a row on a time plus expenses basis. At the end of three days he might have 5,000 images in the can. They go to the client for first pick. Then he edits the images into the more unique and the generic. When the exclusive use period expires, the more unique images go to rights managed stock. The more generic images go to royalty free. He earns about $100,000 a year from assignments. He earns $200,000 a year from stock, almost equally from rights managed and royalty free. He takes little risk because his assignment clients finance the shooting, and he can generate the kind of volume that it takes to get many images into royalty free to be able to earn substantial returns.
What does that mean? If you can finance high volume shooting through assignment clients, and the subject matter is stock oriented, then you can probably make good money in royalty free. Remember, royalty free is a high volume/low price model. If you are not going to produce volume, you are unlikely to make much money. How can you produce volume if your assignments don’t allow it? You either have to do planned productions or concentrate shooting on a few subjects you have access to on a regular basis. For example, let’s say that you live near an agricultural area. You could spend you time shooting agriculture related photographs and ignore other subjects. Over a couple of years you could have thousands of such images that might yield hundreds or more that are suitable for royalty free stock. That is volume. The keys are volume plus subject matter that fits the needs of buyers of royalty free. What kind of subjects and photos are those? Just visit Getty Images or Corbis online and you can easily find out by searching royalty free collections.
Keep this important thing in mind however. Generally, royalty free sells for less than half the price of rights managed and it pays 20% rather than 40% of the sale. So, an image in rights managed that brings $100 will bring only $50 in royalty free. You would earn $40 on the rights managed shot but only $10 on the royalty free shot. So you have to do four times the volume of sales to make the same return. That means four times the volume. The simple strategy for winning in royalty free is to shoot the right subject matter in high volume.
Go to to Part 7
(c) 2006 Richard Weisgrau [contact] [bio]
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 30 March 2006 )
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