So how does that bode for the future of Rights Managed stock?  In my opinion, not well.  By establishing a stock photography option with flat pricing and high resolution, it most assuredly will cut into Rights Managed sales. Assuming that the other agencies adopt a similar type of pricing as Getty’s Rights Ready, and why wouldn’t they, the choice between Rights Ready and Rights Managed will become one made on the basis of content only. When you couple that fact with the buying realities of Royalty Free and Microstock the picture you get looks like this. The buyer searches until he or she finds the desired image in Microstock first as the cheapest option, then in Royalty Free, and then in Rights Ready. Only when one of those options fails to produce the desired image does the buyer look in Rights Managed. Of course there will be exceptions due to the limited file sizes of Microstock and Royalty Free, and sometimes Rights Ready’s flat price will be higher than a low end use in Rights Managed, but the broad scope looks very much like what I painted here. The stock photography licensing ladder now has a new rung, and buyers will climb that ladder from the bottom up stopping where they find what they want.

So what will keep Rights Managed viable? Rights Managed stock will have to offer something that none of the other options offer. There are only two things that can fit that criterion. Rights Managed stock will survive on the basis of originality and limited exclusivity. Buyers who are looking for something that is not available in one of the other options will buy Rights Managed stock. Those Rights Managed collections that can offer licensing exclusivity on an image and that track the rights as licensed for each image will be able to offer limited exclusivity on many images. In short, Rights Managed will include Rights Protected stock. So the stock photography licensing ladder will have five rungs from bottom to top: Microstock, Royalty Free, Rights Ready, Rights Managed, and Rights Protected. And the winner is anybody’s guess.

As for me, I started this series of articles speculating that maybe it was time for me to drop my archaic opposition to licensing models other than Rights Managed and Rights Protected. But the more I look at the online collections that make up the lower rungs of the ladder, the more I realize that I do not want to do that because I would only place my second rate images in such services. The fact is that I don’t want my second rate images in the marketplace. Yes, I could use an alias to market second rate images, but I don’t think the financial return would be worth the time and effort it takes to make those images ready for market. With the huge and still growing number of images in Microstock and Royalty free, the probability of sales is diminished for any participant except those who are placing first rate images into those options. I’ll just stick to Rights Protected and Rights Managed for now. That is not a recommendation. It is just a choice I have made for myself.  Is it the right choice?  That is anybody’s guess.

Next time, I am going to write about what I think Rights managed collections have to become in order to hold their ground or gain ground in today’s shifting marketplace.

(c) 2006 Richard Weisgrau [contact] [bio]