How to maximize your earnings?

This is the follow up article to the one I published earlier this week about the value we put on our art“. Although I talk a lot about “images”, I’m using that as a bit of a shorthand to include videos as well. The key message that I ended with in that article was the following:

Your aim should be to maximize the earnings of your portfolio with the minimum effort needed to achieve those earnings

Exclusivity – a club for you?

Firstly, a word about exclusivity. There are stock agencies where you can be an exclusive contributor (iStock was a big proponent of this in the past) and you received a higher share of the purchase price. There are others such as Pond5 where you can mark some assets as exclusive and put a higher price on them and gain an extra share of that price as well. Alamy also has an exclusive setting. I can see the benefit of this to the agency – they get imagery that can’t be found elsewhere and a dominant agency (as iStock arguably was in the early days) can market this as a real advantage to buying from them. But what is the benefit to the buyer? Exclusivity to them means that no-one else can use that image, so that if they license it for a product, similar products with the same image won’t appear. But that is not what is being offered here – in fact, I would argue that the current use of “Exclusive” could put some buyers off – they get nothing and they have to sign up to an agency they haven’t used before to use that image and they may have to pay more for it as well?? Do any of us really believe that our images and videos are so unique that someone would go out of their way, sign up for an account and pay more to use that specific image? There must be rare cases where this is true, but I remain convinced that “exclusive” is a good marketing pitch for an agency, but brings few benefits to a contributor.

Multiple agencies, then?

I think there are maybe three basic types of buyer.

• An employee of a company where the company maintains an account at one or more agencies and the employee is required to use those agencies
• A self employed buyer obtaining images for their own site or use with a subscription type account at one of the major agencies. They are unlikely to have an account at more than one
• A self employed buyer looking for images on a case by case basis and buying them as required

Only the latter buyer would normally search on Google images to find the sort of image they want (maybe checking the images from free stock sites first) and then buying what they want from the site that both has the image in question and is reasonably priced. The other two categories will tend to start with their chosen agencies and only go elsewhere if they can’t find something suitable. So to maximize our earnings, we should be on all the agencies that buyers are likely to use – subject to the final clause in my statement above “with the minimum effort”. I’ve written extensively about the use of Stock Submitter and Microstock Plus as key tools to allow me to support 15 or so agencies with no extra effort above that needed to support just one. I’m amazed with the comments on the Shutterstock forum about people searching now for agencies beyond just Shutterstock – threatening to upload to Adobe, for instance, or talking to Pond5 about uploading images there. For goodness sake – what were these people thinking? How could they have thought they were stock photographers and only uploading to one agency?

It seems absolutely clear to me that if you want to maximize your earnings, you must submit to multiple agencies. The only question is whether you should submit all your images to every agency, or save your “best” images for agencies that pay more for each download? The most obvious current example is Alamy where net payments of over $100 are not that rare. Other sites have higher value collections – Getty for instance – although getting in there is very difficult I believe, unless you get in via partners such as EyeEM. This question of maximizing your earnings by selective uploads is what I really want to concentrate on.

Ideal world scenarios

If every stock agency paid about the same amount of money, then submitting to all would be the most sensible approach. That would catch all our three groups of buyers outlined above. Of course, they aren’t all the same. The other ideal scenario would be if all contributors decided to put their best images on Alamy, say, and it became known that for those sort of images, Alamy was the only place to go and you needed to pay for those images. Of course, we know what happens when you try to herd cats…

We struggle as well, with what sort of images are “best” and command a higher payment? In the good old days of high quality magazines, National Geographic would pay dearly for world class photographers to spend months on an article and would be willing to license new images at high prices to keep their magazine at the top of the quality charts. What is today’s equivalent? I’ve no idea and I struggle to see what sort of image these days would command a massive premium when we talk about “quality” or “artistic merit”. I know that Alex Rotenberg spent a lot of effort choosing his best shots and submitting on an exclusive basis to Robert Harding, where they went through an editor who finally chose what they would accept. His results from that have been pitiful.

What was suggested in that Alamy forum post I mentioned in the previous article was that scarce or difficult to find (or take) images should command a higher premium, especially if the usage was such that the writer needed to use a photo of that specific item in their article. There was a sort of unwritten thought that if photographers understood this and put common photos on microstock and scarce images on Alamy, then we would all benefit from higher prices on those images. That made me think as I have my own collection of images of out of the way places and things that you could argue should do best on Alamy. So here is the result of my investigation.

Dante Alighieri

Out of the way in Washington DC is a statue of Dante Alighieri. I went there in 2012 and took a few pictures and uploaded them (as is my wont) to all agencies. This statue is well off any tourist areas to Washington and so only a local or dedicated stock photographer would go there and take the time to keyword and upload it. Why am I talking about this? I saw a sale this week for $8 net on Alamy and thought this was an ideal example of a scarce image that people should search for and pay for. It is not the sort of thing that would be used generically to advertise a vacation in Washington DC, after all.

So if someone really needed this image for a story, how would they find it? Starting with Google images, I find this:

I included the words “stock photo” in the search so I got images that you could actually purchase. I still get mainly Alamy images without this restriction. Some of those are mine, but other photographers have been there as well. So this would seem to suggest that if I had put my image solely on Alamy, I would have got the best price for this image? That was the surprise, though. Here are my results over the years on these images:

And splitting this out into individual sales:

What is interesting here is that there were two sales for almost $30 on Shutterstock – one in March this year and one back in 2016. Now you could argue that if I had only had this image on Alamy in 2016, I would have got a much higher priced sale back then – that could be true.

The Bottom Line

What does this tell us? Would some effort on my part in separating out images from my various travels (I think this analysis is more about remote or offbeat places and things) into ones that had generic appeal for any article about a place or region that would go to the microstock sites and other more specialized or unique images solely going to Alamy have generated more income? This one-off analysis of one image might suggest no – I got sales of this image from people that presumably started searching on the agency they had an account with and found my image. Would they have been allowed to use Alamy and pay more? Would they have used something similar from the agency they started with? I can’t answer that either, unfortunately. And how would I decide what would be specialized and destined for Alamy and what would go to the cheaper microstock agencies? I don’t really know how to answer that.

I looked through my best seller list on Microstockr Pro to see which image I would count as being “off the beaten track” and I was almost at the bottom of page 2 (of 100 images each) before I found this one of Accra:

And, as you can see, this has sold on multiple “microstock” sites. Would it have done better just on Alamy – again, it is hard to say!

So my conclusion is that without a consistent approach from many contributors to only put these scarce images on higher paying sites (which will never happen), and with the difficulty in defining what is a scarce image (without searching the databases of the main agencies for each image that “might” make the cut), I still come down on the side of uploading all images to all sites. I know I am probably hurting fellow photographers who only submit to Alamy, I’m probably helping to devalue photography as a paying profession, but this is a global industry without rules, I’m afraid.