Microstock to license your photos

[haven]

Expedition travelers often take photos of their journeys. These photos of gnarly action and beautiful nature can have commercial value. But how to license them?

"Microstock" is a new way for amateur and pro photographers to license their photos for use in magazines, advertising and web sites. Instead of submitting your photos to stock companies like Getty and Corbis, where the chance of your work being accepted is miniscule, now you can post your work on a "microstock" web site.

Here's how it works. You upload your photos, and assign category and key words. You assign a price to license the photo. Companies looking for photos find your photo and pay the license to use it. The microstock web site keeps a percentage of the license fee, and you are paid the rest.

So what's the catch? Most microstock web sites take the lion's share of the licensing fee. For example, iStockPhoto.com (owned by Getty Images) lets you charge a $15 maximum license fee per photo, and the photographer is paid only 20%. SnapVillage.com (owned by Corbis) lets you set a $50 maximum license fee, but you get 30%. Microstockphoto.com lets you keep 35%.

A change is coming soon. Photo sharing site Zooomr.com is working on a Photo Marketplace. They are thinking of permitting a $1000 maximum, and the photographer will get 80% of the royalties. If the idea proves profitable, Zooomr.com will change to a 90/10% split.

Think about microstock when you review the photos from your next trip.

Chip Haven

 

[Scott Brady]

These stock venues are a difficult sell for me. It would cost me more money in time than I would make.

I have had better success with search engine results to my website. Even had a great contact from NG Adventure last year from it.

Making money with images alone is a tough gig.

 

[haven]

website

Well, for those of us that don't own wildly popular websites, microstock is an option.

Microstock has the advantage of making it easy to add lots of descriptive tags to help people looking for a photo to find your particular image. Sure, you might add an ALT tag to your HTML, but that's more time consuming.

Searching using Google Image is like drinking from the proverbial fire hose. A microstock web site makes the process of searching and finding more productive for potential licensees. There must be some reason why Getty paid $50 million to buy the iStockPhoto.com web operation!

The zooomr.com approach is attractive because it's also a free photo sharing site, similar to Photobucket. Upload the photos to share with friends, and add a price tag for licensing.

Chip Haven

 

[Ursidae69]

Thanks for the link Chip, I'll check this out.