Posts Tagged ‘fair play’
Micro Royalties — A Clarification
January 13th, 2011
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
OK, never let it be said we don’t listen to you.
It would appear that a small majority of our members are threatening to leave fotoLibra if we pay them more money.
Blimey, I really didn’t make myself at all clear in my last blog, did I? I blame the flu.
I think people saw the word MICRO and just stopped reading. Or understanding.
This proposal has nothing whatsoever to do with cash flow. It is merely a new concept to make image buying more attractive. It may not catch on. It may even not work. But the day we stop searching for new ideas and new concepts will be the day fotoLibra subsides into being just another everyday picture library.
Here’s our reasoning. Please note, this is merely for illustrative purposes only, and none of these figures are real.
With MICROSTOCK, photographers are lucky to make 20¢ for each image sold. So they have to sell 250 images before they earn a penny because payouts aren’t triggered till they accumulate $50. And all they will ever earn from that picture sale is 20¢ per picture sold.
But with fotoLibra’s MICRO ROYALTIES proposal, photographers will be paid a portion of the net sales receipts of the book per picture used, just like an author — except of course the portion will be smaller.
They will be paid after each royalty statement, which is usually every 6 months. fotoLibra payments are triggered when the member has accumulated £30 / $50 worth of sales.
The percentage share of the Micro Royalty will be based on fotoLibra’s existing average picture sale, which is $80. We pay photographers 50% (Platinum, 60%).
On our standard licensing model, the fotoLibra photographer receives an average flat payment of $40 when a sale is made.
Under the Micro Royalty system, the idea is that if a book retails at $10 and sells 10,000 copies in 6 months, the fotoLibra photographer will receive a micro royalty of $40 — the same as our standard licensing model.
When / if the book sells 20,000 copies, the fotoLibra photographer will receive a micro royalty of $80.
When / if the book sells 100,000 copies, the fotoLibra photographer will receive a micro royalty of $400.
When / if the book sells a million copies, the fotoLibra photographer will receive a micro royalty of $4,000. Per picture sold.
On our current licensing model, if the book sells a million copies,the fotoLibra photographer receives $40.
I hope this makes it clearer. It seems like fair play to us.
More Microstock Moans
March 16th, 2010
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
I really can’t get my head around microstock websites. The bit I can’t understand is why the participating photographers think so little of their work that they’re prepared to value it so cheaply.
Someone recently asked on a Canon forum “Has anybody had experience of using Fotolibra to sell pictures?” Having just helped send out over 100 sales notifications so far this week I thought I could answer that, but my application to sign up to the forum has not yet been verified.
Someone wrongly assumed fotoLibra was a microstock site and posted an answer linking to three blogs recounting experiences with these kinds of agencies. They weren’t universally positive. Out of interest, here they are:
Microstock Tips | Pixels Away | Erik Kolstad’s Blog
They are not right up-to-the-minute (the market has almost stiffened and died since these figures) but none the less I am astounded at how little these supplying photographers are prepared to accept. Have they no pride in their work?
One wrote:
I’m a climate scientist in Bergen, Norway. Starting in 2008, I have been contributing to a number of stock photography sites. I started out with iStockphoto, and after a while I joined Shutterstock and Dreamstime as well. Now I have quit Shutterstock, largely because of their ridiculous royalty scheme (they pay you $0.25 for each customer download). I’m currently trying out SnapVillage, Fotolia, 123rf.com and the German agency PantherMedia.
I couldn’t help but respond, although unfortunately I do sound a bit sniffy from time to time:
May I correct you? You are not actually trying out stock photography sites, you are trying out MICROstock photography sites.
Proper picture libraries such as fotoLibra.com sell fewer images than the microstock sites because we value the work of photographers more highly, and therefore charge accordingly.
You would probably only sell a fiftieth of what you could sell on a microstock site through fotoLibra.
But you would probably earn a hundred times as much.
Our average picture sale for a rights managed image is €56 / $77 / £51. Standard fotoLibra photographers get 50% of that.
So one fotoLibra sale would normally net you $38.50 / £25.50. That’s the equivalent of 154 sales through Shutterstock.
I think that’s a very compelling argument. I have no doubt the microstock apologists will disagree.
Copyright or no copyright?
July 18th, 2009
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
It’s rare for a picture library to make the national news, but that’s what the National Portrait Gallery managed today.
In March this year a Wikipedia administrator appropriated three thousand high-resolution images from the NPG website and published them to Wikipedia.
The NPG contacted Wikipedia and asked for the removal of the images. Wikipedia ignored the request. So the NPG issued a lawyer’s letter.
A spokesman for Wikipedia, an amazing and wonderful resource which I use daily, eventually deigned to respond — in one of the most arrogant, high-handed, dismissive, patronising, offensive, overweening blogs I have ever had the pleasure to read.
The National Portrait Gallery, the repository of Britain’s heritage of people paintings, is derided as an antiquated, fusty old dinosaur of an organisation, hopelessly out of touch with spiffy new C21 ways. It wants to CHARGE for images, ferkrissake!
Well, you can read it for yourself here.
The comments are a joy, by turns placatory and inflammatory.
And what it all boils down to is this: should everything be free, or should we pay for people’s work?
To which, I guess, everyone at heart would share the same response: everything should be free for me, but I want to be paid for my work.
The Wikipedia / NPG confrontation is a no-brainer; it’s straightforward theft, it’s illegal, and Wikipedia should cease and desist instantly. No argument. Being British, the NPG is unlikely to pursue for damages.
But what I cannot understand is how Wikipedia got its hands on 3,000 hi-res images from the NPG (which, frankly, charges an awful lot of money for the use of its images, so it is no saint either) in the first place? Nor can I understand why it needs them — the NPG has indicated that it is happy to allow Wikipedia to display small lo-res copies of the images, which is all you need on a web site. Why on earth would Wikipedia want to hold on to this stolen property?
And does the NPG have no security? If anyone downloads a hi-res image from fotoLibra, they pay for it. We know all about it. How could the NPG have let three THOUSAND expensive hi-res images slip through their fingers? Or were they hacked?
I think we should be told.