November 11, 2019

Royalty Free Is Now The Standard 

Royalty Free is now the standard scam to sell a photographers hard earned efforts.

So Getty finally made an easy decision. They will eliminate Rights Managed (RM) imagery from their clients choices and finally put a dagger in the heart of a business model that protected photographers image uses and paid the photographer a nice fee for their efforts.

I feel that the paragraph that best summarizes why Getty eliminated RM imagery is this,

“Royalty Free (RF) imagery is now the preferred and dominant licensing model for our customers due to the simplicity, value and quality available. Licensing complexity has only led customers to other content and in many cases another provider, as the broader industry is now essentially a RF-only model.”

If we break down this paragraph we will see that Getty was being depleted of customers that were bypassing their web site and going to ShutterStock and Adobe Stock Image.

Their efforts in trying to make RM imagery work for them and the RM photographers one last time was a lost cause from the get go. I don’t believe they gave this “Market Freeze” enough time to work. They just wanted to have an excuse to fall back on if photographers started to complain. If this happened and I am sure it did they had a ready excuse to tell them, that this Market Freeze was the RM photographers last chance and it fizzled. I can’t remember right off hand when they began this approach to selling RM through Market Freeze, even the title of this new approach seems off kilter, by hiding Rights Managed Imagery on their site in a new RM downgrade, separating our RM images from their main goal of selling only RF images showed the photographers still shooting RM our time in the spotlight was long gone.  

After the limited time Market Freeze was supposedly up and running on the Getty site I would go on the site and look for my images. It took me many attempts, jumping through an assortment of categories that eventually would bring up my imagery but not all of them. If it took me this overwhelming amount time to just get to my images I am sure the customer/art director must have been so frustrated to the breaking point she/he just gave up, forget this BS, and either went to a different source or just went with how easy the access was with Royalty Free on the Getty sight. I don’t believe Market Freeze was up and running form more than 2-3 months.

What a great name for RM, Market Freeze. We are freezing out the Rights Managed photographers. They have already lost their life style to a royalty (payment) system degrading year after year as RF crept closer and closer, undermining the photographers control of over his image creations, like a rotten apple in a barrel of delicious apples, eroding any chance for a photographer to make a living creating photographs in the Right Managed market place. 

Back in the 80’s and early 90’s their was something called respect for the photographers and their efforts making great images for the market place and if a client paid for the rights of an image and then tried to extent that usage past a certain negotiated date then an extra fee was sent to the business and the photographer received an extra payment. 

I can remember when we heard the first inklings of this new business model called Royalty Free. What was it how did it work? As we learned more and more about it it turned our stomachs and made us sick. 

We couldn’t believe a photographer would give away his image creation for pennies on the dollar. And then have no rights to rebill the client if he used that image on another campaign. And now in this ever cheapening of image creation add the word Forever without any means for the photographer to be reimbursed for that extended usage is absolutely crazy.  

It is a new era of greed by the Photo Agencies who have abandoned common sense and have left the creators of imagery at the mercy of the market place. I believe Royalty Free is not royalty free for the agency but for the photographer who receives 20% of the sale. I can see why Getty wants to eliminate RM. It is harder to negotiate pricing and it takes a good editor

to see the potential of the images submitted. In the past we trusted our editors. They were our friends and we had continuous contact with them in getting ideas where to travel and ideas for shots. But a good editor always let the photographer choose his course when making his own personal expression, his photos. 

Our sales staff in the old days negotiated a fair price for the image, a 50/50 split between the Photographer and the Stock Photo Agency. We were on equal footing. And because of the openness of the agency with the photographer you felt inspired to travel and create the very best image possible, by waiting for the unique light that would enhance the subject and also the price of the photograph. 

I wonder if Getty’s move to exploit the photographers by migrating them over from RM to RF isn’t also a cost cutting measure by eliminating editing jobs. I thing we can safely say yes on that. For all the royalty free corporation brag about is the ease of selecting an image and then automatically buying it and using it without any restrictions. It is as easy as pie and oh yeah, cheap. 

Now with cell phones and digital cameras, everybody is a photographer and the billions of snap shots taken daily get posted or accepted into Royalty Free Corporation.  

And that is what they are corporations, with only one thing on their mind and that is profit. Not the photographers who go out of their way to create beautiful images but the bottom line, keeping the investors happy with a growing market share.

Photography isn’t for fun anymore, it is a giving away your image rights to people that couldn't care less about you and what you earn from your image creation. 

What you earn now is pennies on the dollar from your RF imagery. Oh yeah, you also get an ego boost from selling your image on the cheap! 

Tell me how does that feel!