January 21, 2020

Royalty Free Scam

What is it about corporate investors that they have to reduce every possible business take over for only one purpose certainly not for the employees welfare but for their own profits?  Business today is not a people focus adventure to make workers lives better but a money making opportunity and that is all that matters, the bottom line of cash into their bank accounts. 

When big business/industry gets involved in any new unique selling venture opportunity it doesn’t take long for that particular business to be dismantled in order for the powers that be to funnel the majority of the profits upward and away from the workers that make the product they sell. They dismantle the core business, selling off as much as they can and leaving the employees without any new potential to get a good paying job.

We see it time and time again in the criminal behavior of corporate industry that invests in another companies business model, that was doing great, an upward arch and the original owner felt that having big money interest would help propel his company into the stratosphere.

What it did was sink into oblivion.

This wave of concentrated assimilation of other businesses into one entity is the corporate raiders  determined greed, externalized, destroying workers rights, unions and wages!  

And the stock photography market place is the latest to be undermined and destroyed by big business.

As in any take over of a business the employees are the ones that get the shaft first and in the stock photography business the photographers were the first to feel the hard slap in their face. 

Their image creation was the fuel that lifted these small photo agencies up into becoming a collaborative journey for the agency owners and the photographers. 

As in any take over the undermining of the photographers profits started slowly but then escalated into a frenzy of diminishing returns for the photographer.

This undermining our share in the profits of our own individual work, led to the inability of the stock photographer to earn a decent living in what he loved doing, creating great images, through his individual personal vision.

The big dollar pot went upstairs to the money men while the photographers got shafted.

Lets be honest stock photography had a great business model in its origin where the photo agency received 50% and the stock photographer received 50% of the sale to their clients. 

The agency and the photographer were a team working together creating images the clients needed.

It was the best of worlds back in the early 80’s until big money began buying up agency after agency in the mid 1990s, consolidating their monopoly on a mom and pop run business model. And then began shortchanging the photographer by lowering his half of the sale. 

Photographers built the stock photo business with their visual talent but through the decades that followed, as more and more people worldwide purchased their digital cameras and began snapping pictures there was an ocean swell of photographers that gave their images away mostly for free and these cheap images hurried the downfall of the Right Managed business model (where the photographer was paid well for his efforts) which ended up becoming obsolete, and evolved into the Royalty Free scam where the profits mainly go to the two giants of the stock photography world Getty Images, ShutterStock and not into the pockets of the photographer who made the image. 

You might ask what is the Royalty Free pricing strategy? Well, the photographer will get 20% and the agency will get 80%, nice isn’t it. But I believe that 20% will soon become 10% and then the photographers will just give their work away for free most do now for an ego rush!

When you think about all the images created in a single day, billions and billions of images by people taking snap shots and then sending them into RF agencies to be sold for pennies on the dollar you can see why this RF model works well for the agency but is literally stealing money from the creator of the agencies image base, the photographer.

The stock photo corporations have done the math so they claim and they state you can do pretty good financially by taking RF images. When you finally wake up from the agencies propaganda you will soon realize that there touting RF is a scam and your talents as a photographer are being used as decoys, a fantasy world of happy faces, loving embraces, as you submit the cliche images demanded, when in the past the true image creators sought to photograph the world as it is, a place of violence, pollution and racism.

As the corporate propaganda machine infiltrates your mind with receptive images of happy people not helping others but buying products and envying an ageless man and woman holding hands looking out over a vineyard with a beautiful sunset, their love assured forever. And the photographers are now part of the scam to keep the people complacent, wanting only to maintain their way of life as the poor suffer for the sins of the corporate greed for money and power.

And to ad insult to injury you discover that Rights Managed is a dying market place because most of the business community addicted to cheap labor and cheap prices for their ads that used to cost them thousands, tens of thousands of dollars for an ad. That dinosaur is on its last leg and will soon disappear from the stock photography world. 

In today's market of fast food photography even the editors are facing a losing battle to keep their jobs. Pretty soon all will be done automatically, search, find, and pay your pennies and then upload the image selected to your computer and lay out your ad and bingo it is done. 

With the death of RM you really won’t have a choice but to sell your images to the client yourself. Good luck with that, businesses today are run by greedy kids that think they’re the next bozo and they won’t pay for anything that is not dirt cheap for they have to save their boss some cash in order to get their monthly bonus!

You can’t live on the stock photography split of twenty per-cent.  You can’t feed your family, pay your rent, your utilities, kids clothes, school etc… welcome to the new age of photography. Submit your hard earned photographs to the stock house who accepts your efforts and then treats you like worker ants to get out there and shoot and shoot making money for the boss but while you live in poverty. 

The new age of photography income becoming waiting in line at a food bank to get canned food for your family.