February 8, 2020

Stock Photography a Bad Business Model For Future Photographers

Once the genius’s of Getty and Shutterstock began competing with each other by lowering and lowering the price structure and royalty percentages for their photographers image creations on their web sites the only conclusion a photographer could foresee in his photographic career was that this is the end of making a living at creating great Stock Images. Why would a professional photographer continue to submit to an agency that gives him 20% of the penny sales?

And not only the disgusting split with their photographers but also the fact that they have eliminated Rights Manage Images from their vocabulary and everything they sell now is Royalty Free where their buying clients get to use the photographers hard earned efforts, our images, over and over again without any further penalty of cost.

A great business model for the agencies but a lousy one for the photographers. So what sayeth the goliath’s of the Stock clearing houses, we are in charge and you are the suckers that still contribute to us so we must be doing something right. Wrong, you have imploded a business model that worked well for decades but you didn’t like the photographers getting their fair share of their hard earned efforts so you created a destructive business model that now is coming back to haunt you. 

And the name of this terror with more to follow is called UnSplash a stock company that doesn’t price their images at all but gives the images away for free.

Yeehaw how about that for a business model. The writing was on the wall for a long time given the free images the Creative Commons has been giving away for decades.

Currently, according to statistics that Jim Pickerell’s ‘Selling Stock’ has published in Weekly Digest, it looks like UnSplash has 70,263,886 downloads per month compared with Shutterstock’s 15,433,333 downloaded per month. You don’t need to be a mathematician to see the writing on the future wall of stock photography, it is dying a fast death and soon it will go extinct.

Getty has known for years what the outcome would be if competition began to intrude over their victory platform at the pinnacle of the Stock Photo Market HayDay. 

Getty knew this day would come and late last year decided to abandoned Rights Managed image sales on their website. I believe this was not because they couldn’t make money still off the rights managed imagery but they decided a while ago to become strictly royalty free because they wanted to eliminate jobs.  It takes a knowledgable editor and sales person to negotiate a good price for Getty and thus for the photographer. By eliminating these jobs Getty saves money because selling RF images doesn’t need any negotiations. Each price is set and the client buys the image or not, all done electronically.

What are we left with in this mad dash to the bottom in the stock photo business? Well, we have less professionals and millions and millions of amateurs taking images and giving them away for free in an ego massage of look at me I got my image published for nothing.  A great business model for everyone to get excited about.

I believe with the erosion of professional photographers leaving the stock field we will see a decline in the quality and subject matter from the new kids on the block. What I see now is not photography as an art form but rather a snap shot of something that might or could be interesting, if the new-bees stayed around longer and explored the subject instead of clicking away and missing the real revelation of perception, your unique vision.

The redundancy of images being submitted is unnerving with no originality that gives us any hint into the purpose and the personality of the photographer. What we see now is mostly generic images with no depth and authenticity.
  

Only a slew of copycat photos that are saying nothing more than surface value. What we are seeing is millions of photographers running around copying someone else’s image creation on a lesser note and then submitting to an agency that doesn’t care about the image maker but only sales volumes.

What we see is cookie cutouts of smiling faces with happy families that will be used by wealthy corporation basically for free.

Give me a break in this exploitation of photographers that do all the heavy lifting creating great images only to see them selling for pennies on the dollar. And now the competition is giving images away for free.  What a business this stock photo agency debacle has become. 

In this devastating economy of greed there is no happy photographers, the stress and lowering of image prices basically undermined any purpose to keep submitting to these stock houses that have basically destroyed the livelihood of their suppliers.

I could go on and on with the undermining of a photographers hard earned efforts to capture a great scene, sometimes under hair raising difficulties. But why bother, we know that end result is always the same. Times change and the new elephant in the room is not a business model but a carnival of deception and a lowering of standards for generations to come. The big question is why would you give away an image for free after the effort it took to create it?