Owner and co-founder of Skyscan, Brenda Marks says that while many of the smaller, general image libraries have been squeezed out of the marketplace by bigger companies, specialist outfits are managing to survive by broadening their activities. "The stock industry has gone through enormous changes in the last few years and the recent rise of online royalty-free and microstock web agencies has hit professional photographers hard," she says. "There has been an increase in the availability of imagery, often from amateur or semi-pro sources, and this in turn has seen a huge increase in the volume of sales of stock imagery. While this is essentially good news, there has been a corresponding drop in the fees paid per image, which is not so good for the established pro shooter. I am also increasingly finding clients willing to accept much lower, non-professional quality from the micro-stock agencies if it gives them marked cost savings. "Consequently, at Skyscan we are now beginning to supply specialist aerial imagery, such as satellite capture, to mapping specialists. Recently we have also started to offer a service to search out and supply historic aerial photos, which are used for legal and planning disputes or for site investigations. In this way we hope not only to survive but expand."
For the established professional, who may already be dabbling in library selling as a sideline, moving up to some of the bigger agencies could be an attractive proposition. Although all libraries with websites could, in theory, sell your pictures around the globe, bigger organisations actively market images in different countries. The likes of Getty, Corbis and even the young upstart, Alamy, all have agencies and satellite offices in every continent and recognise the importance of selling into other countries.
Paul Banwell, Director of Photographer and Filmmaker Relations at Getty Images, says that, at this size, photo agencies become more than just a source of stock imagery. "We are creating the industry's freshest and most relevant rights-managed, royalty-free and rights-ready creative imagery," he says. "Our pre-shot imagery appears in multi-national ad campaigns, on television and billboards, in newspapers, magazines, and brochures - and any place images are used to tell a story."
Competition between the bigger libraries is fierce, and Getty and Alamy are just two organisations that have come under fire recently for their business practices. In the News section of January's Pro we reported a new online search system instigated by Alamy that moves images up the search results ranking according to the number of times they've been purchased. The system, dubbed AlamyRank, is controversial with many contributors because they feel that specialist photographers are losing out.
Controversy hit Getty back in 2006 with the launch of its Rights Ready licensing model. This enabled customers to buy rights-managed photography through a much simpler process, using just eight preset pricing structures. However, in the original announcement, Getty also stated that "Under the rights-ready model, duration and territory rights are unlimited." Great for the customers; not so great for photographers whose images could theoretically be tied up for decades without any extra payment. After lobbying from the US-based association the Stock Artists Alliance, Getty introduced a 10-year limit on its Rights Ready licence, but it still remains controversial. The moral of the story? Check the agreement you are about to sign, and if you are not happy, think carefully about whether this is the library for you.
Ready? Steady? Diversity!
Selling your photography through picture libraries is a good way of branching out into new areas of photography. As we've said before, knowing your market is essential for any pro, but getting hold of this knowledge when breaking into new sectors is hard. A library can really help here: as well as having the contacts and time with which to approach customers, they can also offer feedback on which of your images is selling well and what sectors of the market actually want.
Sharon-Therese Horlor, Marketing and Business Director of fine-art picture library Trevillion Images, says that this is an important part of the relationship between photographer and library. "We will often make suggestions and offer advice on what our contributors should be shooting," she says. "And if more specific help and advice is needed, we even hold workshops."
With assistance like this on offer, Horlor says that photographers who shoot weddings at the weekend, for example, can turn their skills to other subjects and bring in extra revenue by selling to new markets through an agency. She is proud of the success of some of Trevillion's contributors, which undoubtedly would have been hard or impossible to achieve without the library's marketing and sales efforts.
"One of our contributors recently submitted a picture for display on our website. We also promoted it to certain art directors for whom we thought the image would be particularly relevant. Within three days, it had sold for three different projects."
Horlor say that this frankly dazzling success story is only possible thanks to the speed with which libraries can get new photography in front of their clients and, in Trevillion's case, the intimate knowledge of their clients' requirements.
The basic principle of image libraries and agencies, then, is a good one, and selling images in this way can drastically improve your profits. The old saying that ‘many hands make light work' has never been more true. Lumping together millions of photographers' pictures in a single place is always going to make life easier for magazine editors, designers, book publishers and advertising agencies. The best thing is that no matter what your subject matter, as a professional photographer, there is a photolibrary out there for you.
