Funny business is the stock industry, and by that I mean photographic stock and not the city markets. The role of the stock library is very simple. Its a repository of images that a picture buyer can search to find and buy images for their projects. They supply an enormous range of clients and picture needs from newspapers to advertising to cards and calendars. Every time you flick through a book or a newspaper, or see an advert, card or calendar you’ll probably find the images they use were actually purchased from a stock library rather than being commissioned for the job. That isn’t true in every case but you’d be surprised how common and prolific it is.
If you’re interested in finding out a little more about this field, read on.
If we ignore the specialist libraries for a moment, stock libraries fall roughly into two main camps: stock and microstock. There are some big differences between them, both for contributors and for buyers. So, what’s the difference?
Traditional Stock Libraries
The traditional stock library has a very simple model. The photographer supplies the library with images. A pitcure buyer searches the library for images, decides which will best fulfill the brief for their project and buys the image. The image can be bought under typically one of two licenses: Royalty Free or Licensed.
Royalty Free means just that. The picture buyer pays a one-off fee to purchase the image and they can then use the image for as long as they like for (almost) any purpose without paying the supplier any additional moneys. The library can also sell the image to other buyers and no guarantees are given about exclusivity.
Licensed means that the picture buyer buys the image for a specific purpose for use in a specific territory for a specific time. In return they get exclusivity. That means no other picture buyer can buy the image for the same usage in the same territory during that same time. But, the image can be sold for a different use or in a different territory or once the exclusivity period has expired.
Microstock
Microstock is relatively new in comparison. It too operates on a similar model but will typically sell images only as royalty free and is highly geared towards volume sales.
What is the difference?
Licensing aside, the biggest difference between the two types of library is the amount of money required to purchase an image. With a traditional library the fees are much higher, often running into the $100’s or $1,000’s. Compare this to microstock where it is not uncommon to source an image for $1 to $2.
Which one is best for you will depend on your own circumstances and also whether you are a buyer or seller. If you look around the internet it won’t take too long before you stumble across the argument and rants in favour of one side or the other. My personal preference is with the traditional library although I do sell images as microstock too. For me, a traditional library offers a much better return on the investment of my time to prepare the images. It takes me about the same amount of time to prepare an image for submission whether its for a traditional or microstock library. The microstock offers significantly higher volumes but the revenue (for me) is much higher with the traditional library. I would need to sell significantly more images through the microstock to reach parity so for me its a no brainer.
I should also add that selling images through a stock library is very much a numbers game. Generally the contributor can expect to sell 1 image per 100 per year. To put it another way, if you have say 1000 images with the library you can expect to sell 10 images that year. For an average selling price of say $50 per image and paying 40% commission per sale you’ll earn $300 that year. Converting to Sterling and paying tax at 40% and you’ll end up with a measly £120 from $500 of sales. As an exercise to the reader, crunch the numbers for the microstock model with an average selling price of $2 per sale.
In summary…
As you can see, a stock library can be a great source of revenue but to make any reasonable amounts of cash from it you’ll need to feed it with high quality, marketable images. And keep feeding it. It can be time consuming but its also good fun. There are people that make a living out of selling stock images but they know the market inside out, what sells and what doesn’t. It’s also a full time occupation.
