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Page 8 of 14
The Royalty Free Proposition to Photographers
The introduction of Royalty Free sent a shock wave through the first generation of stock photographers who were accustomed to a business of exclusive relationships with their stock “agents” and Rights Managed licensing. They watched as the industry – and their own representatives - embraced this new licensing model that not only commoditized images by selling them as “units” for low prices, but also offered the creators of the images a dramatically reduced share of the revenues.
Even so, success stories circulated widely about photographers who had shot RF and this fueled interest among other photographers to engage in shooting RF. No doubt this was a boom time for the pioneering RF companies and their contributors as clients snapped up the first generations of RF CDs. These collections of simple objects were so economical to produce and in such great demand that they were highly profitable for both photographer and distributor. As the RF business grew, competition intensified, productions became more expensive, and the compensation offered to photographers declined as the RF content developers could always find someone to shoot for less.
Another source of images has been to re-route existing inventory from RM files into the RF collections. Some companies have sought out content from RM photographers with back catalog images and outtakes that they had rarely or never licensed, and some RM shooters profited from the sale of their archives of older images. Companies with both RM and RF divisions have encouraged their RM contributors to submit to RF images that would not make the RM “cut”, the rationale being that it is better to make some money than none. To make matters worse, stock photographers have watched their acceptance rates for Rights Managed images diminish and many have experienced declining revenues from a number of factors, RF among them.
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