Note
Stock photography is a competitive industry where photographers sell existing photos for commercial use, with millions of images available on various websites. Successful stock photographers must balance quality, composition, and staying ahead of trends to make money in the industry. Models in stock photos are paid a day rate and may gain celebrity status, but they do not receive royalties for the images they appear in. The industry is facing challenges from free stock photo websites and machine learning technology, but human photographers still have an edge in creating specific, high-quality images.
Highlights
-
2024-10-28 10:52 Our stuff is the secret background of the whole world. That’s Yuri arkers. He’s the CEO and founder of a company called People Images, and he’s one of the most prolific stock photographers in the world, essentially any big city. If you walk for ten minutes, you’ll probably see five or six of my shots. Pretty much all the big brands at some point or another have used our files.
-
2024-10-28 07:32 Im Zachary Crockett. Today Stock photos 120 years ago, if a newspaper or magazine needed a generic photo, say a shot of the White House or a family enjoying a picnic, you would have to send a photographer. But in the mid 20th century, a number of companies stepped in to let them outsource that service. They assembled archives of photos with broad applications and provided them for a fee. This model became the norm for journalism, advertising, corporate communications and other businesses in need of basic images.
-
2024-10-28 07:31 Shutterstock, the business model is fairly simple. Customers pay a monthly subscription fee for a set number of downloads, or they can buy images individually. A standard license grants buyers broad rights to use the photo anywhere in the world, forever.
-
2024-10-28 07:31 For the photographer, the payout comes in the form of a royalty, a percentage of the sale price for each photo. That payout ranges from 15% to 40%, depending on how many photos the photographer sells in a given year.
-
2024-10-28 07:32 Most stock photographers earn around $0.30 every time someone licenses one of their images.
-
2024-10-28 07:32 says his average payout works out to around $1, and on a typical day he’ll log more than 10,000 sales.
-
2024-10-28 07:33 One financial measure of a stock photographer is return per image, or RPI. It’s how much revenue each image generates every month, averaged across the photographer’s entire portfolio. It includes the thousands of photos that don’t sell at all. An RPI gives you a rough indicator of how successful your assets are. So if your RPI sits around $1 per asset per month, then you have an incredibly high RPI.
-
2024-10-28 07:38 There’s a strict plan for every shot because wasted time is expensive. You need a location, you need a fairly big crew because you’re going to be setting up in the morning. You need lights, you need catering. You need four, five, six models. You need at least one producer, probably a focus puller camera operator.
-
2024-10-28 07:38 A recent office themed shoot arcurs did, for instance, cost around $5,000 and yielded 106 images. That’s an investment that won’t immediately be earned back.
-
2024-10-28 07:39 We look at how much a shoe will bring in in its whole lifetime and have a rough idea about when it’s going to break even. Generally, the break even point for shoots is about two to three years, which unfortunately means that if you want to start out in this industry, you need a pretty big loan.
-
2024-10-28 07:39 There is a general misconception that prettier people sell better, but that’s actually not the case. The case is that people that look trustworthy sell well.
-
2024-10-28 07:46 More recently, stock photographers are under threat from machine learning technology. Tools like Dali and Midjourney allow users to type in a prompt and generate increasingly realistic images of any subject. Nvidia, OpenAI, and Meta all have partnerships in place that allow them to use stock photo libraries to hone their machine learning capabilities or generate images.