The Getty/Flickr Conundrum
Flickr have recently announced that their relationship with Getty Images has been extended. Initially, only a select number of photographers had the ability to add images from their Flickr stream into the Getty collection. The process was rather simple: Getty employees would trawl through Flickr and look for images that would sell. A handful of images of mine were selected and I decided to see how this would pan out.
Now before I delve into my relationship with Getty, stock photography is pretty much dead. This was performed solely as an exercise taken on by myself to prove that it wasn’t a sustainable market for any photographer to be in. I was under no illusion that it would be worth my while, hence me only allowing a small number of images to be added to the collection. The one image that has sold the most was my night shot of an empty car park outside of Pietermaritzburg. 
Initially Getty managed to sell this a number of times, the most recent being to a publishing house for a tidy sum of $185 dollars. Great I hear you mutter, except until you look at the statement.
Now as I’ve previously mentioned, this was never a exercise in ensuring I’ll retire rich, especially with that royalty rate in operation. A whopping 80% cut by Getty before I’ve been given my cut. So who’s image is this really? it doesn’t feel like mine, especially when processing and film worked out to be a little less than that, and that’s without taking into consideration the equipment costs and personal costs. In addition to this, once you’ve licensed it to Getty, you are unable to sell it to anyone else for the duration of that contract.
This is a brilliant move by Getty. On the one hand they’ve managed to create the worlds largest stock imagery database, at a rate that doesn’t exclude anyone, and they prevent the photographer from selling their work anywhere else.
In business terms: Gordon Gekko would be proud.
So now that Flickr and Getty have decided to open up the flood gates for everyone on Flickr to be able to submit images into the collection, it is most likely the final death knell of the stock industry as a whole. If you were making a small living from stock photography, you can pretty much bet that it won’t be that way for much longer. Flickr contains an obscene amount of images, all available at such a small price, it doesn’t make sense to use a more expensive photographer to create them.
The question I ask is what protection is in place to prevent amateur photographers from being exploited by all of those in need of cheap imagery?
Another popular argument often cited by professional photographers is that of raising their game. Often I hear “you will just have to make your images better.” argument. This is a rather poor argument, in that most purchasers won’t necessarily want to pay for a superior image when a semi-decent one is available for 5 US. We’ve already seen this with the current stock market, so why would it all of a sudden change with even more cheap images flooding the market?.
Interesting times ahead, especially for those pro’s trying to survive by stock.
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