Makes thousands off your Flickr images
By Emily Price
Soon you may be able to start making some serious cash from your photos on Flickr. Flickr recently announced a partnership with stock photo company Getty images to allow Getty customers to purchase licenses to use Flickr users’ photos for commercial use. Depending on the type of license a Getty customer purchases, a Flickr user could see anywhere from a few dollars to over $20,000 for the use of their photograph.
The initial launch of the program will only include a few thousand images from Flickr. Photograph owners will have to first specify on Flickr that they are willing to have their photographers considered for commercial use before they can selected to be included in the collection on Getty so it won’t be an out and out free for all. Getty foresees adding a substantial amount of additional photographs to the collection over time after the original few thousand.
If a Getty customer chooses to use an image from Flickr that photographer will be paid in the same way as other photographers for Getty, receiving 30-40 percent of the photo’s licensing fee. Typical licensing fees on Getty are reportedly between $29 and $200,000, so 40% could be around $80,000.
The program is going to make it possible for amateur photographers to walk away with a pretty substantial amount of cash for their images, without really doing anything much differently than they are now. Currently there are quite a few stock photo sites that will allow amateur photographers to upload their photos and make money off of them, but often those photographers give up all rights to the photos when they do sell them, or the amount the photographer makes is negligible. The Getty Images Flicker partnership makes it possible for amateur photographers to be fairly for their work, and potentially break into the business in the process.
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July 18th, 2008
I doubt that the royalties on images that getty may find of flickr will be in the $20,000 bracket, more likely to be 30% of around $50. All that said, if your images are chosen then you will essentially be earning money for doing nothing (other than what your already do which is to photograph and upload to flickr). Most other ways for amateur and budding pros to make money with their photos involves lots of time keywording, having photos rejected and earning small amounts of money from those that do sell.
July 18th, 2008
I don’t think that Getty is going to take just any photos. The photos will need keywords (more than most Flickr files have now) and if the image has people, recognizable brand names, or certain buildings and signs, the photographer will have to provide a digital copy of the signed release form. A lot of detail work is being glossed over by these media pundits. Get real, the new owers of Getty (who just paid $2.4B for it) aren’t going to leave the door open to lawsuits from “outraged” people whose photos were fair game on Flickr when it was sharing for free, but will see things very differently when they are in an ad for skin care lotion or an editorial about AIDS or whatever. Hobbyists are not professionals! Caveat emptor.
July 21st, 2008
Sounds like this new venture is upsetting some who feel they are “real photographers” and the rest of us are creatively inept. You may see some new photographers that can make money and increase popularity to compete at a more reasonable price than is currently available.