Online Stockhouses

I have a friend who wants to place some of his photographs on one of those online "stock photo" sites. He says that he'd like to make some extra money by selling his images via one of those types of internet operations.

"Well, you can do that if you'd like, but, I don't want anything to do with a stock-house that does not have a brick and mortar operation." I told him.

Online-only stock photo operations are selling images at pennies on the dollar. They are charging membership fees that allow so many "points" worth of downloads at a given rate and the photographer gets, oh... about a quarter. Not a fourth of the selling price... a quarter of a dollar.

At first, these online operations sound like a great deal and a few, very few, people are actually making a pretty good amount of money per month. The problem is this: Stock photography is now becoming a nickel and dime market when at one time, it was a great way to make a comfortable living.

Brown's is the oldest stock-house in the business. It is housed in a REAL BUILDING. There are agents working there, plugging their photo collection and selling images of very fine quality. They continue to serve the publishing world with some of the finest stock images available anywhere. Now that, to me, is the way to go.

When you upload images to a site that sells membership downloads to businesses looking for stock photos, you are harming all the photographers who have been working in the field for years. You help these online companies bring down the average image price to the point where the majority of photographers will never make a full-time income taking pictures. It de-values the work of many fine photographers and now they are competing against a work already filled with cheap labor.

We are located in America, but, the same thing is happening in the UK, all over Europe, and Japan. Stock images are falling in price and everyone is looking for something on-the-cheap. So, now, you are going to compete world-wide, with every digital camera-toting person on this rock.

Is that really good for photography? Is that really good for photographers?

--- Mickey Maguire, Editor