Passive Income the Right Way
How much effort are you willing to put into selling your wildlife photography? What if I were to tell you there are ways to make truly passive income from all those photographs you have sitting around and it’s not from selling with Getty? In this article, I am going to share with you one of my top business strategies for making sales to magazines every single month – over and over again.
In my last article, I discussed how I use PhotoShelter as the last and final HYBRID step in my backup strategy. Here resides not only my “greatest hits album” of my most sellable work, but also my own personal stock photography archive.
Having your own digital stock archive is crucial for doing business today.
Large stock photography agencies are run by vampires, taking 70% or more of the profits from the sale of an image.
A few years back, if this had been the business model, and a photograph sold for $1,000, you would have made $150-300, while they kept $700-850 of the profit.
But it’s worse than that.
Now, with the trend of big stock agencies moving to RF licensing (Royalty Free), everything has changed.
Photos that sell for $1,000 to a magazine are what we call Rights Managed (RM).
The names are exactly what you might expect.
Rights Managed means that you or the agency manage all use of the photograph. If a magazine wants to buy the image for an article they are running, the cost is X amount. If they want to run it again in another issue, it costs X amount. If they want to use it on the website, that is another X amount again. And if on social, well, you guessed it, that will be another X amount.
Royalty Free is completely different.
Royalty Free means pay once and that’s it. Use it however, whenever, for as long as you like – and at rock bottom prices usually.
The most an image will sell for on Getty today is $500. Don’t misunderstand this part though. That’s just Getty’s price. Photographs sell for considerably more than this outside of a stock agencies.
But just because Getty can sell your photograph for $500, doesn’t mean that a photo buyer will pay anything close to that.
The price a company pays a stock agency for the use of a photograph is based upon the size of the image they buy. And the company can use the photograph over and over and over in whatever fashion they want for that flat price.
A $500 sale with Getty means that the photo buyer purchased a full-size high-resolution version of the image – usually around 5,000 pixels on the long side.
And here in lies a big part of the problem: most photo buyers don’t need that size image.
So, because pricing is based on size, an organization can purchase a photograph for as little as $1 for web use. And you might only get $0.25 of that.
I see sales of just 10 cents sometimes with these big clearing house agencies today.
Bigger media companies like National Geographic will often license images at top dollar through Getty. This means a $500 sale that equates to $150 in my pocket when Nat Geo licenses work from me this way (I get 30% from Getty as part of being in the top tier as opposed to 15-20%).
But most don’t buy at this size.
Most companies buy the size they can get away with. Or, worse yet, they buy a subscription that gives them access to as many files as they want for a specific price – which is where the weird 10 cent sales come from.
F. That.
This is why YOU need to be your own agent today.
And this is why a PhotoShelter account makes me far more money than stock agencies every year.
PhotoShelter is crawled by Google. This means that your photographs are discoverable via a Google search as long as you have things properly keyworded and captioned – I will be writing another article on this shortly. However, I only land a handful of sales a year through organic searches like this.
My strategy is to exploit the very problem that companies like Getty and RF agencies have created.
At first glance, you would think that this Royalty Free business is good for publishers. Lots of images for very little money equals lower costs of doing business.
But the reason that we are in this mess with Royalty Free images to begin with is because of the sheer volume of photographs on the market today.
Digital democratized photography. It’s basic capitalism. Supply and demand. Digital allowed millions of folks to get into the game. The huge supply of photographs flooded the market and birthed the Royalty Free model – which is fabulous for the stock agencies themselves, but terrible for both photographers and magazines.
You already understand why this isn’t good for you.
But to understand why it’s not good for magazines, you have to recognize that time is money.
Today, if an editor wants a photograph of a bald eagle and does a search on a stock agency for this, they will be met with hundreds of thousands of images keyworded as bald eagle.
Some of these will be eagles. Most will probably be from Alaska. Many will be a photo of something to do with American patriotism. The majority will be mediocre at best. And it will take hours for the editor to cull through all those photographs just to find one single image that meets their needs.
This is the problem for editors and magazines.
And my strategy is to solve that problem for them.
I should pause here for effect. I’m going to say this one more time. My strategy is to solve that problem for them.
This may be more important than you realize at fist.
If you have been in business for yourself in any capacity, then the concept of solving problems is probably old news. But for many folks looking to begin selling their wildlife photography, they might not recognize this tenant. Selling photography may be your first foray into entrepreneurship. So, new paragraph for effect. . .
The foundation of all businesses is solving problems.
It doesn’t matter what your business is. If you are in business, you solve a problem for someone. And if you haven’t identified what that problem is and how you fix it for people, then you won’t last long in business.
Do you own a bar and sell alcohol? You solve a problem for people, and you should probably get into the taxi / Uber business as well.
Do you have a consulting business? You solve a problem.
Do you have a construction business? You solve the problem for people needing housing, or cities needing roads, or businesses needing offices.
So, if you are in the business of selling photos to magazines, then you need to understand exactly what problems editors face and figure out how to solve those for them. And as you can see from the numbers game, the need for photographs today IS NOT THEIR PROBLEM.
Their problem is that there’s too many photographs, too many photographers, and not enough time in the day.
Big media companies like Discovery or I Heart Media typically do not need precision. Generic stock photos are all that matter. But magazines are different. They need photographs that are custom tailored to their needs, and they will pay for the privilege of you saving them the time and effort of hunting for this stuff.
And the way I do this is by creating private “for their eye’s only” galleries made up of a few hundred highly targeted images that meet their very specific needs. Then, I do the unthinkable. I do what would have given photographers a stroke 20 years ago. . .
I give the photo editor complete access to that entire library of photographs to download and use whenever they want.
Let me explain. . .
The photo editor isn’t just some guy named Bob who emailed me asking for a photo. Maybe his name is Bob. But he is not a random stranger. The photo editor works for a legitimate magazine. One who has been in the publishing business for some time, knows the ins and outs of this game, and has as much on the line in terms of copyright infringement and being dragged into federal court as I do (yes, copyright is federal).
I get no less than 20 emails a week asking to use my photographs in some capacity by strangers with no affiliation to publications or media outlets. I am not giving these people downloadable access to my photographs!
But the editor of a major magazine? Absolutely.
The problem this solves is immediate and ON DEMAND access to high quality and highly targeted photographs they need whenever they need them.
Sometimes this is as simple as a magazine trying to find a good vertical image to go on a cover. Sometimes it’s a matter of finding photographs to illustrate an article in an upcoming issue. And other times, it’s 1am and the layout artist is on a time crunch trying to meet a deadline, burning the midnight oil, and they suddenly find they have 3 gaps they need filled in the layout. They can either miss their deadline or they can login to their account with me, pull a few images to plug holes with, complete the project on time, and I get paid because I helped them solve that problem in the moment.
Problem solving.
This is the key to being successful in any business.
Let’s take a real-world example here.
I have spent years selling photographs to a statewide magazine called Our State. Theirs is a magazine devoted solely to the culture and beauty of the state of North Carolina. This isn’t a wildlife magazine. This isn’t a nature magazine. You are more likely to find an article about iced tea or BBQ than you will anything to do with an animal. Yet, most months I make wildlife photography sales to this magazine without having to do any work other than the initial setup of their private library of images.
I created a library for them years ago. And I regularly update it with images I create anytime I am working in North Carolina. Birds. Wild horses. Mammals. Insects. Amphibians. Snakes. You name it.
The photo editor has access to about 800 of my photographs that she can download at any time.
I can look to see which images have been viewed or downloaded, if needs be. But I don’t have to. This is a legitimate business in the publishing industry. And because I created an easy and seamless way for them to access a targeted collection of images instantly, I simply get emails saying, “we are using this photo in this issue. Can you send over an invoice?”
The alternative for that photo editor would be to sit down and send out emails to hundreds of photographers she has worked with over the years. Or she would need to dive into the black hole of stock photography agencies, endlessly scrolling through thousands of 1-star photos before she finds what she is looking for. Either way, time is money and both options here can be a full day’s worth of work to find just 1 or 2 photos she needs.
The beautiful thing about this strategy is that not only does it solve problems for editors in the moment, it also creates a strong working relationship with the editorial staff of the magazine which translates into additional work.
Because the magazine is very familiar with my style of work from the library of images I gave them access to, I also receive assignment work from time to time in order to produce wildlife photography they can’t find elsewhere without the blackhole of stock agencies.
This is important to take note of. Here is a client willing to pay the cost of an assignment just to avoid wading through generic stock photographs at a place like Getty.
Several years ago, the photo editor reached out to me asking if I had photos of painted buntings for an article they were running. I politely informed them that I didn’t have photos of these birds from the region (only south Texas at the time).
A week later she reached out again and told me that she had not been able to find photos of painted buntings that met their needs from the state of North Carolina and asked if she could send me on assignment to photograph them.
Yes, please.
Since then, I have been sent out to photograph wood ducks, bog turtles, and a host of other species they needed photos of but couldn’t find elsewhere.
And all of this because I started out by solving a problem for the photo editor.
Of all the topics I have written about thus far for the Business of Wildlife Photography, this one is probably the most important in terms of making money with your photography. You will make far more money by building relationships with clients and solving problems for them than you will from using third party companies like stock agencies to sell your work for today.
So, why sell with a stock agency at all?
Well, there are many reasons to do this in addition to having your own digital archive. And for that, you will have to wait for the next article from me!
Cheers,
Jared