Comments on: Stock Footage and Photos and the Future of Licensing https://daredreamer.com/stock-footage-and-photos-and-the-future-of-licensing/ The Sites & Sounds of Creative Expression Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:41:18 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.1 By: Martin https://daredreamer.com/stock-footage-and-photos-and-the-future-of-licensing/#comment-2750 Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:41:18 +0000 http://daredreamermag.com/?p=8954#comment-2750 If the stock photo industry is any indicator of the future (and I believe it is), the future frankly seems dim. Quantity of content has gone up, prices have gone down, and commission structures continue to get worse for content creators. (Witness Alamy’s recent decision to drop the commission from 60% to 50%.)

This is becoming a high-volume/low-price game, and it’s just hard to see how someone can make more than a token amount anymore by licensing content. With Shutterstock, you can earn up to a whopping $0.38 per image. Yahoo! For video footage, a “web size” licenses for $19 — the creator’s cut is 30%, which is $5.70. You just can’t pay the bills that way.

I’m curious to see how licensing video footage plays out, but I don’t see why it would be any different from still photos in the long run.

The answer, of course, is to license your own content directly (though it’s tough to compete with places like Shutterstock), but that comes at the cost of a LOT of marketing to get noticed.

]]> By: Kris Simmons https://daredreamer.com/stock-footage-and-photos-and-the-future-of-licensing/#comment-2749 Sun, 02 Dec 2012 03:15:11 +0000 http://daredreamermag.com/?p=8954#comment-2749 Very interesting! I’m curious to know if licensing footage is a worthwhile endeavor. I’m always on the look out for new revenue streams in my video production business and have often brainstormed ideas on how to sell our own stock footage or to actually focus on niche footage that is underserved in the stock marketplace. Have yet to pull the trigger though 🙂

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