A whole heck of a lot, if you’re name is Getty Images. Over the last week or so, photographers have gone up in arms over Getty’s announcement that they would be offering a new price point for images used on web sites. The amount that set off this ire; $49.00. Not such a big deal if you’re selling your images Royalty Free, where prices are based on file size, and not on use. But if you sell your work as Rights Ready, or as Right Managed, these prices reflect a sudden cut of up to 90% off standard rates, based on the term offered. The original term was set as an annual rate, but thanks to an outcry from leading industry groups, Getty has now offered a small capitulation for the photographers selling RM & RR Images. Now, according to Getty, they will reduce the term of use to three months. Well, I’m sorry, but even for a whole year use at $200.00, I’d feel pretty ripped off if I found one of my images being used on the home page of Nike, Coca-Cola, VISA, or Apple Computers. My answer, if you want to mess around with a better price point like this, the answer should be to make the use non-commercial, or limit any commercial use to local companies whose primary business radius is within 100 miles. Sure, this requires an honor system, but then again, don’t all licenses?
Your suggestion points to the basic flaw of almost all RM licenses for the web: they do not take into account the number of views, since there is no easy way to do that, unlike for printed material, so Annie’s rabbit grooming shop and Apple are already charged the same rate.
The only place I’ve seen the size of the business taken into account was on Seth Resnick’s site, but from my own experience answering hundreds of quote requests for the web, Getty’s new pricing scheme is unfortunately more realistic than Seth Resnick’s.
Pricing alone doesn’t tell the story. PDN reports Getty’s price of $49 for a “500 kb file at 72 DPI” Of course, for online use, DPI is meaningless — It’s all about the pixel size. 500kb translates to an uncompressed TIF of about 166kp, or about 500×333 pixels in 3:2 format (and good heavens, it better not be a JPG or the pixel size goes way up!). 500×333 is a pretty large file for the web.
Pricing needs to be based on a few simple categories (main webpage or sub-page within a site? profit or non-profit organization? company size if possible assuming online view relate to company size), as well as pixel size. I like limiting use to time as well, but that’s just one more thing to police (with penalties built in to the licensing, of course).
The biggest problem I see with Getty’s pricing is that is shows that they think the competition for RM images is microstock sites. They think the universe of imagery needs is smaller than it is, and that RF users are the same as RM. Higher profile usages will want RM, and the market can bear higher prices than $49 for such an online use.