Opportunity or Exploitation in the Creative World?

Here are a few quick questions for you; imagine your going in to a job interview, or bidding on a freelance job. What is your ‘worth’? How do you decide the on the value for what you produce? Does it matter to you if someone else benefits from your labors? What if they benefit unfairly? At what point would you begin to feel exploited?

The reason for asking these questions today comes as the result of seeing two back to back postings on Craigslist. It left me wondering; What’s your value? Who would you work for?

Ad Number One:

PHOTOGRAPHER NEEDED: Are you a photographer wanting to build a porfolio ? We would like you to photo shoot our advertisements. We use models/people. Must be enthusiastic, creative and talented. Show us your work – Email Karl at xxxxxxx @ xxxxx .com

• Location: SAN FRANCISCO
• Compensation: $75 FOR THE PHOTO SHOOT

or Ad Number Two:

MARKETING VIDEO CREATION: I need help creating a marketing video. Details are at www.marketing5000.com. Would really appreciate a crew who can shoot some quick interesting stuff and knows YouTube & the other sites really well

• Compensation: $1,000

Seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Well the obvious answer isn’t the correct answer. The truth is that if I had to choose one, (under the duress of having an arm ripped off) I’d choose to do the Photo Shoot.

But the real answer is that neither is worth doing, and both are out to purely exploit your efforts with little to absolutely no return on your efforts. (FWIW: I really hate to put the above link to that marketing site, but I felt it was important for you to read the fine print of his ‘offer’.) Even with the opportunity of doing the photoshoot; this person plans to place ads using ‘your photo’ in places that will cost him thousands of dollars, yet he thinks paying you a measly $75.00 is a great opportunity for your full day of effort and creative talent.

Well frankly, if you think that Karl and his $75.00 is worth the opportunity, then I say you must have real issues with your sense of self-worth. Perhaps you just lack the confidence to ask for more, or maybe you just don’t realize just how severely you’re being exploited.

In a post yesterday, Thomas Hawk raised questions about the value and worth of images sold in the stock industry. Namely this focused on how amateur and professional photographers work compares in places like Getty Images and Flickr & Zooomr. Also raised was the issue of the difference in pricing images. In that post I replied:

Exactly why Flickr, Zooomr and any other such similars should also make a specific area available for educating amatuers about things like licenses, values, model releases, liabilities, etc.. There’s absolutely NO reason why the amatuer shouldn’t get the same $200.00 the pro’s get – except for the fact(s) that they either don’t know any better, simply don’t care, or worst of all, are afraid to ask for any significant dollar value for their work because they feel they’re “not worth it”.

If a client has $200.00 to spend on a photo, and will spend $200.00 on the *right* photo, then there’s only one loser if the person with the *right* photo only asks for $5.00. That poor photographer is now $195.00 poorer due to lack of knowledge or lack of confidence.

Again; an educational arena is what these sites like your zooomr needs; even if only to explain the types of licensing models and the range of values, and resources to further such lines of knowledge.

My $0.25 worth of an opinion. It used to be $0.02, but what with inflation and all….

This idea of having educational resources so that amateurs or wanna-be professionals, and the types that are most likely to frequent places like Flickr, Zooomer, and Craigslist can learn about some of these issues. This has become especially important now that the World Wide Web has brought forth many opportunities for these people to license or benefit from their creativity, yet have no clue where to start, or what value to place on their creations. Granted many don’t care about fiscal gain as a prime opportunity, but if they see that there are 40 five dollar bills piled on the table in front of them, shouldn’t they know that it’s OK to ask for and take all $200.00, rather than just graciously accept the single $5.00 bill that gets offered to them. Similarly, shouldn’t we also teach them it’s also OK to say “No” when someone offers them an opportunity to be exploited?

I see questions asked all the time in these non-professional arenas like, “What should I charge for…” or, “Someone wants to use my image for Blank, and I have no idea what to do…”. Even in the Microstock arena, I see people who aren’t even aware of the “Trads” – traditional stock agencies, or that there are clients out there who would be happy to pay more money for the right image. The clients are obviously the happy ones, becuase there’s a whole new world of photographers who don’t know that it’s OK to ask for more.