Analysis #1--Create More or Create Better?

Artists often ask me if it matters whether they create more images, or better images.  Which one will make them more money, in the Digital Image Marketing (DIM) world?

At my company, (Index Stock Imagery) I keep track of two key numbers:  Licenses Per Image Per Year and Number of New Images Submitted Per Year.  We have artists who make zero dollars each year, despite 100 or more images in our on-line system.  We also have artists who make more than $1,000 per image, per year.  Similarly, there are artists who submit one to five images per year and others who send us thousands.  We carefully edit everything we get--so even the artist who sends us 10,000 images may only get 50 or 100 into our file.

With more than 1,700 artists from all walks of life and more than a decade of data, I thought I might be able to bring some facts to this discussion.  The following chart shows data for about 600 artists from the past two years.  (I excluded some "outliers"--people who earned $1,000 per image and a few who added more than 5,000 new images.  I also dropped a lot of zero earners, or zero new image people.  I felt their data wouldn't help us with this analysis.)

Dollars per image is on the vertical axis, number of new images is along the bottom.  It is pretty clear that there is an inverse relationship between these factors.  Those who produce a lot of new images, tend not to earn as much per image as those who produce a few new images each year.

However, by itself, this doesn't answer the Create more/Create better question.  A little math should convince you that an artist who contribute 100 images that earn $1,000 each, will make the same $100,000 per year that an artist makes who has 10,000 images earning $10 each.  Since our relationships with our artists typically stretch over ten years or more, there is plenty of time for either strategy to work well.

In fact, I believe there are at least three paths to licensing success.  I've marked the three regions on a second version of my chart.

Artists can have a "I'm working on something great" attitude.  We call them, they tell us this, and we wait.  Lo and behold, every six or twelve months they deliver something that is startling, exciting, and new.  Sometimes it works and they make a ton of money.  Sometimes it fails and they have to start over.  But, they have fun, and so do we.  (By the way, this is what most lay people thing that photographers do!)

Another group has a "Turn the crank" attitude.  These artists are often in a field like travel or fashion, where it is easy to generate a lot of new images.  Unlike the group above, these artists often have to hire a manager whose main job is to process their submissions and keep track of where everything is going.  Image production is a workflow process for them, and the best ones maintain the pace for years at a time.  We respect them, and reject more images than we keep!  (By the way, this is what most stock agent managers think their photographers do!)

The third group doesn't get much attention.  They stand out from the big blotch of people who hover in the low per image return and low productivity "death zone."  This group seems to be able to consistently come up with new ideas in fairly mundane areas.  Most of them are specialized on a topic or type of image.  By working primarily in one area, they are close to the trends in the area and come up with a new angle before everyone else sees it.  They probably have the best overall earnings and the least chance of having a nervous breakdown or burning out.  (Most photographers think this is what they do!)

I didn't want to depress myself by calculating the percentage of the artists I studied who are not firmly on one of these three paths.  However, like most other businesses, creating digital images for stock licensing has a strong 80-20 rule.   80% of the money goes to 20% of the artists.  (Actually, I think it is more like a 95-5 rule, but I really don't want to sound pessimistic!)  What most artists need to do is to figure out which path out of the bottom 80% suits their style and personality.  Don't be seduced into thinking there are only two choices--create more or create better.  See if you can find one of the middle path routes.

Once they've made their choice, I tell artists to stick to that choice for at least two years.  That is the only way to see if it works, for them.

Comments

[DJ]

How have these statistics varied for some of the Royalty Free or large Rights Managed contributors Index has added in the past few years? Is there a big difference in the analysis for individual artists who submit 100 images at a time versus companies that send Index 1000's of images per submission? These companies have built up the amount of images in the Index archive swiftly and I am wondering if submitting large collections of images at one time has any affect on sales, in the short term?

[Bahar Gidwani]

Good question. Always lots of questions in our world about Royalty-Free vs Rights-Managed (RF vs RM). For this analysis, I knocked out most of the big RF image dumps, we've gotten.

Most of our images (and most of our artists) are focused on the Rights-Managed world. Some of the RF guys are pretty high on the quality scale. But, because they are doing massive, carefully planned and scripted shoots, they can't offer the variety and depth that RM guys can. They are working on the "big markets." The most successful RM guys are my middle path folks, who are working their medium to small-sized specialty area. (Underwater, animals, space, babies, weddings, black and white, etc.)