Licensing your footage

Like many here I'm looking at ways of making money from my footage and thinking of putting more effort into offering some or all of it as stock footage.

Getty and a few others have this new so-called "rights ready model". It's supposed to make purchasing footage easier, without the negotiation/quoting process, but as far as I can tell the main difference from the more traditional rights-managed model is that you pay a fixed price, regardless of the length of the clip. So for example they charge $4250 for unlimited advertising use per clip. But the clips range in length and I found anything from 7 to 33 seconds in a quick browse of their site. This means that some of the shorter underwater clips they offer come in at over $600 dollars per second! I have no idea who is actually going to pay that much but I wouldn't mind getting a piece of it! As far as I can tell, and based on my limited experience, more traditional unlimited advertising use is around the $100 per second mark.

Then at the other end of the pricing scale you've got royalty-free footage. iStockphoto seem to be making big waves in this field. On their site you can get nice footage for as little as $10 per clip for a 320x240 web movie. And full HD clips run at only $48-$65 depending on how many credits you buy. People are uploading quite long clips there too.

This begs the question just what the customer is getting by going for rights-managed or rights-ready over royalty-free. I'm still pretty green in the licensing field but as far as I can tell it's really only a case of getting some exclusivity by paying a higher price. But even Getty's $4250 per clip doesn't come with an exclusive licence. The channel or website next door might be playing the same clip at the same time as yours. (If I have missed the point between these different business models then please educate me!)

Personally as a footage provider I'm in a bit of a quandry over some of this. Stick with rights-managed/rights-ready, keep the prices up and hold out for those occasional deals that pay nicely? Or play the numbers game and go the royalty-free route where a steady revenue stream should be more of a probability? Or maybe try both ... some rights-managed and some royalty free. Then when the cheap charlies complain about the rights-managed rates at least you've got something to offer them. With iStockphoto's success, and similar sites sprouting up, those nice pay days will no doubt become more of a rarity.

What do you all think? Any views?

Nick,

Happy Birthday mate for the other day, I actually have around 80 clips on Istock at the moment. I think it's pretty good. The things I like about Istock are:

1) It allows you to still use your footage and sell it elsewhere (unless your exclusive)

2) Due to the low cost of clips, they get downloaded a fair amount.

3)It's easy to upload

Bad things are that you don't get that much per clip, but hey if it is downloaded 900 times then the money is great!

It is also a good feeling logging on and seeing cash come in.....

I feel that what Getty charges just means that you sell bugger all. If you do at that price then great but how many clips will you sell????

Jon

Cheers Jon.

Well yeah, a 20% royalty is not much. I think it's 40% if you decide to sell exclusively through them. pond5.com offer 50% commission on royalty-free footage while stockfootagemarket.com let you keep the whole 100% and decide the pricing, licence terms etc (but you do the work in resizing and compressing the video). But iStockphoto seem to have the customer base, largely because the prices are so low and the website is so well done.

As for Getty, well it's difficult to get your stuff on there as they're mostly acting as an agent for discovery footage and the like, but there are footage houses out there like oceanfootage.com who will sell your stuff on a rights-managed basis if it's good. When I asked a couple of years ago they prefered exclusivity and offered 50% royalty but charge to process your tape. I think they're mostly looking for true HD now though.

Well you can also tier your stuff according to how special it is. Stockfootage stuff is usually run of the mill stuff anyhow so you're not losing much by putting in a royalty free environment. A clown fish is a clown fish and all that.

Now if you have a special shot of a whaleshark in a baitball or something, then you can keep it and submit it to the bigger houses. I've sold exclusive rights to stuff and it's never seen light of day because they don't have matching clips to make sense of it. LOL I guess I'll have to capture the rest of it myself then sell it to them as a package

We seem to be doing OKAY just from our web site.

A China deal last month and now we just sold some more. They wanted our best stuff for multi projects but not for the money they offered us.

So they will end up with our more generic second rate material.

Wags I noticed you had a load of stuff on stockfootagemarket.com ... any success with that yet? 0% commission sure is a good deal! I just wonder if their advertising revenue will cover their bandwidth costs in the longrun. After stage6 I don't want to put a load of effort into another site that vanishes.

Anyone else making money with istockphoto.com or other royalty-free site?

Anyone making money with oceanfootage.com or other rights-managed site?

O bugger you found me there

It's a new site so I thought I could fill it with just our underwater footage.

They are new but I like them as they are not taking a cut, just feed you the client.

Every time someone is after some footage they mass email everyone.

Nothing yet but they are on the right track.

http://www.stockfootagemarket.com/Footage-Gallery/wagsy

Oops, I let the cat out of the bag. Well you're difficult to miss on there Wags. I think I searched shark and there you were.

They do seem to have their act together that lot. They came and found me too. You won't be getting any competition from me for a while though as I'm in übergeek mode at the moment trying to get more stuff online and battling Avisynth, MeGUI, x264, AAC, Flash and Javascript. Divemastering is starting to look appealing!

Have you sold much through it Wags?

So the process is basically someone looks at you clip, they send you an email for the cost and you quote them?

Yep thats it plus I have been getting emails every few days asking for other uptop shots of general things.

I'm sure once it grows there will be a few sales.

They make their money by selling adds on each page.

No sales yet from it.

It's pretty cool as well as you end up with a gallery you can send around the place etc.

http://www.stockfootagemarket.com/Footage-Gallery/wagsy

Anyhow just from our own web site we just sold some stuff to the federal government over here.

In the wake of the "300 U$" thread, I thought I'd bring back this old thread to see if there's any more or updated views on licensing underwater footage on a royalty-free vs. rights-managed basis.

Was chatting with a pro u/w photographer on a boat recently who reckoned I was a bit daft to hold out for rights-managed deals for HDV and DV, and admittedly it has slowed to dribble for me. He was saying just go with royalty-free for these formats that the big broadcasters don't really want, especially for "solid" but non-unique footage.

What do you all think? How's it going with istockphoto.com for you guys? Anyone having joy with other royalty-free sites? There seem to be more and more of them popping up.

In the wake of the "300 U$" thread, I thought I'd bring back this old thread to see if there's any more or updated views on licensing underwater footage on a royalty-free vs. rights-managed basis.

 

Was chatting with a pro u/w photographer on a boat recently who reckoned I was a bit daft to hold out for rights-managed deals for HDV and DV, and admittedly it has slowed to dribble for me. He was saying just go with royalty-free for these formats that the big broadcasters don't really want, especially for "solid" but non-unique footage.

 

What do you all think? How's it going with istockphoto.com for you guys? Anyone having joy with other royalty-free sites? There seem to be more and more of them popping up.

istock isn't really a wildlife agency, much more general, you look at the best selling videos and its all media, business, communication and IT especially loops .

I get a reasonable number of sales but its for general underwater stuff, nothing rare really, just good quality footage. Pocket money. A lot of my sales aren't for the full size HDV clips, more-so scaled down for the web.

The rare stuff if I get it I would send to oceanfootage.com but due to the higher prices for rights managed deals I get less sales through them and also the fact that so many people submit footage nowadays the market is super saturated. I am considering oceanfootage's offer to allow RF sales for my footage as this may open things up a bit, has anyone else done this?

It's better to get something for what you have sitting in your hard drive in a non exclusive royalty free deal more regularly with a variety of agencies than waiting out for that specialised RM deal in my opinion even if it does potentially get you more money.

Short term gain or long term investment?

Cheers

S.A.S

Stock Agency Slut