Caters News Agency

After many emails and a complete lack of professionalism with Caters News Agency in the UK I now have to go public with this tale of ineptitude. In May of 2014 I was contacted by Caters about a series of images that they wanted to distribute, I agreed and the images were made available to their distributors in June of 2014. Once the royalties were paid over a span of a couple of months I asked to receive payment, here is the reply as of 28 Oct 2014:

Hello Mike, I hope you are well.

Thanks for getting in touch with me.

There is a sale from the Daily Telegraph online that I will get a royalty report sent out to you next week.

I will arrange payment via PayPal after that.

Kind regards

Of course after a couple of weeks no payment showed up and I contacted them again and received this on 3 Dec 2014

Hello Mike, I hope you are well.

I will add your due payments to my next payment run and will email you once they it has gone through.

Kind regards,

Another follow up on 29 January 2015

Hello Mike, I hope you are well.

I am sorry for the delay, we have recently migrated to a new accounts system which is taking longer than anticipated.

I will get it paid in the next coming weeks.

I will email you once it has been processed.

Kind regards,

Still nothing of course, then here is the last one I received from them on 23 March 2015

Hello Mike, I hope you are well.

I am sorry for the late response, I have only just returned to the office.

I will email you once the payment has been finalised.

Kind regards,

It's now 22 April, I have sent them numerous emails in the last month and am being completely ignored, no payments have ever been sent and none of the people who I have been emailing in accounts, as well as the original contact person at Caters, answers my emails. As you can imagine this is EXTREMELY frustrating to have to chase what should be a professional company in such a way..

So a word or warning to everyone out there, be VERY wary of using Caters as a distributor of your images. Not impressed in the least...

That is really bad...

If you have a twitter account I would highlight them there, its surprising what some bad publicity does....

ya, thats the hope

Has now been settled...

That's great, glad it worked out for you, but it is shameful that you had to work so hard to get resolution.

It seems that Mike is not the only one who has had delayed payments from Caters News Agency

My personal experience with them amounts to a substantial amount of money dating back to February 2014

My emails are either ignored or replied with excuses

I'm sure some people are receiving money in a timely fashion because they "have so many payments to process, mine is slipping through" as I was told a few weeks ago

But, scrolling around the web it seems that my story is not the first of this kind and very likely will not be the last

If you're new and are choosing a News Agency, there are many out there other than Caters, although I don't have any experience of these

Thanks

It took me 7 months and 16 emails to get paid for one image from Caters. Avoid. I’ve had better experience with Barcroft and National News.

Forget agencies. Ring the picture desk and negotiate directly.

Higher return...less grief...quicker payment...

Thanks Tatts/ Simon

This has now been settled

I'm still stunned by this whole situation and how Caters non-payment has happened to so many people

Simon - I hear what you're saying and I do agree

Caters did get me coverage in three publications with my story, the total was over twice as much $$ as the Mail Online offered when I approached them direct

Tatts - I do have another story ready to go, which Caters wants, am I sending it to them .... like hell I am!

SWNS did not get back to me

I sent the proposal to Barcroft last night, they have previously told me that they offer 50%, Caters was 60% [don't know how accurate the base number is tho]

Media Drum upped his offer from 50% to 60%. He said no to an article/ images/ video a few weeks ago. Then a few days later a similar story appeared [mine was better]

I don't know National News

Thanks for your comments guys, take care

Disappointing to hear about Caters. I too have been contacted and sent them images. Will have to follow up. Will be a lot more careful in the future with them having read the comments above.

As a follow up, I was recently contacted by their new Accounting rep and any and all outstanding payments were sent to me within a few days. Hopefully this means that these problems won't happen again. I was impressed with the new rep who contacted me on his own accord.

Well I'm still awaiting two payments-going back to June....

I've rang an their new accounting guy promised payments, but nothing has turned up.

Adam

Still? Thats not good, hope the new guy sorts it out for you

I have the same problem with Caters. Since I had problems before with other agencies, I've decided to license only one image to see how it would work. That was back in early 2015 and they sold the image everywhere! They are actually good on this. in now week, my image was in the front page of many media outlets.
Turned out that i NEVER got paid. I received a few account balances and after a while they just stop sending the account balance, but I know they continue to sell it.
They first apologize for the delay, then start ignoring me completely.

I've posted on twitter and they threaten me to remove the twitter.

I was spending so much time and energy to get paid and because they are in UK it would be harder for me to take any legal action and they took advantage of that.

Now, after almost 2 year, never heard back from them! No payment was done!

Just to let everyone know...

My experience with Caters has changed dramatically!

Since the original posts, Caters have been paying very promptly and efficiently. My sales have been good too.

David Burner, who is a key figure at Caters, is now on Wetpixel (DavidCaters) and if you do have any problems he is very keen that you contact him.

Adam

That's great to hear

Have to add into this thread and perhaps @DavidCaters can answer me.

I don't understand the business model how this agency works. It's been now 3 months and I have no idea how much they owe me - the pictures have been published in several medias online and print (The Times & DailyMail to name a few) - and seems like the answer I am receiving is that these medias haven't paid Caters so I can't get my payments before they receive some money first.

It's quite far from my understanding that Medias wouldn't pay Newsagencys about the pictures they buy in 3 months. Also from another source I heard they have a monthly payment towards Caters so that would mean that they can get e.g. 10 stories with pictures with that kind of a deal. This means that they should have received the payment at some level and should get the cut towards my account. I haven't received a penny todate although the story went through in several medias.

For media publicity sure I would recommend using an agency - if you want to get some money for your pictures it's definitely not worth it - at least for Caters.

-Jukka

@DavidCatersSo, it seems that Caters are still doing this. I have had content on Caters for months, its been sold multiple times and they have made money from my content.

To cut a really long story short and a multitude of emails to caters requesting payment for my royalties, they are still not paying. Despite being constantly reassured payment will be made. Even, had one person tell me it would be made by 3pm UK time the following day. This never happened.

When i mentioned this thread on Wetpixel to the Accounts Assistant this was the answer:

"I can assure you those reviews are quite old and we’ve completely revamped the payment system since then.

I still haven't been paid.  How hard is it to look after a contributor by making an immediate payment for royalties that have not been paid out for months!

Their last excuse was this

"Apologies for the delay in getting back to you, I was awaiting responses from the payments team.

Again this never happened. How can you miss a multitude of payments and not notice it?

I am really dissapointed it ended up at this. But I want to warn other people considering using caters as an agency, it seems you will NOT get paid, try Shutterstock, Adobe stock or any other microstock agency, they pay on time, every time! 

I am closing my account with them and removing my files. 

Update. Since this post and 2 additional emails, Caters have now made payment. 

Does anyone know if getting payment from Caters is still a problem? I was recently contacted by one of their reps, and I’m dubious about agreeing to anything.