Fight for your right to licence your pixels for a proper fee
photo credit: Vinay Deep
But it’s the web! It’s just a web image. It’s cheap. It’s not worth as much as print usage. It’s only 300 pixels wide. It’s small. It can’t be worth anything like a full page in the magazine. It’s just our electronic version. Nobody reads it online anyway.
Just some of the excuses you’ll hear when publishers want you to throw in “digital rights” i.e. web and pdf uses for free or for nearly free.
Wrong!
Here’s why. A great article by Paul Melcher over on Black Star Rising gives you 10 reasons why your pixels are worth as much (if not more) on the web than they are in print. http://rising.blackstar.com/10-ways-to-fight-for-your-digital-rights-as-a-photographer.html
PP
I keep a little photoblog of my city and store some of the shots on Flickr. They’re throwaway shots. I’d never post any good commercial work on Flickr. Time and time again, I am contacted by those Schmap people who do the travel guides. I just reply every time saying “show me the money” and never hear back from them for the image in question. As I shot sort of “off the beaten path” I seem to get contacted by them a lot.
Around photoblog world, there are tons of new shooters who are absolutely thrilled to be “published” on Schmap with a paltry credit line.
The problem is that for every shooter that says No to companies like this, there will be 10 others that will.
Melcher said
“Stop being afraid of losing clients, afraid of tomorrow, afraid of big corporations, afraid of your own decisions.”
I stopped the freebies long ago and haven’t looked back.
Totally agree. These days an advertising company can make more money from a small resolution web banner than from a high-res print if done right. RF pricing is an outdated model and RM prices must be adjusted according to potential profit from the use.