Raoul Pop

As if the stock photography market wasn’t already just hobbling along, having been punched, kicked and spat upon by companies and people with little concern for photographers’ rights or livelihood, Fotolia has joined in the sadistic merriment by launching a free stock photo site, called PhotoXpress. The launch of the new site isn’t yet announced on Fotolia’s blog or in their press section, but TechCrunch covered it here.

There are some strings attached to this new site, namely that you can download only up to 10 free images per day. If you need more, then you’ll need to sign up for a Fotolia account. In that sense, PhotoExpress is nothing more than a lead generation service for Fotolia, and it’s sort of like giving away free samples in the hope of getting more customers, which is not a new concept.

This move is also unoriginal because plenty of photo sharing sites out there let their users give away their photos for free. Flickr is the biggest example I can think of — users there can choose to let visitors download the full resolution originals, or limit the sizes at which their photos are available publicly, or mark them with Creative Commons licenses, which have multiple levels of copyright. Even more so, people can license their photos as public domain, and upload them to sites like Wikipedia.

The only aspect that differentiates Fotolia’s move from a “me too” kind of a thing is that so far, it’s been a normal microstock bank, which has now chosen to give away some of its images for free. Truthfully, even this isn’t too different from what it was already doing, since its lowest priced images went for 14 cents, and that’s not too far from 0 cents in my mind.

TechCrunch and Fotolia are pushing the argument that PhotoXpress “is a way for professional photographers to expose some of their work for free to a larger Web audience, while inculcating a respect for copyrights among Web consumers”. This is, excuse my language, nothing more than certified, 100% bullshit.

Professional photographers wouldn’t be selling their photos for 14 cents. They couldn’t make a living if they did that. Professional photographers also don’t give away their images for free. The term “professional” means they’re past the stage where they do stuff for free. It means they handle paying jobs. It means they expect a certain amount of respect from stock agencies. PhotoXpress is nothing more than a way for Fotolia to get additional customers, period. They saw the “free” model attracts a bunch of freeloaders, as it always does, and wanted to cash in on it. This move has nothing to do with professional photographers. It’s a move that disrespects them altogether.

It also has nothing to do with inculcating a respect for copyright among web consumers. Far from encouraging people to respect copyright, it encourages them to expect that photos should be free. That’s not a realistic expectation. Photos cost money to make. Notice I said “make”, not “take”. A good photo is made, not taken, and that involves time, effort and implicitly, money. There’s also the very real cost of photo gear and of the hardware and software where the photos are stored and processed. The time and effort involved in processing photos is a very real, and very substantial expense. Not only are the photos made to look better, but they’re tagged, catalogued, titled and captioned. That takes an incredible amount of time, which most people don’t realize until they begin to do it. There’s also the ridiculously long amount of time it takes to process the photos already uploaded to online image banks/stock agencies, where one has to do further captioning and keywording.

If you, like me, want to make a living from photography, you also have to factor in living costs, which are incredibly real. Try paying a mortgage at 14 cents per photo and see how far that takes you. You’ll be working out of a cardboard box in some back alley before you know it. Try buying food at 14 cents per photo. Wait, didn’t you join PhotoXpress and give away your photos for free? Right, well, why don’t you walk into your local market and try getting some food for free? Go ahead, try it, and let me know how it works out for you. Make sure to let the store manager know you’ll be giving them attribution and building their brand recognition if they let you load your cart up with free food.

All this time and effort and money spent on producing quality photographs has to be recouped somehow. It certainly isn’t recouped by selling your photos at 14 cents, or by giving them away for free. It doesn’t work, and I’m unpleasantly surprised each time I hear someone who says it somehow works, then gives me an example. The sad part is that it’s the same example each time. The story goes like this: “I know this microstock photographer who makes a lot of money doing it, tens of thousands of dollars each month. His name is…” And it’s the same name every time. What they don’t realize is there are countless other photographers who’ve uploaded their work to microstock sites, who haven’t made any money whatsoever from it, or have made such piddling amounts they couldn’t possibly live from that.

Look, I’m for giving some stuff away to get some brand exposure, but the only brand that gets exposure on PhotoXpress is Fotolia, not the photographer. When someone searches for the photo of a flower, or of a building, they don’t care who took the photo if they like the photo. They’ll buy it from the stock agency, not the photographer. The name of the poor sap who took the photo barely registers, if at all. Worse, customers who get their photos from PhotoXpress must give attribution to the site, not to the photographer [source]. Given all this, do you think they’ll go back to look for more photos from that photographer the next time, or will they go to PhotoXpress to get more free photos? So if you think giving your photos away for free will help to expose your name, I’d encourage you to think again. All that will happen is that you’ll be the guy who’s giving away his images for free. That’s all fine and dandy if you’re an amateur who has another job and is only doing this for fun and a few dollars on the side, but there are people out there, including me, who’d like to make a living from photography, and are finding it harder to do so because of thoughtless people like you.

Some people look to the cost of online music these days, which is around $1 per song, and wonder why photos can’t cost the same. They can’t, and shouldn’t, because songs and photos aren’t the same things. Their marketability is entirely different. Say you bought a popular song. Chances are tons more people like that song, and will also buy it. Songs scale very well. The more popular they are, the more money the artist makes. Photos don’t scale. If an ad agency buys a photo to use it in a campaign, their competitors won’t go gaga over the photo and want to use it in their campaigns, too. They’ll say, okay, we like that photo, but we can’t use it in any of our campaigns because it’s already been used. Game over for that photo. It might be bought a few more times, perhaps by a few newspapers, perhaps by some websites, and it might have a little life in it as a print, if it’s really good, but that’s rare. How many people these days do you know of who still buy prints? Most don’t, they just want to have the photo on their computer and be done with it, and they’d like to get it for free if possible. A photo just doesn’t earn money the same way a song earns it. You can’t compare the two.

If you still think one of Fotolia’s goals is to respect photographers and get them more business with PhotoXpress, then please have a look at one of the banners currently in use on the PhotoXpress site. It asks, “Tired of paying for images?” Need I say more? How exactly does that respect photographers? It’s simple: it doesn’t. It only plays up to the expectations of all the freeloaders out there, who think they can keep getting stuff for nothing.

TechCrunch is also to blame for contributing to the same freeloader movement. Here’s what they say in their article:

“At TechCrunch, we often uses Flickr images licensed under Creative Commons for the best choice of images and the ability to publish the images freely. Bloggers will definitely find it helpful to tap into the wide selection of PhotoXpress’s site to find royalty free, high quality images to illustrate posts. This is exactly the right model.”

That is most certainly not the right model. Trying to get images for free is not a reasonable expectation. I would hope I made that point pretty clear already. I can understand small bloggers wanting to find free stuff, because they have small or non-existent budgets, but certainly TechCrunch can afford to buy their images. They have staff, they have an office, they have a CEO, and they have sizeable revenue streams. And yet they recognize that they still don’t pay for images. Isn’t that shameful and irresponsible behavior? If they can’t “afford” to pay for images, who can? A cash-strapped local newspaper? A mom and pop store who is putting out a flier for their customers? A smaller website with less subscribers? A print magazine with less circulation than TechCrunch’s subscribers? And yet those sorts of operations do buy images, and choose to support photographers, while a very successful and profitable blog like TechCrunch still wants to get stuff for free. If that isn’t the height of hypocrisy, then I’m off my rocker.

Let me close with Fotolia’s mission statement. It says: “… where photographers and designers of all levels can store, share and monetize their photography and illustrations.” I would agree with the “store and share” part of that mission, but I don’t know about the “monetize” part.

Let me make it clear, once more, that launching PhotoXpress is all about Fotolia, not photographers. It’s meant to grow their market share and to build their brand recognition. It’s a coldhearted move that is singlehandedly screwing a whole bunch of photographers and contributing to the collapse of the traditional stock photography market. It is NOT something that will help photographers in any way, shape or form, and I don’t want to hear of yet more examples from the very top of the Bell curve that illustrate the opposite. The examples that matter to me are the ones that show what the majority of photographers who upload to these sites are getting as payment.