Picture Press Starts To Convert Images Of Photo Sharing Community Into Cash, Flickr Probably Follows

This blog speculated a lot in the past about the possible impact on the stock photo industry, especially  the micropayment business, if Flickr one day will give Flickr users the possibility to commercialize their images (Flickr has 4 million registered photographers of all levels and around 200 million photos, numbers as of July 24), even if only a low percentage of these image might currently qualify for selling.

Yesterday Internetnews.com ran an article ("Making Money For The Flickr Flock?") with some statements of Flickr´s founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield on this topic.

But, once in a blue moon, my fellow Germans are obviously faster.

The photo agency Picture Press, a part of the Gruner + Jahr (Europe’s biggest magazine publisher and the second biggest worldwide) and Bertelsmann (one of the world's largest media companies) cluster, will professionally market the images of a company-owned photo sharing site (View Fotocommunity, a venture of the View and STERN magazine) through a new website called augenzeuge.de ("eyewitness"), currently in beta modus.

augenzeuge.de is also open for photographers which are not members of the View Fotocommunity, a possiblity for all amateur photo enthusiasts to sell their photos through a professional high-end sales channel. Submitted images will not appear immediately on augenzeuge.de, because they are reviewed by picture editors before going online. 

Selected images will additionally be sold by Picture Press through the APIS Network, Germany´s predominant professional B2B image trading system (after Getty Images and Corbis, recently WireImage closed a distribution deal with the company behind the APIS Network, Picturemaxx).

There is no question about it that the photo sharing site View Fotocommunity and the commercial site augenzeuge.de are not comparable to Flickr in terms of image numbers and users overall. But, as augenzeuge.de points out in an email to users, their new venture is "worldwide unique".

Finally the best: photographers will receive 50% of the revenues and photos will be acquired under the same price conditions from an amateur as if a professional photographer would sell his images. In case the magazine STERN publishes images from augenzeuge.de - photographers, the fee is limited to a maximum of 1,000 Euros (around $1,300). Images can also qualify for publishing in other Gruner + Jahr magazines.

Overall, publishing images on augenzeuge.de and selling them additionally through Picture Press seems to be a much more better deal for photographers than sharing their images on Flickr.

Flickr recently inked a deal with the mighty Hubert Burda Media Group with the result that the best photos found on Flickr are published in Burda´s Max lifestyle magazine in the so-called Flickr-Portfolio (usually around 6 pages). But Flickr photographers won´t see a dime for their work.

augenzeuge.de describes on a separate section what kind of images they are looking for. The irreducible duration of the contract for marketing the images is one year. IPTC captions are currently not transfered automatically, leaving the photographer with the hassle to re-keyword their images.

But with the 50/50 split in mind, this should not cause lots of heart attacks. Kudos to Picture Press for being the first photo agency worldwide to convert user generated content into real cash for the photographers, and not just cents, like in the case of so many micropayment sites.

All augenzeuge.de details here in Kraut.

 

Related:

• Fotocommunity wird zu Bildagentur ausgebaut (external link, in german, maintained by photojournalist Tim Lilling)
• MAX Magazine Feels Really Sorry: How To Use Flickr Photographers To Maximize Your Company´s Profit (July 24, 2006)
• Will Flickr Enter The Commercial Stock Photography Business? (May 21, 2006)
• Getty Images, Flickr And The Reinvention Of Outdoor Advertising (Sept. 29, 2005)
• Flickr: How To Displace Getty Images and Corbis (Aug. 18, 2005)