(I knew my Dickens would come in handy at some point.)

As I’ve written about before, microstock and traditional RF stock photography are converging and it’s important for traditional RF stock photographers to test microstock as a channel for their images.

To illustrate this, I decided to license two images. One is from iStock’s Vetta collection and the other is a royalty free image from Getty Images. I think they are both great images and the price points are comparable and that is the point.

Image 1: ‘Elderly Man & Woman on Couch in Nursing Home’ (Getty Images)

I licensed the 506 x 337 px size for $49. The pricing chart for the image is shown below:

One thing to note is that an RF license from Getty is much less restrictive than the base iStock license. There is no limit to the number of print runs from Getty for example. On iStock (as I’ll discuss below) this is not the case.

Image 2: ‘Senior’ (iStockphoto, Vetta Collection)

I licensed the 849 x 565 px sized image for roughly $20 (20 credits.) The pricing chart of this image is shown below:

As I mentioned above, the base license from iStock is much more restrictive in terms of what you can do with it when compared to the RF license from Getty. In order to bring the licenses into parity, you have to add the ‘Unlimited Reproduction’ option shown above. This brings the cost of licensing the image to $320. Essentially, licensing the images for similar purposes at the high end is equivalent in cost. (It’s interesting that the microstock license actually has more usage-based elements built in to it than the traditional RF license)

Conclusions

  • Microstock and traditional RF are rapidly converging.
  • The images in this post are both terrific and cost roughly the same to license.
  • The microstock license has more usage restrictions than the Getty RF license.
  • If you have imagery in RF, you should be submitting imagery to microstock.