Quote from: pixel8 on March 02, 2015, 16:08

I have a few questions about selling direct. I know many don't think you should bother, but if I do bother maybe you can help me understand how this works.

Licensing for example, how would you go about that, simply copy what a big site is doing?

How do you police that license agreement or do you just hope they are honest?

When you do sell a photo, are you allowing them to download a jpg file at a set resolution or is there some other file type etc?

I've noticed that when I have a large format sell of a photo it could bring in upwards of $120 for my cut so that would mean about almost $400 for the the overall sale before the agency takes out their cut yet I have seen contributors on here say they would only charge $59 or something like that, that seems pretty low for pricing don't you think?

Which brings me to this question, if these various top four micro sites are selling millions of photos every day how do they enforce the licensing agreements that are being made? I don't even thing the US Gov could keep up with that!

For licensing, some website platforms already have RF and RM systems similar to big sites. Photodeck and Photoshelter are two popular options. You can use their templates or create your own.

For policing, not easy, but Google reverse image search does a pretty good job of finding images in use.

For resolution, depends on license type. RF is usually based on offering size options. RM is normally full size but priced on usage. I only do JPEG.

For pricing, depends on your work. If you have unique enough work that buyers will pay a higher price for then yes why charge $59? I just quoted someone $400 and they had no problem with that price. And yes, 100% of $400 is better than 20% of micro pricing. Charge whatever buyers are willing to pay.

For enforcement, they usually don't enforce infringement that I'm aware of. The RF license is so unrestricted that it's almost impossible to tell if an image is a legit customer or a thief. A designer could have used your image for 15 different websites because the license allowed them to. Plus, very few agencies let us know who the customers are anyway. But with RM it's usually for a very specific use for a single customer. And since it's your site you know who the customer is. So let's say you have a new image and so far have only sold one RM license to one company. But when you do a Google image reverse search you find your client plus 15 other companies using the image. You know those 15 other companies didn't license your image and you can pursue them as you feel appropriate. I only offer RM on my site. And you would need to somehow track each customer and their licenses like with Contact Management software.

Like Sweetgirl mentioned, you need to promote yourself. And you need to understand SEO so you have optimized IPTC content. No marketing/promotion + poor content = no traffic and no sales.

My suggestion is you need to commit to your own website as a mission and strategy. If you're less than committed, stick with agencies.